Books

Afghan poet Nadia Anjuman (1980-2005) drew on the lineage of Persian and Sufi writing and her life under Taliban rule, attending to love, oppression, myth, and devotion through lyrics that both embrace and resist tradition. Anjuman grew up in the Herat, Afghanistan, a city known for centuries for its poetry. While the Taliban was in power, Anjuman met with other women in what appeared to be a needlepoint school, one of the few sanctioned pastimes for women, to secretly discuss literature and poetry. After the fall of the Taliban, Anjuman was finally able to attend university. She wrote and published a celebrated volume of poetry and was set to publish another before her early death due to domestic violence. Selections from both of Anjuman’s collections are presented here for the first time in English.

FROM THE PROP TO THE INSIDE gathers texts on the concept of the prop—as object, requisite and support—on stage and in the exhibition space. The starting points of this book are objects and installations of the artist Michaela Schweighofer, which deal with the stage as a platform and the sculpture as a prop.

The authors are friends: artists, critics and curators whom she has invited to write a text at the interface of their and her practice. The contributions within take on multiple forms; letters, essays and interviews—they are intended to create a theoretical-subjective anthology that makes visible the phenomena of the private as symptoms of the structural, as well as to provide a direct insight into contemporary artistic creation.

Text: Juliane Bischoff, Veronika Eberhart, Cornelia Lein, Cathrin Mayer, Gianna Virgina Prein, Agnieszka Roguski, Juliane Saupe, Michaela Schweighofer & Chloe Stead

By way of archiving, digital translation and reproduction, Philip Poppek extracts from Magritte’s word paintings twenty-six letters; segmental symbols of a textual system form an alphabet of a, with a familiar apple punctuating a provisional end to the sequence. A poetic correspondence with the letter a speculates on the prehistory of this alphabet, as though searching for some indication as to how we may have come to where we are now, in this ‘post-factual moment’.

Maybe at some point we fell into the foxes’ den, only to re-surface in a landscape of ruins. This book poses a number of necessary questions, perhaps beginning with: ‘Which feminine noun trails after the title script ‘est pas une?

Pomme? Pipe? Histoire? Communauté?

Goswell Road publishes ‘Numbered Map’ by Archie Chekatouski, to accompany his exhibition 'You can do so much more with a chair than you can with a painting?'. The publication is edited in 30 copies and focuses on Chekatouski’s Paint-by-numbers Series.

Bio: Archie Chekatouski (born 1996 in Minsk, Belarus) lives and works in Paris. His works are touchingly silly and beautifully simple.
 

Near to the Wild Heart, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, introduced Brazil to what one writer called "Hurricane Clarice" a twenty-three-year-old girl who wrote her first book in a tiny rented room and then baptized it with a title taken from Joyce: "He was alone, unheeded, near to the wild heart of life."

Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue frame the life of Joana, from her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence, when she proclaims: "I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt."

Leash extends the logic of S&M to its inexorable and startling conclusion, darkly and hilariously revealing the masochistic impulse as the urge to disappear from the chores, obligations, and emotional vacuity of daily life.

No more jobs, no more taxes, no more checkbook, no more bills, no more credit cards, no more credit, no more money, no more mortgages, no more rent, no more savings, no more junk mail, no more junk, no more mail, no more phones, no more faxes, no more busy signals, no more computers, no more cars, no more drivers' licenses, no more traffic lights, no more airports, no more flying, no more tickets, no more packing, no more luggage, no more supermarkets, no more health clubs... While her current spends the summer researching public housing in Stockholm, a moderately wealthy, object-oppressed, and terminally hip New York female of a certain age seeks adventure in the sedate dyke bars of lower Manhattan. Finding none, she answers a personal ad. She is ordered to put on a blindfold before the first meeting with the woman she knows only as Sir. Not knowing what someone looks like turns out to be freeing, as do the escalating constraints that alienate her not just from her former life, but from her very conception of who she is. Part Georges Bataille, part Fran Leibowitz, this is the Story of O told with a self-referentially perverse sense of humor.

The early writings of renowned poet and critical theorist Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog. 

Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang's trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping out of an MFA program, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and writing her trenchant book Carceral Capitalism. Alien Daughters charts the dream-seeking misadventures of an "odd girl" from Florida who emerged from punk houses and early Tumblr to become the powerful writer she is today. Anarchic and beautifully personal, Alien Daughters is a strange intellectual autobiography that demonstrates Wang's singular self-education: an early life lived where every day and every written word began like the Tarot's Fool, with a leap of faith.

Looking at pictures, she was reminded of the lack of time. And anyway, where did all the time go?

In Day Book a woman artist looks at time in an address to quotidian events and their unfolding. Exploring motherhood, unpaid labour, childcare, and the time of the artist, she reads the work of contemporary women filmmakers through the earlier works of filmmakers, writers, and photographers, including Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras, Natalia Ginzburg and Christa Wolf, Bertien van Manen and Bernadette Mayer. The inability to capture the accumulation of days emerges—a form without form, day after day after day.

Produced in conjunction with the exhibition that took place at Maison Pelgrims (10/9-23/10/2021), the book presents original interventions by the artists of the rosa rosae rosae project : Alicia Jeannin, Alicja Melzacka, Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain, Annaïk Lou Pitteloud, Audrey Cottin, buren, Charlie Usher, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Eva Giolo, Henry Andersen, Jan Vercruysse, Maíra Dietrich, Marc Buchy, Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Niels Poiz, Oriol Vilanova, Sabir (Lucie Guien, Amélie Derlon Cordina, Sophie Sénécaut / Perrine Estienne,  Kevin Senant, Maud Marique, Pauline Allié, Carole Louis), Slow Reading Club, Sofia Caesar, Surya Ibrahim, Yiannis Papadopoulos, Yoann Van Parys

Edited by Pauline Hatzigeorgiou / SB34
Graphic design by Tipode Office
The book was produced with the support of Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles (aide à l'édition) and Région Bruxelles-Capitale (Image de Bruxelles)

Drink Deeply and Dream by Elspeth Walker is an ethereal, offbeat short story about wannabe vampires with a Marxist bent and their search for salvation from capitalism via eternal bloodlust.

Paperback, Staple Bound and Offset Printed

First published in 1930 by anti-fascist, avant-garde publisher Éditions du Carrefour in Paris as Aveux non Avenus, Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) is Claude Cahun’s wildly radical answer to an invitation to write a memoir. Shattering the very premise of the “memoir”—the singularity of identity—into sharp and prismatic fragments, Cahun assembles an ever-mutating inquiry into the instability of “self” and its many masks.

Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.

Using a multitude of forms (fables, jokes, aphorisms, letters, dialogues, dreams, hymns, pronouncements, etc.), to plumb the subjects of desire, love, gender, sex, fear, faith, religion, and vanity (among others), Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) is a tour-de-force work of resistance: it provokes the reader to enter the capacious, provocative, playful, and deeply imaginative space constructed by Cahun in defiance of all categorization, to repudiate a delimited, censured world and embrace, instead, the outcasts and cast-offs, the unknowable and the unknown.

I believe, but in the conditional: I would like to believe.

Thoughtfully redesigned to emulate the original artist’s book, this revised edition of the out-of-print English translation by Susan de Muth—originally published in the UK by the Tate in 2007 and in the U.S. by MIT Press in 2008—includes novelist and critic Pierre Mac Orlan’s original 1930 preface along with contemporary essays by scholar Amelia Groom and translator de Muth. Almost 100-years-old, it is not only prescient, but urgent, in.

It’s not enough to be vanquished, you also have to know how to turn defeat to your advantage.

Translated by Susan de Muth, preface by Pierre Mac Orlan, essay by Amelia Groom.

Once upon a time there was a shopping center just off Dam Square, a stone’s throw from the Madame Tussauds, not far from Primark, two streets across De Bijenkorf overshadowing the Magna Plaza, and just a couple doors down the Royal Palace in the middle of Amsterdam. It was the place where drag queen Tuu Lipa performed and Yeung sold eau de car engine oil. It was also where Mr. R looked for his human lover, where Inez became a millionaire, and where Yahoo launched its metaverse. “Welcome to the YAniverse,” greeted the Yahoo assistant…

Retail Vérité is the outcome of writing workshops organized by A Maior at San Serriffe. Through a blend of improvisation, larping and speed dating, the participants sketched characters and dialogues on-site.
This cohort featured Anouk Asselineau, Alva Bücking, Katherina Gorodynska, Chieri Higa, SeungJi Jo, Simon Marsiglia, Christina Ntanovasili, Young Eun Park, Ignacy Radtke, Matthew Senkowycz, Maja Simisic, Mehmet Süzgün, Simone Wegman, Bruno Zhu and others.

A Maior is a clothing and home goods store located in the outskirts of Viseu, Portugal. Since 2016, an eponymous exhibition program has taken place within the shopping environment. A Maior is managed by the staff, the artist Bruno Zhu and his family. A Maior has been featured in exhibitions at Melly, Rotterdam; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; Kunsthalle Freeport, Porto; X Museum, Beijing; Life Sport and BQ, both Berlin. In 2022, A Maior was the writer-in-residence at San Serriffe in Amsterdam, who commissioned Retail Verité, A Maior’s first novella.

With A Maior, Anouk Asselineau, Alva Bücking, Katherina Gorodynska, Chieri Higa, SeungJi Jo, Simon Marsiglia, Christina Ntanovasili, Young Eun Park, Ignacy Radtke, Matthew Senkowycz, Maja Simisic, Mehmet Süzgün, Simone Wegman, Bruno Zhu.
Designed by Elisabeth Klement

A children’s book without a specific age category, offering a glimpse into the small rituals and shared moments that shape a day with Fifi Paris.

Fifi, a Pomeranian-Chihuahua mix, came into the lives of Angelica and Kris a few years ago. Taking care of a puppy is taking responsibility for building their world and letting the small animal transform yours. As her human caretakers, the authors created Fifi’s world with toys, cuddles, rules, snacks and walks in the park. In return, she transforms our world by bringing our community together and reminding us of the importance of caring for one another. In this book, Kris and Angelica narrate a day in the life of Fifi, from the moment she wakes up to when she falls asleep at night. Along the way, they share how they connect with her, how they see her understanding her surroundings and what she has taught them about companionship.

Design by Amy Suo Wu
Copy-editing by Clem Edwards
Photography by Lili Huston-Hertreich

A novel about how cotton workers transformed the Mexico-US borderlands, by a Pulitzer Prize–winning author.

In 1934, a young José Revueltas traveled to Tamaulipas to support the cotton workers’ strike in Estación Camarón, which became the basis of his landmark novel, Human Mourning. In her own groundbreaking novel, Autobiography of Cotton, Cristina Rivera Garza recounts her grandparents’ journey from mining towns to those same cotton fields as it intersects with Revueltas’s life in a vivid and evocative history of cotton cultivation along the Mexico-US border.

Through archival research and personal narrative, Rivera Garza chronicles the way cotton transformed the borderlands by reconstructing the cotton workers’ strike and reveals how cycles of deprivation and ecocide persist across generations. Deeply personal and politically acute, Rivera Garza crafts a new kind of border novel that tells how a brittle land radically altered her grandparents’ lives and the territories they helped develop. An intimate fictionalization, Autobiography of Cotton reveals a rich social history of agricultural colonization, labor activism, environmental degradation, and cross-border migration.

The Tenant is a monographic critical essay by Marie Canet. It is the first text to directly address the connections between McKenzie’s work, pornography, and special effects. The title refers to the way the artist moves through different periods and aesthetic spaces, appropriating their codes in order to construct new visual fictions. The book is infused with post-#MeToo feminist thinking, alternative uses of biography, reflections on the art world, and contemporary debates surrounding appropriation, embodiment, and the status of the artwork.

McKenzie and Canet worked with each other for over eight years, on projects like Atelier E.B: Passer-by catalogue, published on the occasion of the Fondation Galeries Lafayette exhibition, or the book Pervert or Detective, a conversation between Lucy McKenzie and artist Reba Maybury. This collaboration now culminated in an exhibition and a book: Plastic Newspaper (presented at CRAC Sète in March 2026) and Lucy McKenzie, The Tenant.

Texts by Marie Canet and Lucy McKenzie
Translations: Catherine Petit & Paul Buck (Marie Canet), Juliette Desorgues (Lucy McKenzie)

Published in connection with the exhibition Lucy McKenzie, Plastic Newspaper, at Crac Occitanie, Centre régional d‘art contemporain Occitanie/Pyrénées-Méditerranée à Sète, 21.03.-06.09.26

In the high-octane essay And Then Comes the Chorus, Jon Refsdal Moe pursues the imagination of theatre opened up by Alfred Jarry when he slipped an ‘r’ into a profanity as he exclaimed ‘Merdre!’ on stage. ‘What matters is that the words became flesh and that this flesh exploded right in the world’s face. What matters is that literature stood up at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre on December 10, 1896 and cried FUCK! and all hell broke loose and the world has never been the same since.’

Jon Refsdal Moe is a writer and dramaturg from Oslo. He has written two novels, one doctoral dissertation, several essays and a lot of criticism. He was artistic director of Black Box teater in Oslo from 2009 to 2016 and is now professor of dramaturgy at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
First edition November 2022
48 pages, 11.0 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding
ISBN: 978-82-691492-8-9
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

Tongue Touching the Other / Dil Ötekine Değince is a result of a research project on the Turkish language and its exchanges mainly with Arabic, Farsi and Kurdish. Through language, it aims to follow a common, transnational history and how modern national identities affected our knowledge of that history, and sense of belonging. However, as much as commons, varied forms and dimensions of marginalization are also deeply embedded in our history, culture, language, and as a result, in our everyday lives and in our collective unconsciousness. This book is an attempt to rethink the social, economic & cultural contexts of identity and the concept of “othering” and reflect on inherited motives of imperial and colonial structures, racism, colourism, classism & gender roles.

The book was created through a multi-layered process involving research, conversations, and design. The research phase explored academic texts, etymology, and visual culture to uncover narratives of commons and division. Conversations with 18 people across 9 countries—based on trust and anonymity—provided personal, subjective insights, recorded between July 2022 and January 2025. These dialogues were transcribed and, rather than presented chronologically, were edited into a montage alongside archival visuals and texts, shaping the book's four-chapter narrative:

Yabancı / Stranger / یابان
Misafir / Guest / مسافر
Eğitim / Education
Temsil / Representation / تمثيل

This book, Deux Ans de Vacances, Dos Años de Vacaciones, Dwa Lata Wakacji, Two years Vacation, Due Anni di Vacanza, documents the production of Céline Condorelli's process-based, cumulative artwork titled 'Tools for Imagination'. The title of the book raises the question of labour and working time, starting from a non-equivalence with its inverse: free time. We can read the various iterations of the title which appear on the cover as an expression of the impossibility of thinking about time outside of work in a univocal dimension.

Toby Altman’s Discipline Park documents the demolition of Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago, a landmark of architectural brutalism designed by Bertrand Goldberg in the 1970s. Altman was born in the building, and years later, was employed by Northwestern University when they tore it down. His personal proximity to the site leads to a wider critical evaluation of the cruelty of a neoliberalism that asks us to draw sustenance from the very institutions that poison and erase our bodies, habitats, and histories. But, as it indicts the present and its claustrophobic, ruinous politics, Discipline Park also recovers or reinvents utopian vistas through an extended engagement with Goldberg's architectural practices.

A novel about escape and connection, class, sex, and queer intimacy in the American Midwest. 

The oldest story: an insider pretends to be an outsider and receives praise for his empathy and imagination and intelligence. Maybe some asshole even says bravery. An outsider pretends to be an insider, is exposed as a fraud, a liar, and burned to the ground. 

In Ripcord, Nate Lippens continues his meditations on escape and connection, class, sex, and intimacy. Stuck in Milwaukee, the narrator cobbles together a living by bartending and catering weddings, enmeshed in a semiaffair with a younger, married man. Cruising apps while tallying his youthful romantic failures, he fantasizes about disappearance but finds both solace and frustration in his friendships with Charlie, an aging punk who was prominent in the 1990s Chicago queercore scene, and Greer, a painter who never broke through but continues making work.

les petites histoires sont quatre courtes fictions contemporaines. Entre le lonely langoureux New York des années deux mille, le pont poétique et capricieux de Louis 2 de Bavière, l'histoire vraie de Sandy Stone dans les seventies et la satire cinglante et drôle d'une galerie d'art, ces livres sont de brefs univers vivants et curieux.

En 2025, quatre petites histoires sont racontées par quatre auteurices dans quatre livres : L'effondrement du pont de Sam Bouffandeau ; The Gallery de S. M. Drogo ; Exit de Juli Le Nahelec; «Que faire de Sandy Stone?» de Mia Trabalon.

L'édition des petites histoires a été imaginée par Élise Comte, Chloé Delchini, Perrine Estienne, Gabriel René Franjou, Justine Gensse, Bastien Hauser, et Cyprien Muth. Ce collectif d'éditeurices est né à Bruxelles, où les petites histoires ont été imprimées, chez Graphius. 
La maquette, réalisée par Chloé Delchini, à été composée avec Otto, une typographie dessinée par Sam de Groot et Laura Opsomer Mironov, chez Dinamo Typefaces.

Featuring the photography of BENJAMIN FREDRICKSON 👅 

This issue of SISSY ANARCHY brings together an incredible cohort of sissies; who give up their environment, their daily encoded stances, to define with me here — in what has become such a tender edition of SISSY ANARCHY — a world where boundaries are stretched and obliterated.

Contributions featuring Imogen Cleverley, Joel Dixon, Donna Marcus Duke, Benjamin Fredrickson, Jordan Hearns, Misha Honcharenko, Ian Ivey, Hesse K, Mayah Monet Lovell, Sam Moore, D Mortimer, Barney Pau, L Scully, Pissed Off Trannies, Ailo Villan, Lee Rae Walsh

Founding Editor: Pierce Eldridge
Design: Caitlin Mcloughlin

A daring novel, once widely censored, about the scrappy, harrowing, and inventive lives of Rome's unhoused youth by one of Italy's greatest film directors.

Boys Alive, published in 1955, was Pier Paolo Pasolini's first work of fiction and it remains his best known. Written in the aftermath of Pasolini's move from the provinces to Rome, the novel captures the. hunger and anger, waywardness and squalor of the big city. The life of the novel is the life of the city streets; from the streets, too, come its raw, mongrel, assaultive language. Here unblinkered realism and passionate lyricism meet in a vision of a vast urban inferno, blazing with darkness and light.

There is no one story to the book, only stories, splitting off, breaking away, going nowhere, flaming out, stories in which scenes of comic debacle, bitter conflict, wild joy, and crushing disappointment quickly follow. Pasolini's young characters have nothing to trade on except youth, and the struggle to live is unending. They loot, hustle, scavenge, steal. Somehow money will turn up; as soon as it does it will get spent. The main thing, in any case, is to have fun, and so the boys boast and vie, the desperate uncertainty of their days and nights offset by the fabulous inventiveness of their words. A warehouse heist, a night of gambling, the hunt for sex: The world of Boys Alive is a world in convulsion where at any instant disaster may strike.

Tim Parks' new translation of Pasolini's early masterpiece brings out the salt and brilliance of a still-scandalous work of art.

Obsessing on the relationship between creation and absence, Argentine poet Liliana Ponce presents an unsettling meditation on body, language, and self. For the first time in English, this edition brings together Ponce’s serial poems from the closing years of the twentieth century, the widely anthologized Theory of the Voice and Dream and Fudekara, a shorter sequence written in response to a Japanese calligraphy course. In these major works, Ponce questions the nature of writing itself, of how to write when to write today is an emptiness, or when mouth and voice cannot find each other. Breaking with Argentine poetic conventions, Ponce charts a new model for poesis—oneiric, embodied, and urgent. As she says, I write so I don’t have to speak, so I don’t have to watch.