Essays

GenderFail Reader 2 is a compilation of four brand new essays written during the pandemic including Small Publishing and Finding Ways to Live, A Touch that You Can Really Feel, Collective Self Isolations: Resistance in the Care of Others and the Violence of Naming. This second printing also has a new essay “Complete Idiots All of Them: Thinking UnFathomable Dreams.

This reader also includes three new poems, Being an Instrument, Douche and Making Friends at 30,  by my partner Noah LeBien, who as become such an important collaborator through my work with GenderFail. Noah also expanded their essay, Betraying Authority: Notes on Queer Art that was previously published as a zine.”

Be Oakley, (formally known as Brett Suemnicht) Born 1991 in Clearwater, Florida; is an writer, facilitator and publisher based in Brooklyn, NY. Oakley's projects looks to what Fred Moten calls "the politics of the mess" by framing their identity as a white non-binary queer person in its intersections with failure and internationality. In 2015 they started GenderFail, a publishing and programming initiative that seeks to encourage projects that foster an intersectional queer subjectivity. Their work has been shown in programs and exhibitions at MoMA PS1 (NYC), the Studio Museum of Harlem, The International Center of Photography (NYC), Vox Populi and Sediment Arts. Their publications can be found in the library collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The Met Museum, The Center for Book Arts and many others.

GF Reader 1 is a complication of six essays by GenderFail founder Be Oakley complied together for the first time. This publication features previous released essays from GF titles including Stonewall was a Riot, This is not another photo of a cis gay white men, My Pronoun (Card) #1 and In Defense of the Softcover Books in the GenderFail Archive. The GF Reader also includes Failure as Futuremaking, a new manifesto written in collaboration with artist Noah LeBien.

Be Oakley, (formally known as Brett Suemnicht) Born 1991 in Clearwater, Florida; is an writer, facilitator and publisher based in Brooklyn, NY. Oakley's projects looks to what Fred Moten calls "the politics of the mess" by framing their identity as a white non-binary queer person in its intersections with failure and internationality. In 2015 they started GenderFail, a publishing and programming initiative that seeks to encourage projects that foster an intersectional queer subjectivity. Their work has been shown in programs and exhibitions at MoMA PS1 (NYC), the Studio Museum of Harlem, The International Center of Photography (NYC), Vox Populi and Sediment Arts. Their publications can be found in the library collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The Met Museum, The Center for Book Arts and many others.

Edition of 100.

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf, first published in September 1929. The work is based on two lectures Woolf delivered in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, women's colleges at the University of Cambridge. An important feminist text, the essay is noted in its argument for both a literal and figurative space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by men.

In the tradition of Suhrkamp Verlag and Penguin Classics, Domain offers a series of elegantly designed pocketbooks, conceived as a starter kit for radical liberatory thought. The pocketbooks are individually crafted with custom book jackets tailored to each individual buyer; every purchase receipt supplying the raw material for each design. The online fulfillment system leverages the graphic language of the US Postal Service for each cover and packaging design.

More info on www.domainbooks.org

Bruce Boone Dismembered collects nearly five decades of writing by Bruce Boone, a founder of New Narrative and critical figure at the crossroads of late-twentieth-century avant-garde and social movement writing. At once sexy and political, gossipy and scholarly, this crucial volume includes poems, stories, essays, interviews, and reviews.

In a time of disorder and disease, Boone’s body of work acts as a mirror to our dismembered global reality. This scavenged, collaged, taped-together collection provides a “map to negotiate perils” and guides us toward reconciliation with perilous futures. This book exemplifies the poignancy that might emerge from the found and frenetic.

A guidebook to the extraordinary breadth of Duras's nonfiction. From the stunning one-page "Me" to the sprawling 70-page "Summer 80," there is not a piece in this collection that can be easily categorized. These are essayistic works written for their times but too virtuosic to be relegated to history, works of commentary or recollection or reportage that are also, unmistakably, works of art.

This passionate love letter to opera, lavishly praised and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award when it was first published, is now firmly established as a cult classic. In a learned, moving, and sparklingly witty melange of criticism, subversion, and homage, Wayne Koestenbaum illuminates mysteries of fandom and obsession, and has created an exuberant work of personal meditation and cultural history.

An essay on the forms or purposes of writing, books and libraries. Or as Quinn Latimer wrote: 'There is a relatively well-known workshop at Werkplaats Typografie, the school for design in Arnhem, Netherlands, called 'Best Books'. This past year the school asked the artist Sophie Nys to lead this course. In due time, Nys wrote König and asked if she might bring her students from the workshop to Cologne to discuss his work with books in the space of his own bookstore. She added that since he likely didn’t have enough chairs for all of her students, they would bring their own. König agreed. Then she asked her students to each pick their favorite book. They did so. Then she asked these students to design a chair inspired by that volume. An inspired idea. Strange—and useful. Thus 16 pieces of furniture suggested and elliptically inspired by specific books were built, a kind of living library of booklike creations, as another Walter might put it. The students went to see Herr König, stools in hand, their library entering his. I heard from Sophie in our email correspondence and singular Skype conversation that it was a wonderful visit. I even saw some pictures from that day. After the students returned to Arnhem, and for the final part of the project, they decided to make a publication. This is where I—and the text you are reading now—enter the picture, as they say.'

'Toward what goal do I aspire, ever, but collision? Always accident, concussion, bodies butting together. By collision I also mean metaphor and metonymy: operations of slide and slip and transfuse.' In his new nonfiction collection, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passenger's leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for stranger; Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friend's stinky feet.

Koestenbaum dreams about a hand job from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenberg's squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences. He directly proposes assignments to readers: Buy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina. Describe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed. Find in every orgasm an encyclopedic richness. Reimagine doing the laundry as having an orgasm, and reinterpret orgasm as not a tiny experience, temporally limited, occurring in a single human body, but as an experience that somehow touches on all of human history. Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play. 

May 2020

"The geopolitics of empire had already prepared me for this...coloniality constructs outsides and insides, worlds to be chosen, disturbed, interpreted and navigated - in order to live something like a real self."

Internationally acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand reflects on her early reading of colonial literature and how it makes Black being inanimate. She explores her encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes; the ways that practices of reading and writing are shaped by those narrative structures; and the challenges of writing a narrative of Black life that attends to its own expression and its own consciousness.

Blackfishing the IUD is a daring and demanding memoir by author, Caren Beilin, about reproductive health and the IUD, gendered illness, medical gaslighting, and activism in the chronic illness community. Rhapsodic and unabashedly polemical, Beilin scrutinizes the literary, artistic, and medical history of Rheumatoid Arthritis, as she considers the copper IUD's role in triggering her sudden onset of chronic autoimmunity. As the title makes abundantly clear, the book is an argument that the copper IUD is sickening quite a lot of women—and that we listen first and foremost to women's testimony to begin to resolve it.

As I read I thought of alchemy, Beilin is an alchemist. She transmutes metal, in this case copper, into something that flames and sings and questions and fights. It's a supranatural work that quests after healing but also finds and makes sense in its paradoxes."—Johanna Hedva

In these essays, the acclaimed artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter, with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book, and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking.

While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others, in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.

Published May 2020.

A young poet on the cusp of motherhood shares a scientific, cultural, and artistic examination of why and how people cry and what crying means. Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and must reckon with her own struggles with depression and the birth of her first child. How she faces her joy, grief, anxiety, impending motherhood, and conflicted truce with the world results in a moving meditation on the nature, rapture, and perils of crying—from the history of tear-catching gadgets (including the woman who designed a gun that shoots tears) to the science behind animal tears (including moths who drink them) to the fraught role of white women's tears in racist violence.

In Shorter Views, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Samuel R. Delany explores the closely felt issues of identity, race, and sexuality; the untangling of the intricacies of literary theory, and the writing process itself. The essays cluster around topics related to queer theory on the one hand, and on the other, questions concerning the paraliterary genres: science fiction, pornography, comics, and more.

Soleil de la Conscience (Sun of Consciousness) was Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant's first published work, and opened the Poétique (Poetics) strain of his oeuvre. This book-length essay, which is characterized by its exploratory, intimate character, announces Glissants concerns with créolisation (creolization), mondialité (worldliness, as against globalization), or opacité (opacity) and inscribes in this work a refusal of colonialism and of inverted exoticism. The sense of estrangement experienced by the author who arrives as a "foreigner" in a country to which he is bound by "the first page of his passport" is the author's principal preoccupation. By positioning himself as both different and same, Glissant opens a space for the writing of a(nother) history: that of the Caribbean.

Collection of early prose writings by Adrienne Rich. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence is a sort of travel diary, documenting Adrienne Rich's journeys to the frontier and into the interior. It traces the development of one individual consciousness, 'playing over such issues as motherhood, racism, history, poetry, the uses of scholarship, the politics of language.' Rich has written a headnote for each essay, briefly discussing the circumstances of its writing.

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose. Her constellation of honors includes two National Book Awards, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, and a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. Ms. Rich’s volumes of poetry include The Dream of a Common Language, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, An Atlas of the Difficult World, The School Among the Ruins, and Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth. Her prose includes the essay collections On Lies, Secrets, and Silence; Blood, Bread, and Poetry; an influential essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” and the nonfiction book Of Woman Born, which examines the institution of motherhood as a socio-historic construct. In 2010, she was honored with The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry's Lifetime Recognition Award.

As she tries to collect them for an essay that she is wanting to write, voices begin interfering in Clara’s Schulmann life. Voices of women, heard on the radio, in podcasts, songs, and films; voices of novelists or feminist theorists; voices of friends or of strangers overheard in the street. Like weeds, like bad seeds (what « zizanies » stands for in French), these wayward words invade her thoughts and her life, and the essay that she once had in mind unfolds in a picaresque tale full of twists and turns. Zizanies is a timely and elegant narrative that reveals Clara Schulmann as a new author whose own voice is going to matter in the years to come. (The texts in this book are French only.)

Written in the style of a sarcastic and irreverent guidebook, How to Suppress Women's Writing explains how women are prevented from producing written works, not given credit when such works are produced, or dismissed or belittled for those contributions they are acknowledged to have made. Although primarily focusing on texts written in English, the author also includes examples from non-English works and other media, like paintings. Citing authors and critics like Suzy McKee Charnas, Margaret Cavendish, and Vonda McIntyre, Russ aims to describe the systematic social forces that impede widespread recognition of the work of female authors.

Love is love, but not really. To recognise love as love we need comprehensible images. What are those contemporary images that help us identify love and how could we identify love differently, figuring it as less defined by safety procedures, measured commitment and feelings of ownership and entitlement? Playing Monogamy refuses to see personal relationships as safe havens where people can hide from the precarities of society, and instead proposes to make public life more intimate and romantic. 

Through a contemporary rereading of the cult of monogamy, van Saarloos playfully queers the way in which the structure of monogamy is upheld through social convention within Western contexts. Written for more of a lay audience, the book proposes an expanded and polyamorous engagement with intimacy and sexuality as a possible alternative. Originally written in Dutch and published by De Bezige Bij, Publication Studio is excited to bring this book to an English speaking audience for the very first time.  

Translated by Liz Waters, it includes a foreword by Leni Zumas, author of the US bestseller Red Clocks, and a revised preface by Simon(e) herself, addressing how she might approach writing about nonmonogamy differently four years after the book's first publication—and after many experiences in between.

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin tells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination.

Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: ‘before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.’ Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero’s killing tools, our ancestors’ greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars. 

This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota, where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew. 

LIBRARY contains four essays and two interviews, with the pre-dominant concern of sexual questions: the subjects in art, film, and literature—the issues tied to Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, Madonna’s sexual assault in Dangerous Game, Clunie Reid’s use of language, Richard Prince’s obsession with books, and Paul Meyersberg’s articulation about sex.

‘Like Carol Reed’s crippled trapeze artist now devoted to sensuality, Paul Buck is more than a suitable case for treatment. A personable deviant, Buck’s culpable, desiring proximity steeps these writings, inasmuch as they are apostrophised by his appearance in cameo, inside and outside the text. Buck stalks his work, addressing us in collusive asides. Rather than the disinterest of resistable objectivity, Buck’s criticism is moved by a profound personal investment in his subjects; he does not elide his complicity, nor does he quiet moral considerations. Discussing Richard Prince’s library or Madonna’s instrumentality, Buck makes the possessive, accountable case throughout. His underlying subject is the snarl of art and life, and the perils that abound in their confusion in the personal and their forced dichotomy in culture at large. Art, for Buck, cannot be an apology for the failures of experience, but instead is a compulsive and risky exposure, like a heretical grace, modelling life for our benefit.’ - Ed Atkins

‘Translator, poet, collagist, archivist, novelist, and all-around intellectual impresario, Paul Buck has a formidable knowledge of culture that he shines like a laser in LIBRARY on Richard Prince, Madonna, Abel Ferrera, and the erotics of painting and representation.  He approaches the critical essay like a crime scene investigation. LIBRARY is a fantastic read’. - Chris Kraus

 

Sinister Wisdom and Inanna Publications & Education Inc. are proud to present a new volume of the work of Native American writer Beth Brant, edited by Janice Gould.

A Generous Spirit: Selected Work by Beth Brant collects the writing of Beth Brant, Mohawk lesbian poet, essayist and activist. During her life, Brant’s work gave voice to an often unacknowledged Two-Spirit identity, and today, her words represent continued strength, growth, and connection in the face of deep suffering.

A Generous Spirit is Brant’s portrait of survival and empathy at the intersection of Native American and lesbian experience. A Generous Spirit recounts and enacts the continuance of her people and her sisters with distinct, organic voices and Brant’s characteristic warmth. Her work is a simultaneous cry of grief and celebration of human compassion and connection in its shared experience. Through storytelling, her characters wrest their own voices from years of silence and find communion with other souls.

With a substantial introduction by Janice Gould situating Brant in a broader political and literary context, a foreword by acclaimed Canadian poet Lee Maracle, and a moving afterword by scholar and poet Deborah Miranda, A Generous Spirit is a tribute to the influence of Brant on a generation of Indigenous writers.

A manifesto for "toxic girls" that reclaims the wives and mistresses of modernism for literature and feminism. On the last day of December, 2009 Kate Zambreno began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister, arising from her obsession with the female modernists and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her husband held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates of the modernist "wives and mistresses." In her blog entries, Zambreno reclaimed the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community where today's "toxic girls" could devise a new feminist discourse, writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon.

In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it—from T. S. Eliot's New Criticism to the writings of such mid-century intellectuals as Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy to the occasional "girl-on-girl crime" of the Second Wave of feminism—she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles female experience to the realm of the "minor," and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. "ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological," writes Zambreno. "When he does, it's existential." By advancing the Girl-As-Philosopher, Zambreno reinvents feminism for her generation while providing a model for a newly subjectivized criticism.

The only collection of Rattray's prose: essays that offer a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition. Since its first publication in 1992, David Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible has functioned as a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition running through Western civilization from Pythagoras to In Nomine music to Hölderlin and Antonin Artaud. Rattray not only excavated this tradition, he embodied and lived it. He studied at Harvard and the Sorbonne but remained a poet, outside the academy. His stories "Van" and "The Angel" chronicle his travels in southern Mexico with his friend, the poet Van Buskirk, and his adventures after graduating from Dartmouth in the mid-1950s.

Eclipsed by the more mediagenic Beat writers during his lifetime, Rattray has become a powerful influence on contemporary artists and writers. Living in Paris, Rattray became the first English translator of Antonin Artaud, and he understood Artaud's incisive scholarship and technological prophecies as few others would.

As he writes of his translations in How I Became One of the Invisible, "You have to identify with the man or the woman. If you don't, then you shouldn't be translating it. Why would you translate something that you didn't think had an important message for other people? I translated Artaud because I wanted to turn my friends on and pass a message that had relevance to our lives. Not to get a grant, or be hired by an English department."

Compiled in the months before his untimely death at age 57, How I Became One of the Invisible is the only volume of Rattray's prose. This new edition, edited by Robert Dewhurst, includes five additional pieces, two of them previously unpublished.

Following in the tradition of Sara Ahmed (the originator of the concept “feminist killjoy”), Wunker brings memoir, theory, literary criticism, pop culture, and feminist thinking together in this collection of essays that take up Ahmed’s project as a multi-faceted lens through which to read the world from a feminist point of view.