Fiction

On the eve of Donald Trump's inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend's phone and makes a startling discovery: he's an anonymous internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in internet fakery, irony, and outrage, she's not exactly shocked by the revelation.

Actually, she's relieved-he was always a little distant-and she plots to end their floundering relationship while on a trip to the Women's March in D.C. But the uncovering of his double life is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies. Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York-or to be anywhere in particular-our unnamed narrator flees to Berlin, embarking on her own cycles of manipulation in the deceptive spaces of her daily life, from dating apps to expat meetups, open-plan offices to bureaucratic waiting rooms

Reader is the first anthology to gather Constance DeJong’s diverse body of writing. Spanning from the 1980s to the present, the publication features eighteen works by DeJong, including out-of-print and previously unpublished fiction, as well as texts emanating from her new media sculptures, sound works, video works, and public art commissions.

An influential figure of the 1970s and ’80s downtown New York writing and performance scene, Constance DeJong has channeled time and language as mediums in her work for the last four decades, expanding the possibilities of narrative form and literary genre. From the earliest work collected here—a manuscript of DeJong’s 1982 prose text I.T.I.L.O.E.—to the digital project Nightwriters (2017-18), Reader assembles a range of experimental texts by the artist. The volume includes such works as the 2013 publication and performance, SpeakChamber and the script for Relatives (1988), a duet between a television and a performer made in collaboration with artist Tony Oursler. Never-before-published works including texts created for re-engineered vintage radios, aphorisms commissioned for a Times Square digital billboard, and transcripts for sound works originally installed along the Thames and Hudson rivers are also featured in the book.

Taken together, these works showcase how DeJong has helped define and push the boundaries of language in the visual and performing arts. The artist’s sustained exploration of language blurs the lines between many fields, and DeJong’s work has also had a long life in the literary world. In the late 1970s, she self-published the critically acclaimed novel Modern Love on her short-lived Standard Editions imprint. On the 40th anniversary of the novel’s original publication, the book was published in facsimile form by Primary Information and Ugly Duckling Presse, and has gone on to sell over 10,000 copies since its release in 2017.

Constance DeJong is a New York-based artist who has exhibited and performed internationally. Her work has been presented at the Renaissance Society, Chicago; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in New York at the Dia Art Foundation; The Kitchen, Thread Waxing Space, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1983 she composed the libretto for Satyagraha, the Philip Glass opera, which has been staged at opera houses worldwide, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York; the Netherlands National Opera, Rotterdam; and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York. She has permanent audio-text installations in Beacon, New York; London; and Seattle. DeJong has published several books of fiction, including her celebrated Modern Love (Standard Editions, 1977; Primary Information/Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), I.T.I.L.O.E. (Top Stories, 1983), and SpeakChamber (Bureau, 2013), and her work is included in the anthologies Up is Up, But So is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Science, 1974-1991 (NYU Press, 2006); Blasted Allegories (New Museum/MIT, 1987), and Wild History (Tanam Press, 1985).

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Editor: Rachel Valinsky
Designer: Freer Studio
Copy editor: Allison Dubinsky

Edinburgh, 2014. Two writer friends, Damaris and Oliver Pablo, escape London, the city that killed his brother. They spend their days trying to get to the library, bickering over their tanking bitcoin, failing to write or resist the sadness. Then they meet Diego, a poet. He tells them he is named for his mother’s island in the Chagos Archipelago, which she and her community were forced to leave by British soldiers in 1973. Damaris and Oliver Pablo become obsessed with this notorious episode and the continuing resistance of the Chagossian people, and want to write in solidarity. But how to share a story that is not theirs to tell? And how to account for a loss not theirs to grieve? A tragicomedy interrogating the powers of literature alongside the crimes of the British government, Diego Garcia is a collaborative fiction that opens up possibilities for the novel and seeks other ways of living together.

‘Intimate yet expansive, heartbroken but unbowed, and a book about writing that is anything but solipsistic, it’s a stirring novel that lights a way forward for politically conscious fiction.’
— Anthony Cummins, Observer

Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco Andrade, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbour – an attractive married woman and mother – while Polo dreams about quitting his gruelling job as a gardener within the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Each facing the impossibility of getting what he thinks he deserves, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme. Written in a chilling torrent of prose by one of our most thrilling new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society – fractured by issues of race, class and violence – and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.

‘With a nimble command of the novel’s technical resources and an uncanny grasp of the irrational forces at work in society, the books navigate a reality riven by violence, race, class, and sex. And they establish Melchor, who was born in 1982, as the latest of Faulkner’s Latin American inheritors, and among the most formidable.... In Melchor’s world, there’s no resisting the violence, much less hating it. All a novelist can do, she seems to suggest, is take a long, unsparing look at the hell that we’ve made.’
— Juan Gabriel Vázquez, New Yorker

Translated by Sophie Hughes.

Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre – the collective autobiography – in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is ‘a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism’ (New York Times), a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.

Translated by Alison L. Strayer.

Amor Cringe explores the dually base and beautiful aspects of self-obsessed media culture. In a perennial bohemian style, an unnamed, ungendered protagonist travels from coast to coast and affair to affair, stumbling upon various moments of failure, absurd insight, and flashes of transcendence.

Half traditionally-written and half AI-generated, Amor Cringe is a "deepfake autofiction" novelette about a TikTok influencer that seeks God, created with the intention to be "as cringe as possible." The result is a painfully self-aware series of encounters that exfoliate the repulsive and fascinating aesthetics of romantic life under social media.

Shola von Reinhold's decadent queer literary debut immerses readers in the pursuit of aesthetics and beauty, while interrogating the removal and obscuring of Black figures from history.

Solitary Mathilda has long harbored a conflicted enchantment bordering on rapture with the "Bright Young Things," the Bloomsbury Group, and their contemporaries of the '20s and '30s, and throughout her life her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists' residency in Dun, a small European town in which Hermia was known to have lived during the '30s. The artists' residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination. From champagne theft and Black Modernisms to art sabotage, alchemy, and a lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cult, Mathilda's "Escapes" through modes of aesthetic expression lead her to question the convoluted ways truth is made and obscured.

Shola von Reinhold is a Scottish socialite and writer. Shola has been published in the Cambridge Literary Review, The Stockholm Review, was Cove Park's Scottish Emerging Writer 2018 and recently won a Dewar Award for Literature. Shola is a recent graduate from the Creative Writing MLitt at Glasgow which was completed through the Jessica Yorke Writing Scholarship and has previously studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Shola has also written for publications including i-D, AnOther Magazine.

Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a master of the macabre, of gorgeous tableaus, biting satire, roguish comedy, and brilliant, effortless flights of the imagination. Nowhere are these qualities more ingeniously brought together than in the works of short fiction she wrote throughout her life. 

Published to coincide with the centennial of her birth, THE COMPLETE STORIES OF LEONORA CARRINGTON collects for the first time all of her stories, including several never before seen in print. With a startling range of styles, subjects, and even languages (several of the stories are translated from French or Spanish), THE COMPLETE STORIES captures the genius and irrepressible spirit of an amazing artist's life.

Sun of an Ignored Putrid Productivity is a speculative novel about the influence of artificial intelligence and accelerating technological progress on our human interactions. The dialogical script is based on personal reflections and pop-cultural, scientific and philosophical references from the beginnings of cybernetics to more recent voices. Randomly generated, constructed and quoted contents cannot be distinguished from each other. The borderline between fact and fiction becomes blurred. What is left is a flickering effect, disorientation, which reflects our perception of reality under conditions of never-ending information overflow.

I travel far across the city, cut it knowingly, concealing behind me the entrances to tunnels, altering the signage. I traverse the grimiest bowels, skirt the farthest wettest edges like a silverfish active only in the hallucinatory hours, to avoid becoming known, to avoid any collusion between my body and theirs, its. 

Under the neon sky of a sick city, which might be London, a nameless governess oscillates between lucidity and dissociation, solitude and communication, wage labour and escape attempts. A wild and unreliable narrator-without-character—ardent, delirious, complicit, vengeful, and paranoid—she embodies a perverse and chaotic resistance. Simultaneously demonic and angelic, both maniacal and generous in her fury, accidentally elegant, tongue tied and barbed, she veers towards defiance as devotion. An anti-Bildungsroman in the collapsing first person, Yes, I Am A Destroyer is an unbecoming record of memory and forgetting, of a relentless undoing. 

‘Any girl who learns how to read is already a lost girl, wrote the infamous confessionalist Rousseau. But if that lost girl, with insatiable pronoun, bastard spawn perhaps of the exiled Genevan, palmed a pen and confessed—how would that read? What can she know? With relentless intelligence and urgent prosody, Mira Mattar shows us. She invents a narrator in the raging anti-tradition of Violette Leduc and Albertine Sarrazin, leaps beyond the cloying contract of capital with the feminine, of intimacy with violence, to animate a lush document of the refusal of subjection. Much like the young Jean-Jacques, she’s a tutor underpaid for her sensitivity. She is, like him, a thief of small things, a sponge for the edifying comportments of the employing class. What she makes of her servitude—a fabulously grotesque encyclopedia of sensing—is dedicated to female anger. Scrubbing, washing, chewing, frigging, barfing, stealing, moisturising, shitting: every surface, every gesture, is appropriated to her bodily resistance.  ‘Live anyway’ is her stoic motto. This glorious tract ends with a call for the anarchical vigour of the animal body we share. Read it and flourish. You will perhaps be invoiced.’ 
–> Lisa Robertson 

Mira Mattar writes fiction and poetry. She is an independent researcher, editor, and tutor. A Palestinian/Jordanian born in the suburbs of London, she continues to live and work there. She has read and published her work widely. Yes, I Am A Destroyer is her first book.

Design classics, the dates of which ranged from the beginnings of the previous century to the start of the current one, were scattered throughout the room, their very definite shapes offset against the off-white, off-modern walls. I allowed my gaze to flit from one piece of furniture to the next, and as I mentally joined the dots between them I unwittingly re-wrote their history according to thematic as opposed to chronological concerns. I wondered if perhaps I were simply seeing my own flat ‘in the expanded field’, each element repositioned by some new and typically rabid curator eager to facilitate the production of their own dense texts...

Part metafiction, part design criticism, with a touch of armchair psychoanalysis, Objektophiliabegins in London in 2014, where a nameless design critic and her partner X reside in a decrepit but Grade II listed tower block. It ends some months later among the fin de siècle wonders of Vienna in an echo of the successive encounters of Schnitzler’s La Ronde. Possessed by the ruins of social housing and its accompanying ideologies, but nonetheless in possession of those ruins’ original brushed-steel light-fittings, the critic soon discovers that her craving for these and similarly ‘undemanding things’ has usurped her more conventional—or fleshly—desires.

‘Susan Finlay’s deft, subtle work examines the psychic texture of life through our relation to things... objects of all kinds, from Filet-O-Fish sandwiches to high art, Le Creuset cookware, bicycle baskets and purpose-built, modern flats. Objektophiliais witty and brisk and devastating all at the same time.’ 
–> Chris Kraus

Susan Finlay is a writer and artist.  She is the author of three poetry pamphets: Indole, 2019, The Unruly Glove, the Green Bum and the Sickly Trickle(2018), and Sex and the City 2 (2017), and two previous novels: Our Lady of Everything(Serpent’s Tail, 2019), and Arriviste (Five Lines in the Sand, 2007).  Most (but not all) of her work relates to psychoanalysis, magic, and the decorative arts.  She lives in the UK and Berlin.  

Then let the story really begin in 1968, though it has little to do with May. By chance it opens in January of that year, and it really concerns me rather than the world of political events, though these are always on my mind, as they were always on my mind. Its antecedents are in the summer of 1967, when I lived, happily, in a squalid bedsit in the then squalid Ladbroke Square, as well as in some basement maid’s room in the West End, and did my secondary sources in the British Library, the V&A, and also, a bit, in Paris, Bordeaux, and Montauban, though that was to flirt with the primary sources ahead of time. 

This short Bildungsroman sets beside each other the fault lines of events and moments recalled without a diary with the verification and sometimes undermining effects of new research of materials, the recovery of what was known, what might have been known, and what was merely probable, as if this were a history of the history of art. 

‘This is an extraordinary journey. Using ekphrasis as method—and as a proper timeline for an indefinite confinement—it wanders through a lived calendar of scholarship, where forgotten stories of art history books flirt with library indexes and archival catalogues, and streetwalking meets gay longing at the heart of the text.’ 
– Élisabeth Lebovici

Adrian Rifkin worked in art departments as a historian and a studio tutor, in historical and cultural studies as well as visual culture, from Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1970 to Goldsmiths, University of London in 2012, where he was a professor of Art Writing. A collection of essays, Communards and Other Cultural Histories, edited and introduced by Steve Edwards, was published in 2017. Interdisciplinary Encounters, Hidden and Visible Explorations of the Work of Adrian Rifkin, edited by Dana Arnold, appeared in 2015.

For nearly two years the author collected phrases from the exhibition press releases she received through email, posting certain of them on Facebook in a rather unsystematic way (that is to say, when she felt like it), with only one change, that of the personal pronoun, so each statement appeared vainglorious, absurd, even tragic. She supposes the measure was if they made her laugh or gasp or used words she deplores when thinking or writing about art. The posts gathered quite a following. Some people still mention them to her, and others have asked her to look at their own press releases before circulation.

These extracts have provoked laughter, disbelief (especially when performed as public readings, when she has  been obliged to swear to their veracity), self-recognition, and yes, shame.

She had only three rules: 1) She would not quote the press release of anyone she knows (certainly she could have done—she must admit that both a friend and someone she dislikes intensely have slipped in, and she fervently hopes neither ever reads this book); 2) She would not alter anything except the pronoun (this is largely true; however, for this book, she corrected some errors of punctuation and spelling, changed spellings to their English form, and employed her beloved Oxford comma); and 3) She would not use anything the artist had written (this, too, is true, save for one exception that was too wonderful not to include).

Finally, she  gathered a collection of endorsements, some along the way, others when she indicated this work was done. She is still alive and she continues to labour in obscurity. 

Poet Rosmarie Waldrop’s classic novel about the horrors and banalities of German life between the World Wars. 

“Josef and Frederika Seifert made a bad marriage—he so metaphysical, she, furious frustrated singer, furious frustrated femme fatale, unfaithful within two months of the wedding day. The setting is small town Germany between the wars; the Seiferts are just those ‘ordinary people’ who helped Hitler rise, bequeathing their daughter, who tells their story, a legacy of grief and guilt. Rosmarie Waldrop’s haunting novel, superbly intelligent, evocative and strange, reverberates in the memory for a long time, a song for the dead, a judgment.” (Angela Carter)

The conclusion of a radically philosophical and personal series of Fanny Howe novels animated by questions of race, spirituality, childhood, transience, resistance, and poverty. 

First published by Semiotexte in 2001, Indivisible concludes a radically philosophical and personal series of Fanny Howe novels animated by questions of race, spirituality, childhood, transience, wonder, resistance, and poverty. Depicting the tempestuous multiracial world of artists and activists who lived in working-class Boston during the 1960s, Indivisible begins when its narrator, Henny, locks her husband in a closet so that she might better discuss things with God. On the verge of a religious conversion, Henny attempts to make peace with the dead by telling their stories.

It’s fall (or autumn) 2018. The Trump administration wants to fortify the United States-Mexico border, Robert ‘Beto’ O'Rourke is running for Senate, and British grifter Nicki Smith has just secured a “low-paid glamour job” at the University of Texas’ Jacques Lacan Foundation. In between sleeping with the air-conditioning repair guy (or man) and watching Kate Moss make-up commercials (or advertisements) Nicki completes the first ever American-English translation of Lacan’s newly discovered and highly controversial notebook – without knowing any French.

An Anglo-American comedy of manners about identity and class The Jacques Lacan Foundation reveals—and revels in—the numerous pretensions that surround academia and authorship, and the institutions that foster them.

Max Rabinowitz, a butch lesbian bartender at an East Village club, is shaken when her friend, a transvestite, is murdered. As the community of cross-dressers, drag queens, lesbians, and gay men stand together in the face of this tragedy, Max taps into the activist spirit she thought had disappeared.

Leslie Feinberg is an editor, writer, and political organizer. Stone Butch Blues, Feinberg's first novel, is an internationally acclaimed classic of trans literature. It won the Lambda Award and the American Library Association Lesbian and Gay Book Award. Feinberg's other works Trans Liberation, Trans Gender Warriors, and Transgender have also been at the forefront of the trans movement. Feinberg lives with her wife, Minnie Bruce Pratt, near New York City.

Etel Adnan's novel Paris, When It's Naked amazes our retinas, ears, lips, fingertips, and noses with sensing, talking, and envisioning the city of Baudelaire and Delacroix, Mallarme and Picasso, Sartre and Djuna Barnes, Miller and Nin, Vietnamese and African refugees, revolutions and Bohemia.

This tale of the Creative Now is told through the fine-tuned sensibility of Etel Adnan, the expatriate poet-painter who knew the French Capital as wholly as she did Beirut and San Francisco, her other homes. She is also the author of Sitt Marie-Rose, an underground novel of the Lebanese Civil War, and many books of poetry. This work is a philosophically charged lyric in prose. The elan vital of every word evokes the eternal present of this wise woman. A highly personal, life-enhancing masterpiece in a deathly age of impersonality. An indespensable book by an indispensable writer. (Words by Morgan Gibson)

Darryl Cook is a man who seems to have everything: a quiet home in Western Oregon, a beautiful wife, and a lot of friends to fuck her while he watches. But as he explores the cuckolding lifestyle, he finds himself tugging at threads that threaten to unravel his marriage, his town, and himself. With empathy and humor, debut author Jackie Ess crafts a kaleidoscopic meditation on marriage, manhood, dreams, basketball, sobriety, and the secret lives of Oregonians.

Jackie Ess is a writer, cultural mischief-maker, and minor internet celebrity. A co-founder of the Bay Area Trans Writers Workshop, her work can be found in Heavy Feather Review, the Zahir, the New Inquiry, Vetch, and the anthology We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Darryl is her first novel.

In writing Le Livre de Promethea Hélène Cixous set for herself the task of bridging the immeasurable distance between love and language. She describes a love between two women in its totality, experienced as both a physical presence and a sense of infinity.

The result is a stunning example of écriture feminine that won kudos when published in France in 1983. Its translation into English by Betsy Wing will extend the influence of a writer already famous for her novels and contributions to feminist theory. In her introduction Betsy Wing notes the contemporary emphasis on "fictions of presence." Cixous, in The Book of Promethea, works to "repair the separation between fiction and presence, trying to chronicle a very-present love without destroying it in the writing."

Betsy Wing is a freelance translator and fiction writer. She translated Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous's La Jeune Née (The Newly Born Woman) into English in 1986. A collection of her fiction, Look Out for Hydrophobia, was published in 1990. Hélène Cixous is also author of the play The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, translated by Juliet Flower MacCannell, Judith Pike, and Lollie Groth (Nebraska 1994).

Hélène Cixous is also author of the play The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, translated by Juliet Flower MacCannell, Judith Pike, and Lollie Groth (Nebraska 1994). Betsy Wing is a freelance translator and fiction writer. She translated Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous's La Jeune Née ( The Newly Born Woman) into English in 1986. A collection of her fiction, Look Out for Hydrophobia, was published in 1990.

In The Third Body, the poet, novelist, feminist critic, and theorist Hélène Cixous interweaves a loose narrative line with anecdotes, autobiography, lyricism, myth, dream, fantasy, philosophical insights, and intertextual citations of and conversations with other authors and thinkers. Cixous evokes the relationship of the female narrator and her lover, a relationship of alternating presences and absences, separations and rejoinings. This relationship assumes protean forms within a complex web of writing, creating a third body out of the entwined bodies of the narrator and her lover. 

Hélène Cixous is a professor emerita of literature and founder of the Centre d'études feminines, Paris VIII. Her numerous books include Stigmata, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, The Newly Born Woman, The Laugh of the Medusa, and Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory. In 2000, a collection in Cixous' name was created at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The story of failure asks one question only: What do people who lose do next? “Let the best one win.” War is one way. The other way is religion. Let me at the stakes. It’s so much a matter of patience. No fury, beyond all reason, no sequence broken, but diverted. Nothing seems to cooperate when you lose control. Blue becomes violet. Bend your head to the blank. The solution is so simple: don’t identify yourself with your description of yourself.

"It feels we aren’t reading prose but language that oscillates between liturgy and prayer." — Eugene Lim

Valerie Solanas's rarely published, legendary play, Up Your Ass, explodes social and sexual mores and the hypocritical, patriarchal culture that produces them through her signature irreverence and wit, incisiveness and camp.

The play, whose full title is Up Your Ass Or From the Cradle to the Boat Or The Big Suck Or Up from the Slime, marches out a cast of screwy stereotypes: the unknowing john, the frothy career girl, the boring male narcissist, two catty drag queens, the sex-depraved housewife, and a pair of racialized pickup artists, among others. At the center is protagonist Bongi Perez—a thinly veiled Solanas—a sardonic, gender-bending hustler who escorts us through the back alleys of her street life. The fictionalized predecessor to SCUM Manifesto, the play shares the same grand, subversive, implicative language, equally spitting and winking, embracing the margins, the scum, and selling a trick along the way.

Valerie Solanas (1936-1988) is an American radical feminist intellectual, known for her SCUM Manifesto—a pamphlet with which she declares the power of women and imagines a political future through the margin—, and for having tried to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Edited by Leah Whitman-Salkin.
With a contribution by Paul B. Preciado.
Graphic design: Roxanne Maillet.

A story that explores how power is enacted on and through the body—the physical, the social, and the political.

Alienation and dire frustration mount as an unnamed woman—a mother—struggles to survive in the face of state repression, neighborhood surveillance, extreme weather, and familial control. Told through one side of an epistolary exchange, the novel's letters are bookended by dense ramblings by the mother's son, who struggles to speak and write and spends most of his days in lockdown rearranging his "vessels," hysterically laughing, drooling, writhing, withdrawing—a state that will ultimately consume his mother as well. This is a story that explores how power is enacted on and through the body—the physical, the social, and the political. Custody of the Eyes (Los Vigilantes) reconfirms the essential, constitutive nature of language and expression in power and freedom.

Diamela Eltit (born 1947 in Santiago, Chile) is a Chilean writer and teacher.

Edited by Leah Whitman-Salkin.
Graphic design: Roxanne Maillet.
Published in May 2022