Books

Told through contradicting, unreliable narrators and almost entirely in dialogue, Seyed Qader Hedayati's GABOR fuses the experimentation of George Saunders with the absurdist satire of Joseph Heller to deliver a seldom explored portrait of friendship and boyhood under the anarchy of occupation.

In a Kurdish village under military occupation, a group of boys scrape together their savings and buy a hand-stitched football to prove they aren't losers to the other kids. When it lands inside the opposing military base, Karim sneaks in and takes it back—only for the soldiers to burn the neighborhood to the ground looking for it. Streets are bombed, homes are raided, snipers take aim at pedestrians, residents are dragged off and imprisoned. As the casualty rate skyrockets, Karim and his friends retaliate by firing junkyard scraps from their slingshots while raging bulls escape slaughterhouses to stampede into warfare.

Aesthetical Relations is a constellation of essays on art, fashion, cancer, comedy, Los Angeles, and your mom. Martinez whips elements of fiction and stand up material into bits and pieces addressing such concerns as: how many times you may kiss an art-world acquaintance, the theoretical stakes of sexting, and why German performance art is like French clowning. Aesthetical Relations is titled after Martinez’s ongoing conceptual comedy talk show of the same name. This new revised and expanded third edition includes new essays written from 2020-2025. 

Christina Catherine Martinez (Mexican American, b. Bellflower, CA) lives and works between Los Angeles, Mexico City, and New England. She was named both a Comedian You Should Know by Vulture and a Comic to Watch by TimeOutLA, and is a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her varied approaches to art criticism, published in platforms such as The Los Angeles Times, Aperture, Frieze, Artforum, Bookforum, e-flux criticism, DOCUMENT Journal, Dirt.fyi and Texte Zur Kunst.

Get Rid of Meaning: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Writing is a biannual periodical by Sticky Fingers Publishing, exploring how and where meaning is produced, maintained and distributed. Through its first three issues, Get Rid of Meaning has become a site for interrogating the material conditions and affective systems of meaning-making, and strategies for surviving an intentionally nonsensical political landscape, through experimental non-fiction. This fourth issue builds on this by uncovering forms and methods of fugitive knowledge, from the heat of the land and the vibrations of the night, to the stoney rumblings of rivers and rock.

Featuring contributions from Alberto Álvarez, e v, Florence Hannah Evans, Lucy Petersen, Mark Sauter, mars k margetson & teresa amrita braggs.

LOOK HERE FOR: BLOOD BOILING, WHAT DEBT DOES, SEEING PURPLE, A PING-PONG BALL BENEATH THE RUBBLE, PSYCHOPOLITICS, ALIEN GOO, A ROD UP YOUR ASS, STONE SUMMONING FORTH, A MIRACLE, & THE BEGINNING OF THE END.

The love child of The L Word and Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends, with a disaffected flair all its own.

It’s San Francisco in the early aughts, and Howie Song is floundering. His failed projects—as a professional ballet dancer, as a boyfriend, as a friend—have left him forever the “third wheel.” But maybe he likes it that way? Leaping wildly between lovers, centuries, and an ever-changing cultural landscape, Howie might just feel most himself in the fracture. 

Delicious, poetic, and delightfully pornographic, Tricyclist is an ode to the “abnormal angles” of people and art. As Howie overcomes his own ambivalences—in large part thanks to two suitors, and a circle of supporters who happen to be lesbians—Joon Oluchi Lee portrays, with his signature flamboyance, all of life’s joys, pitfalls, and pirouettes.

Joon Oluchi Lee is one of my favorite writers. A quick-change artist with a blazing intellect, he startles with his wicked wit and mix of rawness and sophistication. In Tricyclist, vexed, sexed, and indexed types orbit the narrator Howie Song, offering all kinds of distractions and attractions. Identity is a flipbook of possibilities, malleable in a way that excites and also threatens dissolution (which is maybe a relief). Raunch, philosophical asides, and a scavenger hunt for connection and love are all propelled by Lee’s masterful maverick style and brilliant humor. - Nate Lippens

Across lush hangouts with friends and hookups with lovers, Joon Oluchi Lee’s Tricyclist paints shimmering portraits of the most beautiful blouses and bars and bodies laid bare alongside our hopelessly alluring narrator. Through Howie’s careening sex drives and death drives, sensuality is everything, and with Lee’s keen attunement to life’s viscera, Tricyclist aches gorgeously. What a rhapsodic balm to my 2026. - Benedict Nguyễn

Tricyclist is a sex-forward, strikingly original story of queer life in San Francisco that feels so fresh it left my fingers wet. Joon Oluchi Lee’s eye is as sharp as his prose, rendering characters and scenarios with gossipy frankness. Kinetic and true and hyper-alive. - Michelle Tea

Sarah Schulman, fervente militante pour les droits humains, livre dans cet essai une brillante analyse des défis sociaux et psychologiques inhérents à tout mouvement de solidarité. En prenant appui sur plusieurs exemples historiques (lutte pour le droit à l’avortement dans l’Espagne postfranquiste, lutte contre le VIH/sida dans le New York des années 1990, mobilisation contre le génocide à Gaza…) ainsi que sur sa propre expérience de femme queer et juive, l’autrice décortique les rouages de la solidarité et entreprend de questionner les fantasmes qui y sont traditionnellement associés. 

En filigrane, cet ouvrage pose une question fondamentale : quelle place pouvons-nous prendre dans un monde de plus en plus polarisé, et comment agir en solidarité avec les populations opprimées à l’échelle mondiale, locale ou individuelle ? L’autrice analyse les conditions nécessaires à tout mouvement de solidarité et montre l’importance de l’écoute active, la nécessité d’intervenir lorsque l’on est confronté à une injustice, la capacité à tolérer l’imperfection, ou encore la reconnaissance du coût moral et social inhérent à toute mobilisation. 

En dressant des parallèles entre différents mouvements sociaux, Sarah Schulman met en lumière certaines dynamiques transversales à tout acte de solidarité et montre l’importance de la convergence des luttes dans un contexte mondialisé. Ode à la libération des populations opprimées, cet ouvrage apparaît aujourd’hui indispensable pour quiconque souhaite oeuvrer à la construction d’un monde plus juste. 

Toxicité coloniale revient sur les programmes nucléaires français menés entre 1960 et 1966 dans le Sahara algérien. Ce programme secret, qui s’est déroulé pendant et après la guerre d’indépendance algérienne (1954-1962), a permis au régime colonial français de mettre à feu quatre bombes atomiques atmosphériques, treize souterraines et de mener d’autres expériences nucléaires dans le désert. Alors que la grande majorité des documents d’archives sont toujours classés secret aujourd’hui, Toxicité coloniale rassemble une variété de sources permettant de documenter l’histoire violente des activités de la France en Algérie. Le livre constitue un corpus de choix à l’intersection de la justice spatiale, sociale et environnementale pour ceux et celles qui s’intéressent à l’architecture, au paysage et aux pratiques d’archivage dans une démarche décoloniale.

Alors que ces bombes ont eu des conséquences durables pour les populations et les environnements locaux ainsi que pour les vétérans français, le manque de contrôle des explosions, les lacunes de sécurité et l’utilisation des Algériens comme main- d’œuvre sur des chantiers particulièrement dangereux apparaissent comme des faits coloniaux d’une importance majeure.

La même en pire est un roman d’amour enchâssé dans un roman noir, un huis clos dans lequel les confessions de chacune deviennent le procès des autres. Elles sont toutes coupables, toutes victimes, toutes témoins, toutes innocentes de ce qui est arrivé à Madison. Et qu’est-ce qui est arrivé ?

Madison a disparu, Madison a été assassinée, Madison s’est suicidée. Huit femmes se retrouvent dans un appartement et reviennent sur ce qui les avait rassemblées des années auparavant : une maison délabrée que Madison louait et dans laquelle elle avait installé des caméras pour streamer H24 et monétiser son existence. Elles avaient toutes vécu dans cette maison et avaient toutes fini par la déserter. Sophie la poète mariée au terroriste, Cécile la détective privée, Hilary la bourgeoise militante, Lola l’adolescente tiktokeuse muette, Alexandra l’entrepreneuse, Eva la mauvaise mère, Kamila la mère aimante, et la narratrice.

Préface : Lou-Andréa Benzacar

« On ne bombardera jamais ma voix » est un recueil de poèmes écrits depuis le génocide en cours à Gaza. Yahya AL Hamarna y documente les brutalités de la guerre ainsi que les rituels fragiles de la vie quotidienne : étudier, se promener dans le parc, lire de la poésie, préparer du thé, pleurer, survivre. De l’intimité exiguë des tentes de déplacés à la sérénité imaginaire des cours universitaires et des matchs du Réal Madrid, AL Hamarna élabore une poétique de la survie : une poétique qui refuse le désespoir et insiste sur la dignité invincible du peuple palestinien. 

Préface : Elissa Kayal
Postface : Alycia Dufour

Pieds en l’air, loin la terre rassemble les poèmes et paroles de chanson de Yanka Diaghileva (1966-1991), poétesse et musicienne au sein de l’un des premiers groupes de Punk sibérien. Imprégnées d’éléments de folklore sibérien et de mythologies slaves, les quatre-vingt-cinq textes qui composent ce livre évoquent à la fois l’univers du conte, l’esprit no future et la vie quotidienne en Sibérie à la fin des années 1980. S’ils sont marqués par une certaine forme de désespoir, ils témoignent surtout d’une profonde révolte existentielle et d’une insoumission au pouvoir soviétique. Extrêmement ciselés sur le plan sonore, ils sont nourris par les différents -ismes de la poésie russe (symbolisme, acméisme, futurisme). Mais Yanka Diaghileva ne revendiquait aucune filiation, elle faisait du punk: « Ce sont des étoiles qui tombent du ciel / En mégots des étages du dessus ». « Trouer la brume du paradis », un essai littéraire de Marina Skalova, complète cette éditions.

Basse résolution affective, zéro confession, full dispositif : entre artifice et exposition, le « je » de ces poèmes est soigneusement mis en scène. C’est une critique du flux en devenant soi-même le flux. Ce n’est pas juste : « je te dis un secret », mais plutôt : « regarde comme un poème fait semblant d’avoir un secret. » Sam Riviere sample un langage déjà-là — celui d’Internet, de la publicité et des réseaux sociaux — pour le redistribuer en poèmes tentés par l’auto-sabotage et la blague, qui analysent le moment de leur naissance et doutent, au passage, de leur propre valeur.

81 Austérités — Le Mariage de Kim Kardashian — Post-célébrité (poèmes sélectionnés et traduits de l'anglais par Jules Leroy)

Égal infini cherche le contact : une crêpe oubliée dans un tram, un tatouage de baiser, une présence derrière un écran. Ici, les algorithmes affectifs côtoient des recettes de consolation, les robots parlants croisent les animaux marins, et la vitesse d’une voiture dans la nuit rejoint le mouvement fragile des relations. Journal éparpillé, galerie de gestes et de paroles collectées, le livre avance comme le refrain « marabout, bout de ficelle… », laissant à chacun·e la liberté de tracer son propre chemin.

Dorothea Lasky’s stunning new collection of poems presents an unfurling, terrifying, and fiercely loving embodiment of motherhood as a force of creation. Inspired by Bernadette Mayer’s The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, Lasky writes from the inner realm of a third pregnancy and guides us through a suspended timeline taut with anticipation. Mother documents caring for small children, the death of the mother, and the simultaneous anxiety and darkness of impending birth, as Lasky transmits from a deep mythic and biologically immediate space: “And even though I’ve spent / Eight months now / Dreading the sight / Of anything red / Now I long to bleed all over.” Invoking the eternal symbol of the mother, Lasky asks us to consider an expansive understanding of the horror and devotion inherent in the daily practices of existence.

Francis Laurie Schaffer—an artist in her mid-40s—has recently separated from her husband after a two-decade long marriage and has fallen in love with a polyamorous young man who doesn’t fully reciprocate her feelings. In an attempt to express her dissatisfaction, she begins writing about the relationships between the people she imagines belong to her polycule. But things begin to shift into a game of mirrors when Francis meets some of the people she’s written about. A series of events will then culminate with Francis and her friends crashing the 40th birthday party of her husband’s new girlfriend. A disastrous outcome serves as a rite of passage, delivering the protagonists onto the other side of that experience with a transformed sense of self.

A raw and profound novel in verse about mental health, addiction, queerness and shame that explores ideas of hybridity and identity. 

Following their discharge from hospital, Mirrorstage follows its narrator on a road trip through the grey, liminal landscapes of modern Britain. As they pass graffitied bus shelters, construction sites and flooded motorways, factories and high-rises, the narrator’s internal and external journeys begin to converge, leading them down paths they have been trying to avoid: the mental illness and substance use that led them to the inpatient ward, the uneasy balance of their own gender identity, their troubled relationship with their estranged father, the perils and pleasures of the queer scene, and the shame that has haunted them throughout their life.

Woven around the psychoanalytic concept of its title, Mirrorstage is an experimental fable exploring the boundaries of selfhood and literary forms, told in fragments of prose and verse that are equal parts heartbreaking, sexy, and witty.

[Available for preorders. Shipping 26 October.] 

Twenty Shadows tells of a man’s spiritual change following the suicide of his son after a long addiction. Haunted by this loss and the unknown desire of his only child, thinking and writing with a new emptiness, he finds a form of expression that was previously impossible. 

This singular book brings together the reflections of one of our greatest living philosophers with a father’s grief. —Todd McGowan 

Taking its title from Shakespeare’s Richard II—“Each substance of grief hath twenty shadows”—this book follows personal tragedy into the murky place where memory and interpretation become indistinguishable. What lies at its heart is a meditation on the unknowability of the other. —Charlotte Northall 

Richard Boothby is right that no amount of intellect curbs the impulses of real experience, but that doesn’t mean you have to remain in a state of ignorance. Composed from the leftovers of terrible, unassimilable events, this book gives us bracing indications of ways to live on in a diminished aftermath. —Justin Clemens 

Richard Boothby is professor emeritus of philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. Boothby’s books include Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud (1991), Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan (2001), Sex on the Couch: What Freud Still Has to Teach Us about Sex and Gender (2006), and Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred (2023). He lives in Baltimore.

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

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

For our Summer 2026 issue, amid the latest revival of SPIRITUALITY in culture, Spike asked: what are people reaching for beyond what can be measured? The answers are eclectic, emphatic, and most of all personal: Johanna Hedva’s essay about the human voice’s part in the divine; portraits of mystic artists Lee “Scratch” Perry, Natasha Tontey, and Santiago Yahuarcani by Isis Semaj-Hall, Riar Rizaldi, and Miguel A. López; Jamieson Webster’s psychoanalytic look at Renaissance painting’s body of Christ; a spiritual history of perfumes by Élisabeth de Feydeau; Patrick McGraw’s soulful reading of America’s (perhaps) greatest living author, Joy Williams; queries of Gen Z’s search for God by Lamorna Ash, the disappearance of atheism by Steven Phillips-Horst, and a new form of contemplation by Aodhan Madden; and LIFEMAXXING recommendations to purge the soul, sometimes devilishly. Plus, some backpage words of wisdom from Tea Hačić-Vlahović: “Devotion and humiliation are holy.” 

Emerging from the dark ecology between lullaby and ghost story, The pedestrian meanders down a labyrinth of divinatory time where crimes demand a more defective detective. To conjure the source of this text’s trauma, the poet becomes a ritual detective, tracing the wound by its shadow. Meaning emerges through distortion and echo—courting what cannot be seen head-on to create a haunted grammar of grief. An ill pastoral of displacement, The pedestrian turns domestic spaces into underworlds, the body of the exiled child into a prophetic threshold—it listens as much as it speaks, attuned to forces beyond itself.

The pedestrian is a map to a terrain of shards and shadows. While reading it, I felt lost only to the land of the normative, a lush fugitivity. I traveled far with, because of, and in this book. Hsiung trusts in the politics of decomposition, making syntaxes that have been distorted by grief, and thus sharpened to what cannot be colonially extracted. Writers like this know that grammar, vocabulary, and the sentence itself are haunted, so they write not to exorcise or cure this condition of its ghosts, but to make a place for them to live, a place they belong.
— Johanna Hedva

What began as a project responding to the fiftieth anniversary of the ‘end’ of the Vietnam War became a project of inhabiting the Movement Research Performance Journal (MRPJ) from within the landscape of contemporary Vietnamese performance art. The result, Issue #62, is a window onto a community of insiders who reflect a set of concerns, questions, historical trajectories, and aesthetic legacies that differ from what has more often been foregrounded in our U.S./New York City-centric publication. Like other documents of this kind, which endeavor to portray a performance scene that will be foreign to many readers, the texts from this group of intergenerational, contemporary artists demonstrate a careful navigation of the dialectics of inside and outside, self and other, performer and audience, seeing and being seen, that informs every exchange across cultural difference. 

The texts are also not monolithic, suggesting a range of relations to the Vietnam of the past and present, from within Vietnam’s national borders and among the diaspora. Especially for contributors living and working in Vietnam, writing has also been a practice of choreographing words within a political landscape where to speak publicly, in itself, is a performance of negotiated risk. Embracing the complexities of these differing positions has been the focus of our editorial process—one that has asked the editorial team to embrace the limits of our own knowledge, to recognize we will not be able to recognize all valences others may discover in these texts, and not to edit these layers out of the works that follows.

Reportage, photography, and art from Palestine and Lebanon. Contributors include Alaa Mansour, Fady Joudah, Farah Silvana-Kanaan, Fatima Joumaa, Fouad Elkoury, Hadi Afif, Islam Al-Khatib, Philippa Dahrouj, Rawad Wehbe, Sakir Khader, and Wassila Abboud.

Black Cine-Body Sonics: Racializing the Soundtrack surveys how Black audiovisuality developed and thrives in films and television through importing and materializing the sonics of Black musical representation — from 'Blaxploitation' classics (Shaft and Truck Turner) to cine-auteurs (Melvin Van Peebles, Spike Lee and Jordan Peele) to music video performers (Michael Jackson, Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar) to video artists (Arthur Jafa and Isaac Julien) to contemporary multi-genre explorations of race (Sinners, Lovecraft Country, Atlanta and Swarm). The book views Jazz Soul Funk Disco Hip Hop Techno and House not as 'source music' but as genetic origins in the transformation of movies and shows resulting in new cinematic and televisual formations — all of which foreground the body performance and musicality.
— Philip Brophy

This is the 4th publication in the Echoes of Dissent series, devoted to the politics of the soundtrack.

You can talk about Ishii and music and you can talk about Ishii and sound. I want to talk about both. I want to talk about him as a node in a network of musicians and bands that starts with punk but spider webs out to ensnare post-punk industrial and ambient music with a brief free jazz cameo. I also want to talk about the way he uses sound rhythm and silence. This is not just about soundtrack. A soundtrack tends towards telling you something about what’s happening. Soundtracks tell you what to feel whether there is dread or romance or sadness in a scene. Not so for Ishii. For Ishii a soundtrack stands alone is a bed and is a moment but it doesn’t tell you how to feel. It is in Ishii's hands dislocation silencing or distortion of the cause-effect connection between the punch thrown and the punch landing between moving image and the sound that constructs the conceits of the cinema. "He attempted to find a visual equivalent to punk music," wrote critic Tom Mes. "A way to express the same philosophy and spirit with a camera instead of a guitar.”
— Jennifer Lucy Allan

This is the 3rd publication in the Echoes of Dissent series, devoted to the politics of the soundtrack.

Blank Stare is the first publication in the CommonWealth series, published by Chillzone. 

Compiled of graffiti written in the streets of Iran, combining the urgency of emotional expression amidst the political suffocation of people during the 2026 government-imposed internet blackout.