Books

In her first book of critical non-fiction, The Poetics of Wrongness, poet Rachel Zucker explores wrongness as a foundational orientation of opposition and provocation.

Devastating in their revelations, yet hopeful in their commitment to perseverance, these lecture-essays of protest and reckoning resist the notion of being wrong as a stopping point on the road to being right, and insist on wrongness as an analytical lens and way of reading, writing, and living that might create openness, connection, humility, and engagement.

This book marks a turning point in Zucker's significant body of work, documenting her embrace of the multivocality of interview in her podcasting, and resisting the univocality of the lecture as a form of wrongness in and of itself.

The book is a reprint of a cult text of post-1968 psychedelic culture: The Rainbow Book, published in 1975 in Berkeley, California, on the occasion of The Rainbow Show exhibition held at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

The Rainbow Book is a collection of essays and illustrations devoted to the rainbow and color spectra, analyzing the significance of color (both physical and metaphysical) from antiquity to modern times.

An encyclopedia of the cultural and artistic manifestations of the rainbow: in myth, magic and paintings, as well as in prints and poems. The book includes poems by Virgil, Dante, Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, and others; paintings by Giotto, Bosch, Van der Weyden, Dürer, Rubens, Blake, Turner, Constable, and Church; and the sacred art of Tibet.

The book is printed on sheets of different colors, according to the rainbow spectrum, and reports notions of increasing complexity, accessible at first to younger readers and later to the more experienced and interested in the subject.

The reprint accompanies the exhibition Rainbow. Colors and Wonders between Myths, Arts and Science at MUDEC in Milan (February 16–July 2, 2023), and the release of the first issue of MUdec United.

The Whisper is Félicia Atkinson's new artist's book, bringing together photographs, drawings and poems. They revolve around the eponymous installation located on the pointe d'Agon, on the west coast in Normandy. On a dune acquired by the artist for the Conservatoire du Littoral, stands a pierced wooden sculpture. Around this sculpture, inside this wild dune and facing the sea, the walker is invited to become a whisperer, and listen to what surrounds him. 

What if whispering could be a metaphor for a way of creating and living within biodiversity? Observing and listening, being present to the world while only leaving gentle trace? The studio then becomes a garden, the exhibition space a dune, deep listening a method of working and exchanging with the public and the reader.

Experimental musician, sound and visual artist Félicia Atkinson (born 1981) lives on the wild coast of Normandy (France). She has played music since the early 2000s. She has released many records and a novel on Shelter Press, the label and publisher she co-runs with Bartolomé Sanson. 
For Félicia Atkinson, human voices inhabit an ecology alongside and within many other things that don't speak, in the conventional sense: landscapes, images, books, memories, ideas. The French electro-acoustic composer and visual artist makes music that animates these other possible voices in conversation with her own, collaging field recording, MIDI instrumentation, and snippets of essayistic language in both French and English. Her own voice, always shifting to make space, might whisper from the corner or assume another character's tone. Atkinson uses composing as a way to process imaginative and creative life, frequently engaging with the work of visual artists, filmmakers, and novelists. Her layered compositions tell stories that alternately stretch and fold time and place, stories in which she is the narrator but not the protagonist. 

The third issue of Le Signe Design (the Cahiers of the National Graphic Design Center) is about DIY practices and is based on the work of Gilles de Brock, graphic designer who became a ceramic tile manufacturer.

Do It Yourself practices are not, as is commonly assumed, limited to home improvement, nor just a way of subverting—hacking—a given social and political organization. They are also a way of looking both forward and backward, at our future and our heritage. They involve our heritage insofar as they allow constituted groups to revive past knowledge and skills threatened with extinction. They look forward in that they make it possible to create tools that do not yet exist but could.

The applications of the Do It Yourself approach range from niche practices to everything everywhere, and what they have in common is that they are always in opposition to the mass market. Some examples of this extremely diversified movement include self-publishing, cosplay, biotechnology, hacking (especially in the sense of programming), and producing digital artworks and music. Its most mediatized (and often romanticized) contemporary manifestation is what are called fablabs, but this term is too limited to cover the phenomenon in all its vast variety.

The roots of the DIY movement go back to the magazines Popular Mechanics(1902) and Mechanix Illustrated (1928), popular education publications meant for readers in small towns and the countryside who needed to be self-reliant and repair broken manufactured items rather than buying new ones. The late 1960s saw the emergence of movements motivated by environmental concerns and a distrust of consumer society. Many people—like some student co-op members, hippies in North America and punks in Europe—wanted to share resources. Stewart Brand's famous Whole Earth Catalogue, subtitled "Access to tools", launched in 1968, constitutes our contemporary reference.

This issue is appearing in parallel with the solo exhibition retracing the career of Gilles de Brock, whose production is deeply infused with the DIY spirit. Yet his practice can't be reduced to the things he has actually made. It is part of the kind of knowledge-sharing economy proclaimed in Brand's counter-culture manifesto, able to go even further today thanks to the participatory and interactive Web 2.0.

Texts by Pao Lien Djie, Maya Ober, Nina Paim, Anthony Masure, Guillaume Helleu, Tereza Bettinardi, Jean-Michel Géridan.

Deleuzine: A Zine for Nobodies Without Organs is an experimental publication inspired by the writings of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, as well as figures whose life or work can be said to exemplify aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy of life, including Antonin Artaud, Ezekiel Mphaphele’s Wanderers and Kathy Acker among others. Encompassing the fields of literature, philosophy, ethnography, archaeology, and the arts, the publication aims at a radical exploration (and exploitation) of word, image, and printed matter towards beauty, but also aesthetic and political freedom.

1 Laurence Pritchard, Memories of the Penes 6 Natascha Nanji, Crisis in Three Parts 16 Max Henninger, From Poems For Two Voices 18 Sascha Akhtar, Now, You Become D/eath, Destroyer 34 Karina Bush, Claws; I Spit; Sonnet VI 36 Francesca Dobbe, Dog Lady’s Becoming Animal 9 George Micah Kuhn, Pharmacophilia 54 Uma Breakdown, The Graveyard of Extension 60 MUCK, ‘IN A FOLD, THE OUTSIDE IS NEVER FULLY ABSORBED…’  73 Anouk Asselineau, Angel’s Share 78 Maria Sledmere, Zebra; Lens Flare; Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Kitchen Disco; Jewel Organza; New Weird Kirsty 82 Paola Valentina, Tube people 85 Dalia Maini, Water Lilies Syndrome 88 Hugo Hagger, Death Dissensus 95 Michal Leszuk, Curating Cruising Culture in the Anthropocene 108 Joshua Jones, Petřín Hill, Dusk 111 Chiara Gambuto 143 Isaac Harris, Helioelagablaus Reborn 163Helen Samuels, Winterize 174 Aimilia Efthimiou, A Recipe 176Simon Barraclough, Vampire in the Funhouse, Part I 178 Suki Hollywood, Mortal Combat 186 Louis Mason, The Executioner 198 Rebecca Close, The Acephale Sonnets 204Sites Of Horror RU, RmIH8 U 90’s Ancestors 206 MUCK, THE STORM 215 George Finlay Ramsay, Raven’s Reprise 228Mike Templeton, The Window Journal: Looking out my Window onto Court Street 232 Caitlin Merrett King, She Has No References; Dylan Thomas; For S 235 Phoebe Eccles, Hold Me in Your Watchful Presence 238 Isabelle Bucklow, Some Bears, Some Moves 244 Alistair McCartney, The Textual Animal 248 Caspar Bryant, Diffraction of a Waterfowl 249 Flo Josephine Goodliffe, Alive Border (Husk or Shell) front & back cover(s) Jean-Robert Alcindor (dispersed) drawings by Rossen Daskalov designed by Alessia Arcuri

Age! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! (Apart from greasing the wheels of capitalist reproduction.) In this queer manifesto, Simon(e) van Saarloos weaves a wealth of militant sex-liberationist, afrofuturist, transfeminist and decolonial imaginaries into their anti-ageist sails, charting a confident course across contemporary society’s generational hang-ups as well as visiting, in some more personal moments, their own.
-Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation and Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family

Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto starts with what it is not: it is not a socio-economic argument against ageism, celebrating “the elderly” as economically viable. Author Simon(e) van Saarloos is not interested in natural arguments about age, which portray different age groups as valuable because of assumed inherent qualities. Instead, this manifesto starts with an experience of childhood sexual abuse, and moves on to dissect the ways in which constructions of “age” and “youth” function to support and reproduce white supremacist patriarchy. The book includes two reproductions of works by painter Samantha Nye.

Simon(e) van Saarloos is the author of Take ‘em Down (Publication Studio Guelph) and Playing Monogamy (Publication Studio Rotterdam). They were the curator of the 2021 exhibition on Abundance (“We must bring about the end of the world as we know it” – Denise Ferreira da Silva) in Het HEM and are also the host of *The Asterisk Conversations podcast. Van Saarloos is currently a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric department at UC Berkeley.

Hidden in the Cave We Forge of One Another gathers a selection of CAConrad’s soma(tic) poems, written from rituals performed by the author, which call for a state of consciousness grounded in the now and an awareness of bodies, their environmental entanglements and social histories. This is a poetry for surpassing, politically charged yet meditative and quotidian. CAConrad's poetry is rooted in legacies of both struggle and friendship arising from the AIDS crisis, as well as in contemporary imaginations of belonging in an ecologically broken world. This selection of poems is accompanied by an extensive interview with the author, complete with photographs and transcripts, as well as the theater play The Obituary Show. This publication accompanies Hidden in the Cave We Forge of One Another, an exhibition by CAConrad, curated by pântano books and commissioned by Batalha Centro de Cinema. 

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of nine books, including AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), which won the 2022 PEN Josephine Miles Award. They received a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. They exhibit poems as art objects, with recent solo shows in Spain and Portugal, and their play The Obituary Show was adapted into film in 2022 by Augusto Cascales. UK Penguin published two books of theirs in 2023, The Book of Frank and You Don’t Have What It Takes to Be My Nemesis, and a new collection of poetry is forthcoming from Wave Books in 2024, titled Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. This publication accompanies Hidden in the Cave We Forge of One Another, an exhibition by CAConrad, curated by pântano books for Batalha Centro de Cinema in 2023. You can visit CAConrad online. 

THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK is the debut collection of poetry from a writer who displays a wide-ranging palette for storytelling and folklore in a suite of narrative poems. The collection is built around an ensemble of characters that range from known to unknown, through which Serubiri crafts visually-inspired poems that combine the photographic, the intensely personal, and the scholarly. In his book, he manages to domesticate larger-than-life figures, including Zanzibari-born singer-songwriter Freddie Mercury and Nigerian-born photographer Rotimi Fani Kayode. Simultaneously pondered and elastic, Serubiri’s poetry lures these figures – and the reader – into an atmosphere that is only as expansive as the interior landscapes he delineates with each succeeding poem. With this he expresses his own doubts and path, from memories of his native Uganda to New York City, through a psychology of decisions and life choices. 

Serubiri Moses is a Ugandan curator and author based in New York City. He currently serves as faculty in Art History at Hunter College and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He previously held positions at New York University and the New Centre for Research and Practice, and delivered lectures at Williams College, Yale University, University of Pittsburgh, The New School, basis voor aktuelle kunst, and University of the Arts Helsinki. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions at museums including MoMA PS1, New York; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and the Hessel Museum, Bard College, NY. He previously held a research fellowship at the University of Bayreuth; received his MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College; and is an alumni of the Àsìkò International Art Programme. He serves on the editorial team of e-flux journal. He has published poetry in the online journals Jalada and Badilisha Poetry Exchange, as well as in print in journals Kwani? 7, Kwani? 8, and READ: A Journal of Inter-Translation (2022). His poetry has been reviewed online in The New Inquiry. THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK is his first book of poetry. 

Ronald Johnson's underground classic of visionary and queer poetics, Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses, has been legendarily hard to find for over 50 years.

In this book of poems, Johnson creates a specifically North American vision that references everything from ancient Native American myths to Johnny Appleseed, from Charles Darwin to the Wizard of Oz, microcosmically transforming the vast open expanse of the plains into delicate flower petals.

These are poems of observation, transformation, and a uniquely subtle sensibility harmonically tuned to the stars. Masterfully crafted examples of poetic music and textures, Johnson weaves together texts to show the world from multiple angles of vision, not only his own, to explore what others have seen and experienced of the world.

One of the most unheralded poets in literature, Ronald Johnson needs to be securely placed in history with the likes of his fellow dreamers: Stan Brakhage, Marguerite Young, Charles Ives, Marsden Hartley, and the Transcendentalists.

Faced with photos of a once-tumultuous New York art world, the narrator's mind in this scathing, darkly funny novel begins to erupt. Memories jostle for center stage, just as those that they are about always did. These brilliant but broken survivors of the '80s and '90s have now reached the brink of middle age and are facing the challenge of continuing to feel authentic. Luminous with imagery, cackling with bitter humor, and with a new foreword by the author, this roman a cle spares no one.

First published in 2003, Gary Indiana's turn-of-the-millennium novel traces the lives of a loosely connected group of New York artists and the dissolution of their scene.  

During the summer of 2001, the narrator of Do Everything in the Dark, a gallery curator, receives intermittent dispatches from his far-flung friends, many of whom resemble well-known figures in the art and intellectual worlds, who are spread out across the globe, from Istanbul to Provincetown to Santa Fe. Seeking various reprieves from a changed New York, the long-festering, glossed-over incompatibilities of these aging bohemians blossom into exotic and unbearable relief. Beneath the contemporary excesses Indiana chronicles, we can see the outlines of the earlier New York bohemia captured by Dawn Powell.  

Arguably Indiana's most intimate, internal, and compassionate work to date, Do Everything in the Dark is a chilling chronicle of madness and failure, success and disappointment, and the many ways love dies in a world people find increasingly unlivable.

The first new collection since Evolution from the prolific poet, activist, and writer Eileen Myles, 'A Working Life' captures the measure of life. Whether alone or in a relationship, on city sidewalks or in the country, their lyrics always engage with permanence and mortality, danger and safety, fear and wonder. 'A Working Life' is a book transfixed by the everyday: the 'sweet accumulation' of birds outside a window, a cup of coffee and a slice of pizza, a lover's foot on the bed. These poems arise in the close quarters of air travel, the flashing of a landscape through a train window, or simply in a truck tooling around town, or on foot with a dog in all the places that held us during the pandemic lockdowns.

The Long Form is the story of two people composing a day together. It is a day of movements and improvisations, common and uncommon rhythms, stopping and starting again. As the morning progresses, a book – The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding – gets delivered, and the scope of the day widens further. Matters of care-work share ground with matters of friendship, housing, translation, aesthetics and creativity. Small incidents of the day revive some of the oldest preoccupations of the novel: the force of social circumstance, the power of names, the meaning of duration and the work of love. With lightness and precision, Kate Briggs renews Henry Fielding’s proposition for what a novel can be, combining fiction and essay to write an extraordinary domestic novel of far-reaching ideas.

Kate Briggs grew up in Somerset, UK, and lives and works in Rotterdam, NL, where she founded and co-runs the writing and publishing project ‘Short Pieces That Move’. She is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. The Long Form follows This Little Art, a narrative essay on the practice of translation. In 2021, Kate Briggs was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize.

This collection of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's film scripts vividly evokes the close connection between their influential work as theorists and their work as filmmakers. It includes scripts for all six of Mulvey and Wollen's collaborative films, Wollen's solo feature film, Friendship's Death (1987), and Mulvey's later collaborations.

Each text is followed by a new essay by a leading writer, offering a critical interpretation of the corresponding film. The collection also includes Wollen's short story Friendship's Death (1976), the outlines for two unrealised Mulvey and Wollen collaborations, and a selection of scanned working documents. The scripts and essays collected in this volume trace the historical significance of a complex cinematic project that brought feminist, semiotic and psychoanalytic concerns together with formal devices and strategies.

The book includes original contributions from Nora M. Alter, Kodwo Eshun, Nicolas Helm-Grovas, Esther Leslie, Laura Mulvey, Volker Pantenburg, Griselda Pollock, B. Ruby Rich and Sukhdev Sandhu.

This instalment of Bricks from the Kiln doubles as issue #6 of the journal and as an exhibition catalogue for the thematic show ‘BFTK#6: Tentative — Incomplete — Inconsistent: A Catalogue of the Disappeared, Destroyed, Lost or Otherwise Inaccessible’. Presenting objects, artworks, artefacts, models, events and animals that no-longer — or never did — exist in physical form, the exhibition explores themes of death, destruction and reincarnation, examining persisting interests in notions of ephemerality and permanence, memory and record, preservation and erasure, creation and reconstruction.

How do we remember and memorialise? How is space given to the unrecorded? How do we experience the out of reach, concealed, unseen, undiscovered? How can the dematerialised be materialised again, through the mediation of writing, image and sound?

THE ALMOST HORSE
Helen Marten
(inside front / back cover)

‘STILL IN ALL HEARTS, IN ALL BELLIES, IN ALL TOES’:
A BELATED REVIEW OF FESTIVAL DE FORT BOYARD
Matthew Stuart & Andrew Walsh-Lister
(pp.6–8)

EDDYSTONE
Rachael Allen
(pp.11–18)

TO MAKE THE STONE STONY
Emily LaBarge
(pp.21–26)

WHEREFORE AM I NOW?
Lucy Mercer
(pp.29–40)

WESTON: THE TOWN THAT WAS, AND THEN WASN’T
Crystal Bennes
(pp.43–52)

NOTES TO ACCOMPANY VIOLENT INNOCENCE (2019)
Will Harris
(pp.55–64)

GHOST, POCKETS, TRACES, NECESSARY CLOUDS
Matthew Stuart
(pp.66–69)

CONNECTIVITY OF TOUCHING
Ali Na & Mindy Seu in conversation
(pp.71–76)

PEARL
Rose Higham-Stainton
(pp.79–84)

NOTES FROM NEW MEXICO
Jennifer Hodgson
(pp.87–98)

THE MOOG OF AHMEDABAD
Paul Purgas
(pp.101–108)

IN WHICH DECIBELLA ESCAPES AUDITION
Sarah Hayden
(pp.111–122)

D.C.B.: A PARTIAL RETROSPECTIVE
Juliet Jacques
(pp.125–136)

PINBALL REMAINS: ON THE PINBALL ISSUE OF THE SITUATIONIST TIMES
Ellef Prestsæter
(pp.139–150)

TOMB III – CADMIUM (2021)
Gilbert Again
(pp.152–154)

NON-DESCRIPT ANIMAL
David Hering
(pp.157–161)

Cover & Bookmark artwork by Helen Marten

Au début des années 1990, des groupes inspirés du new jack swing états-unien comme N’Groove, Tribal Jam, et les artistes du label Sensitive marquent les premiers pas du R&B français.

Avec le succès des Poetic Lover et des refrains du rap français, dont certains des plus connus ont été chantés par des artistes R&B, il s’impose peu à peu dans le paysage. Une série d’excellents premiers albums voit alors le jour (K-Reen, Vibe, Matt Houston ou Wallen) avant qu’une seconde génération ne s’impose au tournant du millénaire, avec les tubes et albums de chanteuses de R&B variété. De leur côté, les médias et la critique ont souvent multiplié les malentendus et les marques de mépris face à ces différents artistes, réduisant leur musique à une version édulcorée du rap, une «revanche des filles de cité», ou en la rejetant comme une importation étrangère. Dans ce premier livre à lui être consacré, Rhoda Tchokokam montre la richesse non seulement d’un R&B en français, mais du R&B français comme genre à part entière.

En s’appuyant sur la parole des principales actrices et acteurs de ce mouvement, Rhoda Tchokokam en propose une histoire culturelle ambitieuse. Sa passion pour les chansons de R&B français croise en permanence l’analyse de leur dimension politique : elle examine aussi bien leur manière d’assumer la sexualité que leurs injonctions à la pudeur, les stratégies de formatage commercial que l’affirmation d’une sororité noire dans les clips.

A book in two halves, Kissing Other People or the House of Fame opens with a sequence of poems that roam the grotty, sublime streets: patting rats, reading pamphlets, enduring labour, acquiring falafel, waving to friends. Then the book flips on a seam and invokes Chaucer as an unlikely guide through a series of dream-blocks, each autonomous yet resonant with attachments and perversions as they come and go, repeat and echo. The book is as staunch as it is warm - one arm extended in a hug and the other cupped over the mouth to shield a secret (weapon).

Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. With Andrea Abi-Karam, she co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). She's the author of A Queen in Bucks County (Nightboat Books, 2022).

An unconventional history of homosexuality.

We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those 'bad gays' whose unexemplary lives reveal more than we might expect? Many popular histories seek to establish homosexual heroes, pioneers, and martyrs but, as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and dastardly deeds have been overlooked despite their being informative and instructive.

Based on the hugely popular podcast series of the same name, Bad Gays asks what we can learn about LGBTQ+ history, sexuality and identity through its villains, failures, and baddies. With characters such as the Emperor Hadrian, anthropologist Margaret Mead and notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors tell the story of how the figure of the white gay man was born, and how he failed. They examine a cast of kings, fascist thugs, artists and debauched bon viveurs. Imperial-era figures Lawrence of Arabia and Roger Casement get a look-in, as do FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, lawyer Roy Cohn, and architect Philip Johnson.

Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge mainstream assumptions about sexual identity: showing that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century, one central to major historical events.

Huw Lemmey is a novelist, artist and critic living in Barcelona. He is the author of three novels: Unknown Language, Red Tory, and Chubz. He has written for the Guardian, Frieze, Tribune, the Architectural Review, New Humanist, the White Review, and L'Uomo Vogue, among others.

Ben Miller is a writer and researcher living in Berlin, where he is currently a Doctoral Fellow at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität. He has written for the New York Times, Literary Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, and Radical History Review, and is the author of The New Queer Photography. Since 2018 he has been a member of the board of directors of the Schwules Museum, one of the world's largest independent queer museums and archives.

A horror story of one woman's awful reinvention, M. S. Coe's The Formation of Calcium is disturbingly funny and completely unexpected.

Middle-aged Mary Ellen Washie has finally freed herself of her stultified past life in western New York state and moved to Florida. With the husband she's grown to hate firmly in her rearview mirror, and all ties to her family cut off, she changes her name, bleaches her hair, and befriends Natalie, a seemingly kind, martini-loving woman whom she promptly begins to manipulate. As her machinations propel her beyond the brink of who she used to be, Mary Ellen seeks to unburden herself—but not one to sit down with pen and paper, she narrates the events of her new life into a cassette tape recorder, giving each tape an innocuous name to keep the curious away. A riveting account of one woman's awful reinvention, M. S. Coe's new novel is disturbingly funny and completely unexpected. With elements of pulp noir and confessional literature, The Formation of Calcium depicts the bland misery of modern American life as one woman seeks her own ill-fated transformation.

Born in Las Vegas, Nevada, M. S. Coe is an American writer living in Guadalajara, Mexico. After she graduated with an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University, Clash Books published her first novel, New Veronia, in 2019. Coe's stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Electric Literature, Nashville Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has held residencies from the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, Petrified Forest National Park, and Ora Lerman Trust.

Over the years 1919–20, the celebrated medical scientist and doctor Carl Julius Salomonsen began giving public lectures and publishing pamphlets regarding a new “epidemic” that had begun to affect the European populace: the increasing ubiquity of modernist art.

In a 1919 pamphlet titled New Forms of Art and Contagious Mental Illness, he wrote: “We stand, at this moment, before a movement in art which is psychopathic in character, and whose victorious journey through all countries is probably caused by the same spiritual disease that gave the older, religious spiritual epidemic such a powerful spread.” This pamphlet and the accompanying talks were countered by a retaliatory pamphlet published by members of Grønningen, a Copenhagen modernist painters group, to which Salomonsen responded with a further pamphlet.

Translated into English for the first time by literary theorist Andrew Hodgson, the entire altercation is gathered in this book, documenting one of the earliest rejections of modernist art.

Edited & Translated by Andrew Hodgson.

At an otherwise forgettable party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter spots a woman who instantly controls the room: gorgeous and distant and utterly white, the centre of everyone’s attention. Haunted into adulthood by her Korean father’s abandonment of his family, as well as the spectre of her beguiling, abusive white mother, the painter finds herself caught in a perfect trap. She wants Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or some confusion of all the above. Since she’s an artist, she will use art to get closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model. As for Hanne, what does she want? Her whiteness seems sometimes as cruel as a new sheet of paper.

When the paintings of Hanne become a hit, resulting in the artist’s first sold-out show, she resolves to bring her new muse with her to Berlin, to continue their work, and her seduction. But, just when the painter is on the verge of her long sought-after breakthrough, a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds in the art community, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for their imperialist and racist practices.

Torn between her desire to support the petition, to be a success, and to possess Hanne, the painter and her reality become more unstable and disorienting, unwilling to cut loose any one of her warring ambitions, yet unable to accommodate them all. Is it any wonder so many artists self-destruct so spectacularly? Is it perhaps just a bit exciting to think she could too?

Your Love Is Not Good stuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, between desire and art, and revels in the raining debris.

Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and 
musician who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hedva is the author of the essay 'Sick Woman Theory', originally published in 2016, which has now been translated into ten languages. Hedva is also the author of the novel On Hell, which was one of Dennis Cooper's favourite books of 2018, and the nonfiction collection Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain. Their albums are The Sun and the Moon and Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House.

Imagine words approaching a dance eyes closed or sleepwalking, words adrift beyond what can be envisioned beforehand, prompting writer and reader alike into a zone where time multiplies, where bodies grow footnotes and paper skin, savour the taste of language, attune their ears to the wavelength of blue. In a string of brief essays on her practice of writing choreographic poetry and scores, Janne-Camilla Lyster offers reflections on time, memory and the senses, on translation, punctuation and rhythm, on mistakes and crevasses, on the impossible and yet other things. What does it take to enter another form of existence, say, a chair?

Janne-Camilla Lyster is a writer, dancer and choreographer. She has published poetry, novels, essays and plays.

Ursula K. Le Guin witnessed and contributed to many of the twentieth century’s rebellions and upheavals, including women’s liberation, the Civil Rights movement and US anti-war and environmental activism.

Spanning fifty years of her life and work, Space Crone brings together Le Guin’s writings on feminism and gender for the first time, offering new insights into her imaginative, multispecies feminist consciousness: from its roots in deep ecology and philosophies of non-violence to her self-education about racism and her writing on motherhood and ageing.

Drawing on her own stories and those of others, especially Black and brown feminists and queer thinkers, Sara Ahmed combines depth of thought with honesty and intimacy. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook unpicks the lies our culture tells us and provides a form of solidarity and companionship that can be returned to over a lifetime.

We have to keep saying it because they keep doing it.

Do colleagues roll their eyes in a meeting when you use words like sexism or racism? Do you refuse to laugh at jokes that aren't funny? Have you been called divisive for pointing out a division? Then you are a feminist killjoy, and this handbook is for you.

The term killjoy has been used to dismiss feminism by claiming that it causes misery. But by naming ourselves feminist killjoys, we recover a feminist history, turning it into a source of strength as well as an inspiration.

Bersani’s prescient and long unavailable polemic against gay assimilation, a plea for “antimonogamous promiscuity,” illustrated with artistic interventions
In 1997, during a symposium at Centre Pompidou, pioneering queer theorist Leo Bersani presented a prescient critique of the assimilative tendencies that made “gays melt into the very culture they like to think of themselves as undermining.” For Bersani, queer activism, mired in micropolitics, had relinquished the radical task of reconfiguring the horizon of the possible. Later published as “Gay Betrayals” in the pioneering (and now unavailable) collection Is the Rectum a Grave?, Bersani’s intervention champions a truly disruptive vision of homosexuality, one that betrays the relational, identitarian and communitarian foundations of bourgeois heterosexual respectability through “antimonogamous promiscuity.”

Building on artistic research into the politics of queer spaces and culture some 20 years later, British artist duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings revisit Bersani’s polemic with a response in three acts. Through a kaleidoscopic array of drawings, preparatory sketches and egg tempera paintings, a narrative of everyday (homo)sociality emerges.

Leo Bersani (1931–2022) was an American theorist best known for his books Is the Rectum a Grave?, Homos and Receptive Bodies. Born in the Bronx, he graduated from Harvard in 1952 and eventually joined the University of California, Berkeley, where he became an influential teacher, remaining there for the rest of his career.