Books

[Slightly damaged cover. Reduced price from 60 euros.] Foraging for mushrooms with John Cage: writing, art, photography and ephemera from an idiosyncratic chapter in the composer's life

Imagined as an extended mushroom-foraging expedition, John Cage: A Mycological Foray gathers together Cage's mushroom-themed compositions, photographs, illustrations and ephemera. Indeterminacy Stories and other writings by Cage are interwoven throughout the first volume within a central essay examining Cage's enduring relationship with mycology. Also included is a transcript of Cage's 1983 performance, MUSHROOMS et Variationes. The second volume is the inaugural reproduction of Cage's 1972 portfolio, Mushroom Book, authored in collaboration with illustrator Lois Long and botanist Alexander H. Smith. Readers are thus drawn through the landscape of Cage's mycologically centred oeuvre and interests, discovering assorted works, images, compositions, philosophies and ephemera, as one might encounter assorted fungi and flora while foraging.

John Cage: A Mycological Foray constitutes a new, idiosyncratic chapter in Cage's oeuvre, a departure from the composer's more established narrative.

American composer and music theorist John Cage (1912-92) was a pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music and a leading figure of the postwar avant-garde. His influence extended to the realms of dance, poetry, performance and visual art.

One day, while running an errand for her mother-in-law, she comes across a strange creature, follows it to the embankment of a river, and ends up falling into a hole, a hole that seems to have been made specifically for her. This is the first in a series of bizarre experiences that drive Asa deeper into the mysteries of this rural landscape filled with eccentric characters and unidentifiable creatures, leading her to question her role in this world, and eventually, her sanity.

Winner of the 150th Akutagawa Prize in 2014

Known as a remarkable classicist, Anne Carson weaves contemporary and ancient poetic strands with stunning style in Glass, Irony and God. This collection includes: "The Glass Essay," a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson's reading of the Bronte sisters; "Book of Isaiah," a poem evoking the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism; and "The Fall of Rome," about her trip to "find" Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of a terrible alienation there.

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.

This publication brings together works made between 2010 and 2013 that share the same principle: a method of constructing images of time by layering multiple moments, creating hybrids between photography and other media, documenting something that is positioned beyond our human ability to see.

Each series adds a different parameter to the principle, such as two- and three- dimensional space, scale, perspective, performance, installation and parallel events. The publication also features an alternative view on Mater’s practice with a chapter of research and process material.

With an essay by Maxine Kopsa. Design: Veronica Ditting.

Excerpts from Caren Beilin’s 2019 essay/memoir about reproductive health and the IUD, gendered illness, medical gaslighting, and activism in the chronic illness community.

“The moon is hollow. The moon is hollow says a certain contingent of people, because of aliens (and, also, the moon has experienced bangs on its surface that have apparently made it ring just like a bell).
These people are conspiracy theorists. Paranoid, conclusive, certain. Too certain. They connect the dots with their eager, enormous chalk. They want something to be true. They want, I think, something new to be true, and they are taken (as I am) with the moon being like a bell, two phonemes, moon, bell, beautiful and struck across each other’s false armor, mutable and beautiful.
The moon is a bell, as the theorist Georges Bataille, in 1931, said, ‘The sun is an anus.’ He was arguing about the beauty – the absolute energy – of the copula.

‘The verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy,’ he wrote, the year that Benjamin unpacked his library, alone. The moon is a bell, and I believe this absolutely, sure. The IUD is the RA. The sexual force of the verb, is, to be, of my verbacious being, will knock any noun into the moon and beyond. Everything is a parody, can be anything. The moon is hollow and made of muleskin. The moon is hollow, insofar as it is coated with the agglutinate, the shining coat, of a limit. I cannot go into the moon with my eyesight. I can’t enter my womb from that time (in November 2015) and sit crosslegged by the device, at the base of its suspending embedding, in the oaty red fist of my uterus, and watch the metal loam off its rigid cross-branch – and leech into tissues and activate, or reanimate, flare, or push over my problem. I can’t spy the center of the inception or the core of my being. I only know the timing. My health deteriorated rapidly after it was in, and I know how horrible it is, to cease planning for trips, outings, applications, or children, waiting and watching for how bad and how soon, and that the moon is hollow

This pamphlet excerpts from Blackfishing the IUD, published in 2019 by Wolfman Books, Oakland. With thanks to Caren Beilin, Jacob Kahn, and Justin Carder.

A Textbook for the Ecocene is a how-to guide for connecting to self, community and planet. The Ecocene is an emergent and imagined geologic era where all humyns are living in reciprocity with their ecosystems again. Each textbook chapter shares practical exercises to try at home, Earth-centered theory and spirituality, and interviews with Black and Indigenous Earth warriors—cultural workers generating planetary liberation in their everyday lives. These testimonios from Johanna Iraheta, Bruje Fuego, Raquel Lemus, Patty Denisse, Jasmine Nyende, Queen Hollins and Olivia Chumacero shine with wisdom and advice for new and seasoned Earth stewards alike. Created originally as Sarita Dougherty's DIY PhD Dissertation, A Textbook for the Ecocene is a curricula for eco-feminista educations, DIY degrees and planetary destinies. We are activating the Ecocene right now, one step at a time. What we pay attention to grows.

Size: 5" x 8.5", 158 pages, perfect bound

Self-published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Women's Center for Creative Work. Edited by Simone Krug, copy edited by Gowri Chandra and Demi Corso. Designed by MJ Balvanera, Riso-printed by Neko Natalia.

the monumental misrememberings is a meditation on death. It’s a curious insight on the creative and violent ways in which Black girls, women, trans women and femmes often become displaced, experience death, and subjugation as a result of patriarchal systems in America. This debut collection of poems by Mimi Tempestt operates through this specific lens, not to romanticize the pain of Black femme bodies, but to bring light to this sadistic truth. When we turn on the television, when we log into social media, when we look in the mirror, the normalcy of how often and creatively Black women are murdered weighs on our conscience. the monumental misrememberings addresses our unwillingness to grapple with these violences, and places front and center the realities faced by Black femmes.

Size: 5" x 7.5", 88 pages

Self published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Women's Center for Creative Work. Designed by MJ Balvanera, Riso-printed by Neko Natalia.

An interactive guide for black women of all ages, to not only create the creative life they want, but to monetize every aspect of it. Visit creativeblackwomansplaybook.com for a Spanish version of the book.

Size: 5" x 7.5", 60 pages

Self published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Women's Center for Creative Work. Designed by MJ Balvanera, Edited by Sarah Williams and Hana Ward, Riso-printed by Neko Natalia, Illustrations by Hana Ward.

A cult classic in France, the first translation of a novel that captures a subjective stroll through an underground, glamorous Paris.
'finally there are the rolling stones who call for all these at the same time among them and around them: the policeman, the cross-dresser, the dancer, Frankenstein, the dandy, the robot'
—from Dusty Pink

Written with the hope of achieving a "dreary distant banality," Jean-Jacques Schuhl's first novel is a subjective stroll through an underground, glamorous Paris, a city that slips into the background but never disappears, hovering on the verge of its own suppression. An elegiac and luminous cut-up, Dusty Pink brings together race wire results, editions of France-Soir, the lyrics to well-known British songs, scripts from famous old films, pharmaceutical leaflets, fashion ads, and strips and scraps of culture in which the avant-garde and academicism blur in an overview of the cultural scene. This world of atmospheres, portraits, and dazzling associations of ideas creates a plane of shimmering surfaces.

Published in French in 1972, Jean-Jacques Schuhl's Dusty Pink became a cult classic. This is its first translation.

Cult author Jean-Jacques Shuhl won the Prix Goncourt in 2000 for his novel Ingrid Caven, which sold over 235,000 copies in France. It was his first book since Dusty Pink was published in 1972.

Composed between destinations, in airplanes, trains, museums, and bars over three years, Jeanne Graff's Vzszhhzz captures the slight intersections of a loose group of artists and lawyers, restauranteurs, philosophers, wine-makers and boxers whose lives are conducted almost entirely in a second language. A loose chronicle masquerading as a novel, Vszhhzz - like Michèle Bernstein's All The King's Horses, the Bernadette Corporation's Reena Spaulings, and Natasha Stagg's Surveys - couches Graff's sharp observations in a laconic and ambient style. By not saying too much, Vzszhhzz says everything about the relation to time, cities, weather and smog that has become the lingua franca of a creative and transient life.

Writer and curator Jeanne Graff was born in Lausanne, Switzerland and lives in New York. She is a columnist for May Revue (Paris), works in a vineyard, and teaches at HEAD art school in Geneva. In 2014, Graff founded 186f Kepler, an art space without walls. She has organized numerous international exhibitions, and performs with her band Solar Lice. Graff recently completed a writing residency at Villa Noailles in Hyeres, France.

"The Pain Journal" is the last finished work by Los Angeles writer and artist Bob Flanagan and is the extraordinary chronicle of the final year of his life before his death from cystic fibrosis at the age of 43. Flanagan created performances with Sheree Rose that shocked and inspired audiences as he combined text, video, and live performance to create a highly personal exploration of childhood, sex, illness, and mortality.

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

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

THE NANCY REAGAN COLLECTION is a response to growing up queer and trans under the rise of HIV-AIDS. Crossing genres and generations, this performance novel remixes the AIDS archive through an ever-spiraling politics and aesthetics of mourning. Alternating chapters offer up a narrative throughline composed of hallucinogenic episodes from the perspective of a nameless, grieving protagonist in the midst of the global carnage of the Reagan dynasty. Part revenge, part fantasy, the book experiments with poetic practices that challenge conceptions of memory and morality, activism and escapism, grief and beauty.

Maxe Crandall is a poet, playwright, and director. He is the author of the chapbooks Emoji for Cher Heart (Belladonna*, 2015) and Together Men Make Paradigms (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2014), and is the founder of the theater company Beautiful Moments in Popular Culture, which produces a poets theater series at the Stud in San Francisco. He has received fellowships from the Poetry Project, Poets House, Lambda Literary, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Maxe is a lecturer in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Stanford University.

Hotel Theory is two books in one: a meditation on the meaning of hotels, and a dime novel ( Hotel Women) featuring Lana Turner and Liberace. Typical of Wayne Koestenbaum's invigoratingly inventive style, the two books — one fiction, one nonfiction — run concurrently, in twin columns, and the articles "a," "an," and "the" never appear. The nonfiction ruminations on hotels are divided into eight dossiers, composed of short takes on the presence of hotels in the author's dreams as well as in literature, film, and history. Guest stars include everyone from Oscar Wilde to Marilyn Monroe. Hotel Theory gives (divided) voice to an aesthetic of hyperaesthesia, of yearning. It is an oblique manifesto, the place where writing disappears. A new mode of theorizing — in fiction, in fragment, through quotation and palimpsest — arises in this dazzling work.

In the essay BEING HUMAN IS AN OCCULT PRACTICE, Zurawski argues that studying and sharing literature can function as a means of enriching the impoverished definition of human created by capitalist social relations. Beginning with an analysis of Robert Duncan's description of the moment in his high school classroom when he finds himself called into a life in poetry, this essay explores the possibilities of the literature classroom at the very moment that it's being dismantled by the neoliberalization of our university systems. Zurawski argues that the literary holds a revitalizing potential precisely because of its capacity of exceeding the narrow imaginative aims of life within our contemporary social order.

Magdalena Zurawski is the author of BEING HUMAN IS AN OCCULT PRACTICE (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020), the novel The Bruise, which won the Ronald Sukenick Award from FC2 in 2008 and a LAMBDA literary award in 2009, and the collection of poems COMPANION ANIMAL, which was published by Litmus Press in 2015 and won a Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. THE TINIEST MUZZLE SINGS SONGS OF FREEDOM (Wave Books, 2019) is her most recent poetry collection. Her poem/essay Don't Be Scared is available as a chapbook from The Operating System. As an undergraduate Magdalena studied with poets Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, C.D. Wright, and Peter Gizzi. She has lived in Berlin, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Durham, NC where she ran the Minor American Reading Series. She is currently Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.

In 1967, the first books of two poets were published by small presses on opposite coasts of the USA: David Henderson's Felix of the Silent Forest and Mary Norbert Korte's Hymn to the Gentle Sun. In this essay, poet, scholar, educator, and publisher Iris Cushing looks at the context of these supposedly minor poets, and through research and conversation with Korte, Henderson, and Diane di Prima, reconstructs the role of small presses in the countercultural resistance of the late 1960s.

Iris Cushing is a poet, scholar, educator and founding editor for Argos Books, an independent poetry press. She is the author, most recently, of THE FIRST BOOKS OF DAVID HENDERSON AND MARY NORBERT KORTE: A RESEARCH (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020), and Into the Long Long Time: How Mary Korte Saved the Trees (Ink Cap Press, 2019). Her poems and critical writings have appeared in numerous publications, including the Boston Review, Fence, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series, and her poetry collection WYOMING (Furniture Press Books, 2014) won the 2013 Furniture Press Poetry Prize. She has edited three chapbooks for the Lost & Found Poetics Documents Initiative: Diane di Prima: Prometheus Unbound as a Magickal Working (Series VIII, 2019), Bobbie Louise Hawkins: The Sounding Word, and Judy Grahn: Selections from Blood, Bread and Roses (Series VI, 2016). A doctoral candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, Iris is currently at work on a biographical dissertation titled Pierce and Pine: Diane di Prima, Mary Norbert Korte and the Question of Matter and Spirit.

In Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy continues the conversation he began in his landmark study of race and nation, 'There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, ' by once again departing from conventional wisdom to examine-and defend-multiculturalism within the context of a post-9/11 "politics of security."

Gilroy adapts the concept of melancholia from its Freudian origins and applies it to the social pathology of neoimperialist politics. His unorthodox analysis pinpoints melancholic reactions not only in the hostility and violence directed at blacks, immigrants, and aliens but also in an inability to value the ordinary, unruly multiculture that has evolved organically and unnoticed in urban centers.

Drawing on seminal discussions of race by Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and George Orwell, Gilroy goes beyond the idea of mere tolerance and proposes that it is possible to celebrate multiculture and live with otherness without becoming anxious, fearful, or violent.

chop is a collection of poems that center on the life and work of proto-feminist and civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer.

A Mississippi native, Treasure Shields Redmond is a poet, speaker, diversity and inclusion coach, and social justice educator. In 2016 she founded her company, Feminine Pronoun Consultants, LLC. Even though Treasure is completing a PhD in English Literature and Criticism, is a published writer, gifted veteran educator, and has spoken on stages all over the U.S. and in Europe, she uses her humble beginnings in the federal housing projects in Meridian, Mississippi to fuel her passion for helping college-bound families navigate college admissions painlessly and pro tably, and o ering perceptive leaders creative diversity and inclusion facilitation. Additional information on her poetry, writing, and multidimensional practice are available at: www.FemininePronoun.com.

The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award winning poet.

Adrienne Rich was the female face of American poetry for decades. Her forceful, uncompromising writing has more than stood the test of time, and the life of the woman behind the words is equally impressive. Motivated by personal revelations, Rich transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of prose as well as poetry. In doing so, she emerged as both architect and exemplar of the modern feminist movement, breaking ranks to denounce the male-dominated literary establishment and paving the way for the many queer women of letters to take their places in the cultural mainstream. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich's correspondence and in-depth interviews with numerous people who knew her, Hilary Holladay digs deep into never-before-accessed sources to portray Rich in full dimension and vivid, human detail.

We begin with the image of an idea in ruin. A small field of assumptions disassembled. A question no longer in need of its mark. A thought not sure where it began. It starts from the body and language. The debris of these three words, crumbling already at and, did not break apart but congealed the separations once made. We start from a research (project) undone and just beginning. 

Typesetting and design: Will Holder
Produced by: A.pass

Chloe Chignell works across choreography and publication taking the body as the central problem, question and location of the research. She invests in writing as a body building practice, examining the ways in which language makes us up.

A collection of brief descriptions of Toine's movement performances- and installations since 1979. The book, that started four years ago as a possible form in which Toine's ephemeral works could live on, gradually developed into a writing project about movement and the imaginative power of language.

Each of the 120 selected works has been translated in the most concise way into words and sentences.

Because of the possible role that the book could play in the discussion about conserving and documenting volatile works of art, Toine included related texts by other writers who directly or indirectly responded  to my writing: Marcus Bergner  Hannes Böhringer  Florian Cramer  Jan Van Den  Dobbelsteen  Nell Donkers  Tim Etchells  Ger Groot  Geert Koevoets Thomas Körtvelyessy  Dom H. van der Laan  Dick Raaijmakers  Jan Laurens Siesling  Sandra Smets  Hans Stevens  ieke Trinks  Samuel Vriezen  Ciel Werts - Emilie Gallier
Editing and text advice   Kathrin Wolkowicz  Dick van Teylingen

translations:  Simon Benson  Maaike Trimbach  Samuel Vriezen  Helen Adkins  Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

English version

graphic design: Koos Siep
Edition: 2 x 250 copies

A collection of brief descriptions of Toine's movement performances- and installations since 1979. The book, that started four years ago as a possible form in which Toine's ephemeral works could live on, gradually developed into a writing project about movement and the imaginative power of language.

Each of the 120 selected works has been translated in the most concise way into words and sentences.

Because of the possible role that the book could play in the discussion about conserving and documenting volatile works of art, Toine included related texts by other writers who directly or indirectly responded  to my writing: Marcus Bergner  Hannes Böhringer  Florian Cramer  Jan Van Den  Dobbelsteen  Nell Donkers  Tim Etchells  Ger Groot  Geert Koevoets Thomas Körtvelyessy  Dom H. van der Laan  Dick Raaijmakers  Jan Laurens Siesling  Sandra Smets  Hans Stevens  ieke Trinks  Samuel Vriezen  Ciel Werts - Emilie Gallier
Editing and text advice   Kathrin Wolkowicz  Dick van Teylingen

translations:  Simon Benson  Maaike Trimbach  Samuel Vriezen  Helen Adkins  Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

Dutch version

graphic design: Koos Siep
Edition: 2 x 250 copies

The flag bearing twelve yellow stars on a blue background has become Europe’s most recognisable symbol. Since its introduction by the Council of Europe in 1955, it has stood for the unification of Europe’s nation states. It was precisely this yellow circle of stars that prevailed over more than 150 flag ideas sent to the Council of Europe by a host of diverse private individuals. These colourful designs are being now published in Rejected for the first time. They document the continent’s zeitgeist at a decisive period in the development of European unity. Alongside the flag proposals, the trilingual book (English, German, French) features a written contribution by the German-French poet and writer Marie Rotkopf, who tackles the EU’s neoliberal political cynicism and Germany’s expansion of power with biting irony.

Two clock-faces are staring at each other.
They are two sides of one thing, as different as they are the same.
They move as two bodies revolving around each other, into a tender embrace.
A kiss, made of time, in time.
Mirrored shape shifters, their hour-numbers climbing on each other's shoulders.
Running up against the limits of their own usefulness, clocklikeness.

A book by Katja Mater, with a text by Amelia Groom designed by Elisabeth Klement
79 clocks, 192 pages, open spine, 17 × 21 cm
Printed by Wilco Art Books on Arena White Rough by Fedrigoni