Books

"Some years ago I wrote a book about a boy named Geryon who was red and had wings and fell in love with Herakles. Recently I began to wonder what happened to them in later life. Red Doc> continues their adventures in a very different style and with changed names. To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing." Anne Carson

Anne Carson was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.

Published 2014.

In the 2090s, Earth is somehow still here. Drones and clones are big business and Henries Ickles, debonair New Los Angeles infoarchitect, wants in on the action. Metaphysical theories are put into practice, invisible art is critiqued, quasicrystals are crafted, yogurt is spilled. From diplomatic misadventures with metallic herds in RealSweden to an underwater rendezvous in the free domes of MiamiVII, Ickles, ad Infinitum is a compendium of the exuberant and the abject, a refracted hologram of the absurdities of cultural production that swerves between incisive ode and knowing lampoon.

Mark von Schlegell has been pushing the envelope with independently-published experimental fiction and theory since the 1990s. He was born in New York, moved to L.A. in 2000, and currently lives in Cologne. His first novel, Venusia (Semiotext(e), 2005) was honor's listed for the Otherwise Award in Science Fiction.

The Companion Species Manifesto is about the implosion of nature and culture in the joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in significant otherness. In all their historical complexity, Donna Haraway tells us, dogs matter. They are not just surrogates for theory, she says; they are not here just to think with. Neither are they just an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote. This pamphlet is Haraway's answer to her own Cyborg Manifesto, where the slogan for living on the edge of global war has to be not just cyborgs for earthly survival but also, in a more doggish idiom, shut up and train.

Donna Haraway is professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

BLANK is a collection of previously out-of-print essays and new works by one of Canada's most important contemporary writers and thinkers. Through an engagement with her earlier work, M. NourbeSe Philip comes to realize the existence of a repetition in the world: the return of something that, while still present, has become unembedded from the world, disappeared. Her imperative becomes to make us see what has gone unseen, by writing memory upon the margin of history, in the shadow of empire and at the frontier of silence.

In heretical writings that work to make the disappeared perceptible, BLANK explores questions of race, the body politic,timeliness, recurrence, ongoingness, art, and the so-called multicultural nation. Through these considerations, Philip creates a linguistic form that registers the presence of what has seemingly dissolved, a form that also imprints the loss and the silence surrounding those disappearances in its very presence.

M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet, essayist, novelist, playwright, and former lawyer who lives in Toronto. She is a Fellow of the Guggenheim and Rockefeller (Bellagio) Foundations, and the MacDowell Colony. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Casa de las Americas prize (Cuba). Among her best-known works are: She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence, and Zong!, a genre-breaking poem that engages with ideas of the law, history, and memory as they relate to the transatlantic slave trade.

published 2017

Black Mountain College had an explosive influence on American poetry, music, art, craft, dance, and thought; it's hard to imagine any other institution that was so utopian, rebellious, and experimental. Founded with the mission of creating rounded, complete people by balancing the arts and manual labor within a democratic, nonhierarchical structure, Black Mountain was a crucible of revolutionary literature. Although this artistic haven only existed from 1933 to 1956, Black Mountain helped inspire some of the most radical and significant midcentury American poets.

This anthology begins with the well-known Black Mountain Poets—Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov—but also includes the artist Josef Albers and the musician John Cage, as well as the often overlooked women associated with the college, M. C. Richards and Hilda Morley.

published 2019.

How to speak of the searing, unpindownable power that the past-ours, our family's, our culture's-wields in the present? Drawing on nine years of research, Axiomatic explores the ways we understand the traumas we inherit and the systems that sustain them. In five sections-each one built on an axiom about how the past affects the present-Tumarkin weaves together true and intimate stories of a community dealing with the extended aftermath of a suicide, a grandmother's quest to kidnap her grandson to keep him safe, one community lawyer's struggle inside and against the criminal justice system, a larger-than-life Holocaust survivor, and the history of the author's longest friendship. With verve, wit, and critical dexterity, Tumarkin asks questions about loss, grief, and how our particular histories inform the people we become in the world.

Maria Tumarkin is a writer and cultural historian. A recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, she is the author of three previous books of ideas, Traumascapes, Courage, and Otherland, all of which received critical acclaim in Australia, where she lives. Her most recent work, Axiomatic, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Published 2019.

With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly, the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.

In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

Published 2003.

Finally collected in a signature single standalone edition, Clark Ashton Smith's Averoigne is a testament of temptation and transcendence: corrupt sellswords, vengeful sorceresses, and time-warping dissident priests all play a part in these tales set in the louche groves of Smith's decadent imagination.

Printed in the style of the erstwhile Ballantine Books Adult Fantasy Series, Averoigne concludes the iconic five-book cycle begun by editor Lin Carter in 1970 and left unfinished until now.

"No other world [of Smith's] feels so bound to actual human endeavors, to the concrete ruins of landscape and lore, to humanity groping toward a sense of itself. What Averoigne offers us is an affective history, a surrender of the imagination not to history’s facts, but to its ambience, its desires." - Kit Schlüter

As a young gay man leading a closeted life in the 1960s American South, Toland Polk tries his best to keep a low profile, until he finds himself unexpectedly drawn to a lively community of civil rights activists, folk singers, and night club performers. Emboldened by his new friends, he joins local protests and even finds the courage to venture into a gay bar. No longer content to stay on the sidelines, Toland takes a stand against bigotry. But in Clayfield, Alabama, that can be dangerous—even deadly. Painstakingly researched and exquisitely illustrated, Stuck Rubber Baby is a groundbreaking graphic novel that draws on Howard Cruse's experience coming of age and coming out in 1960s Birmingham, Alabama. Just in time for its 25th anniversary, this rich and moving tale of identity and resistance is back in print—complete with unpublished archival material and a behind-the-scenes look at the author's creative process.

Howard Cruse's career as an underground cartoonist was launched during the 1970s, and in 1980 he served as the founding editor of the groundbreaking Gay Comix series. His comic strip Wendel was serialized in the Advocate through much of the 1980s. Stuck Rubber Baby, his most widely known work, was the winner of Eisner and Harvey Awards in the U.S. and (in translation) a Comics Critics Award in Spain, a Luchs Award in Germany, and a Prix de la critique at the International Comics Festival in Angoulême, France.

Published 2020. 

This publication is part of Backward Sway | Upper Beam | Forward Swivel | Lower Bound - a site specific exhibition by Marie Raffn realized at Theatre Academy Helsinki in February 2019. The publication is a score of performative action developed in correspondence with the exhibition and the performance; Reading and Interpretation of - and inside - a spatial score by dancers Taru Miettinen and Aino Puhonen which took place during its opening days.

The Imaginary Republic is an artistic research project focusing on questions of social practice. In particular, it considers the creative and restless imaginaries underpinning our political selves and argues for a deeper engagement with what Elena Loizidou terms “dream-action”: the figurative and poetic staging of world making activity.

The publication brings together participating artists Tatiana Fiodorova, Octavio Camargo / Brandon LaBelle, the Sala-Manca Group, and Joulia Strauss, whose practices engage situations of struggle and autonomous cultures through a range of methods and approaches. From social fictioning to camouflaged interventions, collaborative pedagogies to gestures of care, their works propose unlikely paths of mutuality. The publication includes documentation of an exhibition held at Kunsthall 3,14 in Bergen, as well as key essays and works by theorists and artists Rhiannon Firth, Hélène Frichot, Marysia Lewandowska, Gerald Raunig, Raimar Stange with Oliver Ressler, and Manuela Zechner.

published in June 2020

Some thirty years ago, the artist Peggy Ahwesh began to cultivate a fascination with the films of Doris Wishman, the prolific director behind grindhouse gems like Nude on the Moon (1961), Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), and Let Me Die a Woman (1977), among many others. By that time, a number of Wishman titles had been released by VHS label Something Weird, and she had been profiled by Andrea Juno in the RE/Search compendium Incredibly Strange Films, granting her a small but fervent cult following. In the early ’90s, Ahwesh heard from musician Tom Smith that the elusive auteur was working at a sex shop in Florida. Determined to meet the doyenne of the skin flick in the flesh, Ahwesh flew down from New York with fellow filmmaker M.M. Serra in 1994 to surprise Wishman at the Pink Pussycat Boutique in Coconut Grove, Miami.

The fruits of this encounter would go into the making of The Films of Doris Wishman, a one-issue zine produced by Ahwesh in 1995, featuring collages drawn from Wishman ephemera given to Ahwesh in Florida, and writings on Wishman by Blossom Lefcourt, programmer Joel Shepard, filmmaker Keith Sanborn, and Ahwesh herself. “The films,” Ahwesh notes “offer the prerequisite weirdness of the genre, but they have a seedy underlying resonance of the fear of and hostility toward women in our world, which Doris describes in her own profound and tawdry way.”

Inpatient Press and Light Industry's new publication includes a complete facsimile of the original zine—long unavailable—as well as the heretofore unpublished transcript of Ahwesh, Serra, and Smith’s 1994 video interview with Wishman at the Pink Pussycat, plus a brief essay on Wishman by Ahwesh, which first appeared in the Village Voice. Experimental cinema and exploitation pictures would seem to exist at opposite ends of film's outer reaches, but every so often, as with Ahwesh and Wishman, their stars align.

NEVER SETTLE! is an activity booklet for minds young and old who are curious about the exciting growing field of SAVAGE PHILOSOPHY. Prepare for a career as an accomplice in the New Red Order with fun games, puzzles, and plenty of brain teasers . NEVER SETTLE! will get you ready to capture culture and commit crimes against reality.

NEVER SETTLE! is an ongoing, collaborative educational effort between Inpatient Press and filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil.

咸濕 (Salty Wet) - an anti-travelogue essay on distance and desire within and without Hong Kong

“There is no Hong Kong anymore.” These four words have been on the lips of my colleagues, friends and family. Even if you have never been, every Chinatown is a facsimile of Hong Kong. The city’s specter also lives in pop culture, movies and cantopop and video games, and in these projections, we live its simulacrum. In history, dead cities have their morbid enigma and mythology from Pompeii to Rome. But if I could find coherence in living through political decay, outside of the frameworks of news journalism or historiography, then perhaps I would be able to find a more human way to mourn Hong Kong."

T▇▇ 謝▇ is an independent film producer based between Hong Kong and New York and the founder of Speculative Place. She was the Executive Producer of Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer’s feature debut film Empty Metal, and the forthcoming documentary film, Ancestors in the Archives, directed by Adam and Zack Khalil. 謝 is pronounced SHä (as in Shanghainese).

Second volume of a publication dedicated to the artist's novel, this metafiction follows a detective investigating the conditions of production of a novel within an artistic framework.
Why do artists write novels? What impact does the artist's novel have on the visual arts? How should such a novel be experienced? In recent years, there has been a proliferation of visual artists who create novels as part of their broader art practice. They do so in order to address artistic issues by means of novelistic devices, favoring a sort of art predicated on process and subjectivity, introducing notions such as fiction, narrative, and imagination. In this sense, it is possible to see the novel as a new medium in the visual arts; yet very little is known about it. This two-volume publication is the first to explore in depth the subject of the artist's novel.

The Fantasy of the Novel, is a research project in the form of a novel; it examines the process of creating an artist's novel derived from five episodic performances and an exhibition. The creative process was affected by the circumstances of production, including intersubjective relationships usually invisible to audiences. The protagonist assumes the role of a detective who tries to understand the conditions under which an artist decides to write, and how this writing is possible within an artistic setting.

David Maroto (born 1976, lives and works in Rotterdam) is a Spanish visual artist, researcher, writer, and curator. He is the co-curator of The Book Lovers, a research project on the artist's novel, together with Joanna Zielińska.

Published 2020

Drawing upon traditions of socially engaged poetics, Brandon LaBelle's The Other Citizen presents narratives of contemporary crisis and exclusionary politics—from American teenagers in the maze of neoliberal privatization to those caught between borders of nation-states—outlining the force of a planetary citizenry.

Brandon LaBelle is a musician, artist, writer, theorist, curator and editor (founder of Errant Bodies). His work is based on performance, sound installation, recording and use of found sounds. LaBelle reflects fluently on his artistic practice, drawing attention to the social dimensions of listening and manner in which sounds, in multiple variations, play upon public spaces, and drawing connections across media and incorporate video, as well as architectural and sculptural vocabularies into an expanded field that embraces rhetorical and spatial challenges.

Published September 2020.

Based on the author's artistic research on migration, contemporary urban experience, and sonic alienation, The Nomadic Listener is composed of a series of texts stemming from psychogeographic explorations of contemporary cities, including Copenhagen, Berlin, Kolkata, Vienna, Delhi, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and New York, among others.

Each text is an act of listening, where the author records his surrounding environment and attunes to the sonic fluctuations of movement and the passing of events. What surfaces is a collection of meditations on the occurrences of life movingly interwoven with memories, associations, desires and reflections. As readers we are brought into a tender map of contemporary urban experience, and the often lonely, surprising, and random interactions found in traveling. The Nomadic Listener includes parallel drawings based on the original audio recordings, and appear as ghostly renderings of the corresponding experiences. The recordings are published by Gruenrekorder and accessed through a QR code included in the book.

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is a contemporary artist, researcher, writer and theorist. Incorporating diverse media, such as sound and moving image, Chattopadhyay produces works for large-scale installation and live performance addressing urgent issues such as the climate crisis, human intervention in the environment and ecology, migration, race, and decolonization.

published September 2020.

Jenny Erpenbeck's highly acclaimed novel Go, Went, Gone was a New York Times notable book and launched one of Germany's most admired writers into the American spotlight. In the New Yorker, James Wood wrote: "When Erpenbeck wins the Nobel Prize in a few years, I suspect that this novel will be cited."

On the heels of this literary breakthrough comes Not a Novel, a book of personal, profound, often humorous meditations and reflections. Erpenbeck writes, "With this collection of texts, I am looking back for the first time at many years of my life, at the thoughts that filled my life from day to day."

Starting with her childhood days in East Berlin ("I start with my life as a schoolgirl ... my own conscious life begins at the same time as the socialist life of Leipziger Strasse"), Not a Novel provides a glimpse of growing up in the GDR and of what it was like to be twenty-two when the wall collapsed; it takes us through Erpenbeck's early adult years, working in a bakery after immersing herself in the worlds of music, theater, and opera, and ultimately discovering her path as a writer.

There are lively essays about her literary influences (Thomas Bernhard, the Brothers Grimm, Kafka, and Thomas Mann), unforgettable reflections on the forces at work in her novels (including history, silence, and time), and scathing commentaries on the dire situation of America and Europe today. "Why do we still hear laments for the Germans who died attempting to flee over the wall, but almost none for the countless refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean in recent years, turning the sea into a giant grave?" With deep insight and warm intelligence, Jenny Erpenbeck provides us with a collection of unforgettable essays that take us into the heart and mind of "one of the finest and most exciting writers alive"

Published September 2020. 

The scripts of Romy Rüegger's performances: a constellation of texts, largely written to be spoken. The scripts as they are printed do not document the performances primarily. They are indications of spacial and temporal layering, juxtapositions of aesthetic and poetic elements and bodies. Overlapping every day observations with archival material, confronting, jumping.

Romy Rüegger (born 1983, lives and works in Zurich) is an artist and writer working with sound-based practices and shared listening. Her writings for performances, audio works and choreographed spaces draw on anti-racist and intersectional politics of language and memory. Recent performances, audio works and publication contributions include Synthetic Stream Plays (Kunsthalle Basel, 2018), Binary Codes as NO (Gasworks, London, 2018), “I am the Wall” (in: Grounds for Possible Music, Errant Bodies Press, Berlin, 2018), Reina llora*, Reads (Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, 2017), I am the Wall (Q-O2 / Performatik Festival, Brussels, 2017), History is Closed Today (Helmhaus, Zurich, 2017), J'ai everyday ma substance (in collaboration with Anna Frei, Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck, 2017).

Published 2018

A collection of texts defining utopia as a place existing only within the domain of language, Utopia gives a synthesis of historical utopias and a snapshot of the 1970-1980's poetic scene.

An avant-garde writer associated with the New York School of poets, Bernadette Mayer was born in 1945 in Brooklyn, New York, where she lives and works. From 1967 to 1969, she published the experimental newspaper 0 to 9 with artist Vito Acconci, which combined texts and works of writers and conceptual artists based on the use of language (Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Aram Saroyan, Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, Morton Feldman or Sol LeWitt).

In 1967—along with Lewis Warsh—she founded the publishing house United Artists Books which published a number of influential writers such as Robert Creeley, Anne Waldman, Hannah Weiner, James Schuyler, Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley as well as Mayer's own books like 1978's The Golden books of Words or 1984's Utopia. Known for her innovative use of language, Mayer rose to prominence with the exhibition “Memory,” which combined photography and narration. During July 1971 Mayer took daily photographs and recorded her thoughts. These materials formed the basis for the exhibition, and for the eponymous book published in 1975. In 1980, Mayer became director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York where she also ran literary workshops. She also initiated the Poetry Project's Reading Series.
Mayer's composition methods such as chance operation, collage and cut-up identifies her as being close to the likes of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low or Frank O'Hara—central figures of the New York School—as well as more contemporary figures associated with the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Mayer's work is also influenced by modernist figures such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and the Dadaists or classical authors (Catullus).

French Edition.
Published in June 2016.

Locked down at home during the first wave of Covid-19, David Weber-Krebs kept on thinking about the day when theatres would open their doors again. At that point, it was somehow difficult to even picture that moment.

On the 8th of April, 2020, in the middle of the lockdown, David sent an e-mail to his peers: artists, scholars, curators, and spectators belonging to different art communities. In this e-mail, there was a simple question: What will happen on your first theatre visit after the lockdown?

It was an invitation to imagine the future of theatre from this very specific moment when theatres were all closed and when it was not clear how and when and if they would open again.

With contributions by: Paula Almiron, Kristof van Baarle, Sven Age Birkeland, Antonia Baehr, Caroline Barneaud, Nicole Beutler, Maaike Bleeker, Julien Bruneau, Pieter De Buysser, Alondra Castellanos, Chloé Chignell, Amélie Coster, Jasper Delbecke, Zoë Demoustier, Wouter De Raeve, Charlotte De Somviele, Katja Dreyer, Jeroen Fabius, Silvia Fanti, Far, Nicolas Galeazzi, Emilie Gallier, Nada Gambier, Melih Gencboyaci, Konstantina Georgelou, Kristof van Gestel, Matthieu Goeury, Maximilian Haas, Ant Hampton, David Helbich, Marijke Hoogenboom, Rita Hofwijk, Breg Horemans, Asa Horvitz, Dolores Hulan, Mette Ingvartsen, Myriam Van Imschoot and Marcus Bergner (MM), Stefan Kaegi, Edyta Kozak, Bojana Kunst, Rudi Laermans, Sarah van Lamsweerde, Heike Langsdorf, Mylène Lauzon, André Lepecki, Kopano Maroga, Ivana Müller, Phoebe Osborne, Leonie Persyn, Julie Pfleiderer, Antoine Pickels, Amanda Piña, Jan-Philipp Possmann, Fransien van der Putt, Irena Radmanovic, Anna Rispoli, Martina Ruhsam, Jonas Rutgeerts, Nienke Scholts, Ula Sickle, Michael Simon, Karoline Skuseth, Lara Staal, Christel Stalpaert, Danae Theodoridou, Pankaj Tiwari, Vera Tussing, Marie Urban, Michiel Vandevelde, Hidde Aans Verkade, Mathilde Villeneuve, Georg Weinand, Stefanie Wenner, Siegmar Zacharias, Andros Zins-Browne.

Artists, curators and writers describe their vision on the role of artist-run spaces for the future and discuss their own position in the world of art. The authors weigh in on the importance of artist-run spaces and reach out to anyone looking for alternative ways of thinking, working and living together.

Forms of Public Privacy is part of the larger FORMAT 2019 exhibtion ‘Changing Attitudes’ in Z33, Hasselt. As a critique on the current urban trend to overpragram and overdesign Belgium cities, and Western cities in general, a reasearch is done into five cases of abandoned and un-maintained spaces in Brussels. In the exhibition a series of sculptural models show architectural elements of the investigated spaces that provide a certain spatial intimacy and public privacy. These models, together with photographs of Axel de Marteau and a publication, argue for the value of these abandoned and un-programmed spaces within an urban setting. Their informal programs such as hangout spots, living spaces and meetings spaces form a vital part of the social spaces and commons of our cities.

This is the publication to that research.

The Vienna Guide is conceptually built upon ‘travel notes” compiled and edited on the occasion by artist Tony Cokes. Adopting the point of view of the flaneur, Cokes creates a speculative image of Vienna by appropriating and meshing non-art, historical figures, touristic clichés and club nights, all entwined in technological commentary. This distant gaze – Cokes hasn’t visited Vienna in the last 20 years – facilitates an aerial view of the complexities and unique traits that characterizes it. Commissioned by Attilia Fattori Franchini the Guide proposes to approach Vienna – and any urban site – as a discursive platform for future possibilities and identities.

The Vienna Guide by Tony Cokes comprises 3 stickers of video stills of Cokes’ videos Could you visit me in dreams? (2018), published in an edition of 150 + 25.