Books

A tale of two idiots—the handsome, charismatic Troy Augustus Loudermilk and his unassuming, socially anxious friend Harry Rego—who, in the early days of the new millennium, scam their way into a fellowship at the most prestigious creative writing program in the country.

"It's the end of summer, 2003. George W. Bush has recently declared the mission in Iraq accomplished and the unemployment rate is at its highest level in years. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Midwest, Troy Augustus Loudermilk (fair-haired, statuesque, charismatic) and his companion Harry Rego (definitely none of those things) step out of a silver Land Cruiser and onto the campus of The Seminars, America's most prestigious creative writing program, to which Loudermilk has recently been accepted for his excellence in poetry. However, Loudermilk has never written a poem in his life. For all Troy Loudermilk is—and, in the eyes of his fellow students and instructors, he is many things: a cipher to be solved, a hero to be championed, a rival to be disgraced—a poet he most certainly is not." — publishers note

Lucy Ives is the author of the novel Impossible Views of the World. Her writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, the Baffler, frieze, Granta, Lapham's Quarterly, Vogue, and at newyorker.com. For five years she was an editor with the online magazine Triple Canopy. A graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she holds a PhD in comparative literature from New York University. She currently teaches in the Image Text interdisciplinary MFA program at Ithaca College, as well as at NYU's XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement Master's program. She is the recipient of a 2018 Creative Capital - Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Drawing on cryptic intimations in the work of J. G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, André Leroi-Gourhan, Elaine Morgan, and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the late twentieth century Daniel Barker formulated the axioms of spinal catastrophism: If human morphology, upright posture, and the possibility of language are the ramified accidents of natural history, then psychic ailments are ultimately afflictions of the spine, which itself is a scale model of biogenetic trauma, a portable map of the catastrophic events that shaped that atrocity exhibition of evolutionary traumata, the sick orthograde talking mammal.

Tracing its provenance through the biological notions of phylogeny and "organic memory" that fueled early psychoanalysis, back into idealism, nature philosophy, and romanticism, and across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology, Thomas Moynihan reveals the historical continuity of spinal catastrophism. From psychoanalysis and myth to geology and neuroanatomy, from bioanalysis to chronopathy, from spinal colonies of proto-minds to the retroparasitism of the CNS, from "railway spine" to Elizabeth Taylor's lost gill-slits, this extravagantly comprehensive philosophical adventure uses the spinal cord as a guiding thread to rediscover forgotten pathways in modern thought. 

Moynihan demonstrates that, far from being an fanciful notion rendered obsolete by advances in biology, spinal catastrophism dramatizes fundamental philosophical problematics of time, identity, continuity, and the transcendental that remain central to any attempt to reconcile human experience with natural history.

The White Card stages a conversation that is both informed and derailed by the black/white American drama. The scenes in this one-act play, for all the characters' disagreements, stalemates, and seeming impasses, explore what happens if one is willing to stay in the room when it is painful to bear the pressure to listen and the obligation to respond.
—from the introduction by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine's first published play, The White Card, poses the essential question: Can American society progress if whiteness remains invisible?

Composed of two scenes, the play opens with a dinner party thrown by Virginia and Charles, an influential Manhattan couple, for the up-and-coming artist Charlotte. Their conversation about art and representations of race spirals toward the devastation of Virginia and Charles's intentions. One year later, the second scene brings Charlotte and Charles into the artist's studio, and their confrontation raises both the stakes and the questions of what—and who—is actually on display.

On the occasion of Merce Cunningham's centennial comes this edition of his classic and long-out-of-print artist's book Changes: Notes on Choreography, first published in 1968 by Dick Higgins' Something Else Press. The book presents a revealing exposition of Cunningham's compositional process by way of his working notebooks, containing in-progress notations of individual dances with extensive speculations about the choreographic and artistic problems he was facing.

Illustrated with over 170 photographs and printed in color and black and white, the book was described by its original publisher as "the most comprehensive book on choreography to emerge from the new dance ... [which] will come to stand with Eisenstein's and Stanislavsky's classics on the artistic process." By the time these notebooks were published, Cunningham had already led the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for 15 years, and had collaborated with Cage and others on milestones such as Variations V (1966) and RainForest (1968), the latter with Andy Warhol, David Tudor and Jasper Johns.

Along with his essay collection Dancing in Space and Time (1978), Changes is one of the most significant publications on Cunningham's enduring contributions to dance, which developed through collaboration with John Cage to incorporate formal innovation with regard to chance, silence and stillness.

In Hannah Regel’s brilliant collection, Oliver Reed, the figure of the horse becomes an object for language’s brutality and the all too familiar subjugation of women’s voices, bodies, and labour. An impressive hyperbolic pastiche of pleasurable misbehavior guides a girl named Sorry through her own undoing while naming new tools for calculated resistance. ‘Kill the language. Kill it. Get the shovel. We’re making a belt.’ I would gladly do whatever she tells me to do and wouldn’t think of doing otherwise. Regel creates a new order for the ecstatic wreckage of obedience.
– Cassandra Troyan, author of Blacken Me Blacken Me, Growled

Regel doesn’t really sound like anyone. Oliver Reed introduces a poetic sensibility that seems as at odds with convention as it is equal to the moment: fully formed, virtuosic, kind of lethal. These are pitiless, discomforting poems that explore our own creatureliness with a deadly curiosity. Each is a transformation: the actor becomes a strange muse and guiding presence, to ‘smoulder a mobile furnace’; the horse, another of the book’s recurring figures, becomes more than an emblem of eros, labour and suffering; the young girl’s bratty insolence turns defiant and stricken. The voice wills these changes into being even as she ‘wills herself barren’. As much as they trouble and seduce, the poems are also watchful, vigilant – they seem to offer a means of protection. Oliver Reed is an astonishing, masterful first book.
– Sam Riviere, author of 81 Austerities

faits divers are the various reports in a news bulletin, miscellaneous human interest stories, theorised by Roland Barthes as ‘total’ and ‘immanent’ information.

ferrara deux (faits divers) scrolls around the discovered corpse of a talented street musician named Landau, mangled and sealed into vacuum bags in the walk-in of a modern Italian-American restaurant. Street performance is content for an attention economy, playing on authenticities and profiting from recognition.

In this debut novel, artist Ivan Cheng reconfigures recent performance texts into an approximation of a murder mystery.

Issue Two includes: An Angela Carter Portfolio: Wolves in Fiction by Daisy Johnson, Pornography in Angela Carter by Arifa Akbar, and Angela Carter-inspired illustrations by Natalie Kay-Thatcher. Sharlene Teo on Qiu Miaojin. An interview with Dialogue Books publisher Sharmaine Lovegrove and her Ideal Bookshelf from Jane Mount. Fiona Lensvelt of Litwitchure on Pamela Colman Smith. Lucy Scholes interviews Posy Simmonds. A comic-strip profile of Veronica Santiago and Word-Up Bookshop by Ellen Lindner. Fiction by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Khaliah Williams of three generations of her family reading Jane Austen. And more! Cover photography is "A Study of the 'Katia Reading'" from the series "After Balthus - a Photographic Portrayal of the Paintings of Balthus" by Hisaji Hara.

23 × 17 cm, Softcover, 2019

“Dilara: Warrior Sorceress” is a traditional 70s style comic where Dilara is a superhero, a warrior queen with magical powers, living in a floating castle in a sea of the skulls of her opponents.

We join Dilara on an adventure through time and space, kidnapping a glam metal band and teaming up with historical figures to save the world from calamity. The comic is drawn by Benjamin Filby with a story by fantasy writer Amy Tipper-Hale. All of the characters have been styled by Dilara Findikoglu.

It features everyone's favourite fashion designer transformed in to a warrior queen using her magical powers to save the world. Drawn by Benjamin AE Filby and written by Amy Tipper-Hale, this comic is printed in a limited edition of 250.

Pulp paper
Golden centre spread
Deluxe cover with gold inks
28 pgs, 24 × 16 cm, Softcover, 2017

On projection in three stories, four poems and a sequence of poems. Featuring illustrations by Birdie Hall.

First published: October 2019

This issue of Mal Journal considers projection, transgression and adolescence, bringing together texts that challenge received notions of innocence and moral reasoning. It features new fiction by Chris Kraus, Luke Brown and Natasha Stagg, poetry by Rachel Long and a sequence of poems by Sasha Dugdale.

On botany and eroticism in twelve essays, stories and poems. Published in collaboration with Serpentine Galleries.

First published: April 2019.

This issue of Mal Journal features an essay by Chloe Aridjis on Mexican flora and its foreigners, a sequence of poems by Bhanu Kapil, an essay on the sex lives of plants by Emanuele Coccia, a sci-fi story by artist Victoria Sin, a personal exploration of the queerness of gardening by Julia Bell, an essay on queer botanics by film critic Teresa Castro, a sequence of botanical nursery rhymes and artworks by artist, poet and gardener Alex Cecchetti, a new poem (and somatic poetry ritual) by CAConrad, an essay by writer and poet Daisy Lafarge asking ‘Can you be a revolutionary & still love flowers?’, excerpts from the Song of Songs and Ovid's Fasti V and Metamorphoses, and illustrations by Australian artist Yi Xiao Chen.

On transcendence in two essays, a short story and four poems. Featuring illustrations by Franz Lang.

First published January 2019.

This issue of Mal features Fiona Alison Duncan on a legal case interrogating the blurred lines between sex work and spiritual practice, a personal essay on trans pleasure by Gabrielle Bellot, a short story on the volatility of mortal love by Sheila Heti and a series of poems by Mary Ruefle.

On desire and its objects in two essays, a short story and three poems. Featuring illustrations by Ana Kirova.

First published November 2018

The inaugural of Mal Journal features an essay by Anne Boyer on infatuation and literary creativity (from Dante's obsession with Beatrice to Chris Kraus's with Dick); an essay by Juliet Jacques on écriture trans-féminine (trans writing as genre); a short story by Saskia Vogel; and poetry by Eileen Myles.

Featuring Zoe Leonard, Eileen Myles, Jimmy DeSana, Princess Julia, Olivia Laing, Simon Costin, Timothy Thornton, Mary Manning and many more. Published 2020.

Pilot Press's debut publication Not Here, a queer anthology of loneliness was launched in June 2017 with contributors including Olivia Laing, Colby Keller, Marc Hundley, Monique Mouton, Timothy Thornton, Alice Goodman, Charlie Porter and Sarah Schulman.

Anthology number two asks what is joy? Is joy possible in the world today? If so, how do queer people imagine or experience it? Over 30 writers, artists and performers consider queer joy with contributors including Eileen Myles, Wayne Koestenbaum, Hilton Als, AA Bronson, Timothy Thornton, Sophie Robinson, Eley Williams and Honey Dijon.

In the long interview that forms the body of this publication, Éliane Radigue talks about her work, her reflections and underlying research, as well as her historical context. The publication also contains a commented list of works and Radigue's programmatic text on The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal.

Éliane Radigue (born 1932 in Paris) is considered one of the most innovative and influential contemporary composers, from her early electronic music through to her acoustic work of the last fifteen years. Influenced by musique concrète and shaped by regular sojourns in the United States, where she discovered analogue synthesisers, her work unfolds an intensity which is at once subtle and monumental. Through her deep reflections on sound and listening, not only her music but also her working methods have come to shape a widely resonating set of new parameters for working with sound as musical material.

Julia Eckhardt is a musician and curator in the field of the sonic arts. She is a founding member and artistic director of Q-O2 workspace in Brussels, for which she conceptualized various thematic research projects. As a performer of composed and improvised music she has collaborated with numerous artists, and extensively with Eliane Radigue. She has performed internationally, and released a number of recordings. She has been lecturing about topics such as sound, gender and public space, and is (co-)author of The Second Sound, Conversation on Gender and Music, Grounds for Possible Music, and The Middle Matter, Sound as Interstice.

Second edition (2020).

This reader brings together artistic and theoretical contributions on the instertitial nature of sound. This issue is addressed through a variety of prisms, such as format, language, politics, or new technologies.

The Middle Matter is a reader which brings together thoughts on the nature of sound; its substance, specific qualities, and potential—with a specific curiosity to its propensity to occupy the spaces in-between, the instertitial gaps between different spaces, times, cultures, and world views, between the interior body and the exterior space.

Through a number of artistic and theoretical contributions, observations are made around the notion of “audience” and the attendant questions of format, on the effects of old and new technologies, of communal working processes, and the complexity of language, the contributors reveal sound to be a material particularly apt at negotiating these zones of and between contact.

It is a large field of in-betweenness, sound travels, hops borders, passes through walls, its messages for a large part being transported involuntarily and even unconsciously. In this sense sound is extensively participative, entangled in the complicated gaps between bodies, minds and objects through and against which it resonates.

The Second Sound is an imaginary conversation based on the testimonies of musicians and sound artists on the role of gender and sex within their field.

Gathering anonymous testimonies from artists of different backgrounds into a single stream of (often contrary) opinions, the book addresses discrimination as a paradigm of otherness, the possibility of gendered music and sound art, and how sound artists and musicians navigate the field.

The Second Sound raises questions such as: How do life circumstances find their way into music and sound art? How does music reflect historical and social structures? What does discrimination do, and how can we navigate around it? Is the under-representation of women and LGBTQ people in the field a symptom or a cause? Is art itself gendered? And can it reflect the gender of its maker? Is a different way of listening needed to more accurately understand those voices from outside the historical canon?

Although this book raises more questions than it answers, it came to be a pledge for embracing artistic differences, for the richness of contextual listening, and for honesty in the expression of concerns and doubts. The responses seem to suggest that understanding differences by theme and not as predetermination is a way to provide freedom in a field of seemingly abstract art.

Publication documenting the research made by Dora García for a video project on Oscar Masotta, pioneer of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Latin America and influential art critic.

It features a selection of Masotta's writings as well as contextual essays on his work.Segunda Vez is an art research project centered on the figure of Oscar Masotta (Buenos Aires, 1930, Barcelona, 1979), an author of groundbreaking texts about the Happening, art, and dematerialization, a pioneer of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the Spanish-speaking world, and a happenista. The project has yielded a full-length and four medium-length films by Dora García, two Cahiers documenting the research, and this book. Segunda Vez: How Masotta Was Repeated offers a selection of Masotta's writings, including his early study of Argentinean author Roberto Arlt, as well as texts that contextualize Masotta's thought and broaden the reach of his reflections on the intersections between performance and psychoanalysis, art and politics.

Edited by Emiliano Battista.
Texts by Dora García, Oscar Masotta, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Jinkis, Inés Katzenstein, Ana Longoni, Emiliano Battista, Aaron Schuster, Julio Cortázar.

English edition

13,5 x 21 cm (hardcover)

320 pages (color & b/w ill.)

First French translation of Shulamith Firestone's first novel.

Originally published by Semiotext(e) in 1998, Airless Spaces is Shulamith Firestone's first novel. She writes this short stories gradually moving away from a career as a feminist activist; while finding herself increasingly close to a state of breathlessness. The stories center around people in the grip of a seemingly endemic poverty in New York, worn out by the back and forth of psychiatric hospitals and a sclerotic daily life. On the back cover of the original edition, we read the words of the poet Eileen Myles: “In the century I'm most familiar with, the 20th, the explosion was never-ending, the pieces tinier and tinier. Shulamith Firestone, in her radical insider's tale, informs us repeatedly like lightly pelting rain that all of us are vanishing in a century of institutions that take and take until everyone has gone away and there's no one left to shut the door.”

The French edition that we offer here, in a translation by Émilie Notéris, is accompanied by a text by Chris Kraus, author and first editor of the book.

Shulamith Firestone (1945 - 2012) is a feminist writer, activist and artist. After studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, she moved to New York where she co-founded the feminist groups New York Radical Women (1967), Redstockings (1969) and New York Radical Feminists (1969). In 1970, when she was only 25 years old, she publieshed the book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution. Firestone theorizes cybernetic communism as a system that enables the liberation of women, while at the same time putting an end to biological and social inequalities linked to reproduction and the education of children, in particular through technological emancipation.

published in May 2020

French edition
12,5 x 19,5 cm (softcover)
154 pages

The books included in the series Choreography as Conditioning are rooted in a cycle of work sessions entitled CASC at KASK, in which students work together with invited guests. They ex­plore the notions of choreography, understood as ways of orga­nizing subjects in their surroundings, and conditioning in both art-making and society-making. Where, how, and by whom are things organized and what kind of landscapes of experience are made (im)possible by the practices we enact and encounter?

Practicing Futures through Voicing, the second book in this series, connects with the first book’s concern with how practices destabi­lize and (re)constitute the concept of conditioning. It does so by questioning how to process life in a way that allows us to create volume, take space, and find our (tone of) voice—first in our immediate surroundings and, through this, in the world as it struggles and moves toward ongoing futures.

October 2019

The books included in the series Choreography as Conditioning are rooted in a cycle of work sessions entitled CASC at KASK, in which students work together with invited guests. They explore the notions of choreography, understood as ways of organizing subjects in their surroundings, and conditioning in both art-making and society-making. Where, how, and by whom are things organized and what kind of landscapes of experience are made (im)possible by the practices we enact and encounter?

Thinking Conditioning through Practice, the first book in this series, addresses the question of how these practices destabilize and (re)constitute the concept of conditioning through six writing processes performed by Alex Arteaga, Julia Barrios de la Mora, Julien Bruneau, Laetitia Gendre & Miram Rohde, Heike Langsdorf and Kristof Van Baarle.

June 2018

Contributions by: Julien de Smet, Ronny Heiremans, Heike Langsdorf, Vanessa Müller, Filip Van Dingenen, Stijn Van Dorpe, Clémentine Vaultier, Katleen Vermeir.

The books included in the series Choreography as Conditioning are rooted in a cycle of work sessions entitled CASC at KASK, in which students work together with invited guests. They explore the notions of choreography, understood as ways of organizing subjects in their surroundings, and conditioning in both art-making and society-making. Where, how, and by whom are things organized and what kind of landscapes of experience are made (im)possible by the practices we enact and encounter?

The Orphans of Tar – A Speculative Opera answers the question posed in the second book by transforming life into voices and presenting possible mindsets through co-authoring a factual fiction. As such, it constitutes a mental space in which ficti­tious characters find an almost disturbing expansion of their thoughts. Accordingly, the book can be considered as an alle­gory of human thoughts as (possible) actions: what could happen becomes what does happen. For better and worse.

October 2019

‘Piles of Bricks / Piles de briques’ by Bie Michels presents the working proces of her project ‘Bricks in Madagascar’. This project consists of two films, ‘La couleur de la brique’ and ‘Ingahy Kama’, the installation ‘Circular construction versus human body—referring to Toshikatsu Endo’, which she showed in Madagascar (October 2017) and Argos Brussels (May 2018), and the performance ‘Piles of bricks (working process)’, on which she will work 8 weeks before the book presentation and which will be performed at that moment.

Besides images and stills, five writers deliver a contribution in their own working field related to the project: Hobisoa Raininoro (Art assistent and former director of CRAAM (Centre de Ressources des Arts Actuels de Madagascar, MG), Rafolo Andrianaivoarivony (Professor History University of Antanarivo, MG), Petra Van Brabandt (Doctor philosophy Sint Lucas Antwerp, B), Gwyn Campbell (Professor History Mc Gill University, CA) and Nanne op ‘t Ende (writer, NL)