Books

It was the year that autofiction was everywhere.

All the major authors were accused of writing autofiction. You, the reader, were reading autofiction, maybe even writing autofiction yourself. The little known author HWK also was working towards his own autofiction, cycling through London, drafting, redrafting, scrapping, and scraping by, spiraling through his own mind, a geography of ambient anxiety, and a rising sea of associations and dead ends. As the tides begin to overwhelm him, HWK finds lifelines in the various stories that float past.

Possible rescuers, including Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, Sheila Heti, Mario Levrero, Jay Sherman (best known by his professional title, The Critic), and the noted animated therapist Dr. Katz call out to our narrator from the shores of literary and cultural success, will he reach them before the waters close over his head? Will HWK, dear reader, reach you?

Fail Worse is the smartest novel I’ve read in a long time, at once a scathing and hilarious critique of the limitations and conventions of autofiction as well as a moving work of personal narrative. I want to give copies of this novel to every writer I know. – Madeleine Watts, author of The Inland Sea

A brilliantly audacious and thoroughly ridiculous book – skewers its subject with a grandeur and wit it scarcely deserves… a stained glass window thrown at a pebble. – Keiran Goddard, author of I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

CONSTANT VIOLINS is a hybrid book consisting of two parts, each comprised of two texts of sci-fi auto-fiction: ‘FӔTAL ATRACTUS’ & ‘COQUETTES’, ‘RATS LIVE ON NO EVIL STAR’ & ‘SOPH MOB’.  CONSTANT VIOLINS follows mutating characters & contexts that grapple & contort in half-step with the logics of a vast labyrinth of psycho para-social references, playing out across a tête-bêche (or head-to-tail) format book. The myriad ‘worlds’ occupied & embodied narratively riff on the act of world-making in itself. 

As an only child, I used to climb up onto my grandmother’s vanity & collapse the 3 way mirror over my head so I could bask in the calm of the many me’s preening inside its reflective continuum. Sometimes I would just lean against the looking glass above her bureau or pretend the wall was my simultaneous lover. No one wants to be alone. Under covers, I initiate the same sequences of experiments that virtually anyone does. 

We all imagine what our pillows witness annually would baffle sane onlookers. That’s why we practice kissing on our dorsal carpal arches, peaches in the dead of night, or remove condoms from bananas with our teeth. CONSTANT VIOLINS wants what any book wants; to become a formidable power couple with its author like a Pokemon & its precocious Trainer.

Jordan/Martin Hell (b. 1993, USA) is a Black trans(2s) writer, artist, & scholar who attended Städelschule (DE) & Cooper Union School of Art. He is currently a PhD candidate at Queen Mary’s University of London. Hell’s work is interdisciplinary & interlaced with his writing as the seedbed for his various explorations across painting, sculpture, pedagogy, music, dance, etc. In all of his work Hell is invested in the embedded associations which proliferate in the global collective subconscious & how that frames intimate (& often violent) realities in the lives of individuals whether historical, celebrity, or obscure. Closely linked with his work is a spiritualist psychoanalytic practice which spans hypnosis, theology, philosophy, Black fugitivity, & indigenous somatics.

The fruit of a long-term project, this artist's book focuses on the written word and language in Jean-Michel Wicker's work.

Since the 1990s, the work of French artist Jean-Michel Wicker (born 1970 in Riedisheim, lives and works in Berlin) has focused on all forms of production, including publishing, typography, performance, and gardening. Wicker is the founder of the publishing houses Le edizioni della luna, Nice, Le edizioni della china, Berlin, and Ballabella papers, Berlin. His recent solo exhibitions include Edouard Montassut, Paris (2017), Bergen Kunsthall (2015), Sandy Brown, Berlin (2015), Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart (2015), Cubitt, London (2014), New Theater, Berlin (2014), Artists Space, New York (2013), Kunsthalle Bern (2012), and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2010). He has also exhibited in group shows, including the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2014), Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2011), and Kunsthalle Zürich (2011).

Remember that first time you were startled by a shrill screech, looked up and saw to your amazement a green parakeet perched on a branch in the middle of Brussels? There are some juicy and perhaps even instructive urban legends being told about the origins of the Brussels ring-necked parakeet.

Joren Peeters has collected and dramatized three of these urban legends, Antonino Triolo has illustrated them, and graphic designer Lise Leën has put them together in a kind of bird-watching book revealing the mythical origins of the Brussels ring-necked parakeet: De Vaders van de Brusselse Halsbandparkiet.

In these illustrated stories, the ring-necked parakeet appears to be a symbol of male hubris: the bird is born from the typically male, naive, unworldly and arrogant desire to impose a vision of Good on the world. The three fathers turn out to be three parodies of the hero, three tragic do-gooders.

(NL)

Weet je nog die eerste keer dat je opschrok door een schril gekrijs, opkeek en tot je verbazing een groene parkiet op een tak zag zitten – in het midden van Brussel? Er doen over de oorsprong van de Brusselse halsbandparkiet enkele sappige en misschien zelfs leerrijke urban legends de ronde.

Joren Peeters heeft er drie verzameld, uitvergroot en uitgeschreven, Antonino Triolo heeft ze geïllustreerd en Lise Leën heeft ze samengezet in een soort vogelspotboekje: “De Vaders van de Brusselse Halsbandparkiet”.

In deze geïllustreerde verhalen blijkt de halsbandparkiet een symbool voor mannelijke hoogmoed: ze zijn geboren uit het typisch mannelijke, wereldvreemde en arrogante verlangen om uw visie op het goede aan de wereld op te leggen. De drie vaders blijken drie parodieën op de held, drie fatale wereldverbeteraars.

For the very first time, the newspaper Font News, published together with the supplement Font Menu, showcases the typographic work of Erkin Karamemet from his own label as printed matter. The large format of the newspaper invites the viewer to appreciate the typefaces in large, poster-like sizes. The curated texts by Gerrit Kotsivos reference pop-cultural curiosities and are further enhanced by overlaid spreads with amusing illustrations by the London-based artist Why Ebay. This limited issue, produced as a special artist edition of only 300 copies, is something for typography enthusiasts to collect, explore, and celebrate contemporary type design.

A bold, innovative biography that offers a new understanding of the life, work, and enduring impact of Audre Lorde.

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde’s teachings on “the creative power of difference” may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today.

Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation. Possibly the focus on Lorde’s quotable essays, to the neglect of her complex poems, has led us to ignore her deep engagement with the natural world, the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For her, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be of earth on earth, and how to survive―to live the ethics that a Black feminist lesbian warrior poetics demands.

In Survival Is a Promise , Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives, illuminates the eternal life of Lorde. Her life and work become more than a sound bite; they become a cosmic force, teaching us the grand contingency of life together on earth.

The New York Times–bestselling author of The First Bad Man returns with an irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious, and surprising novel about a woman upending her life

A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.

A beguiling debut novel about friendship and failure, written with unusual craft and spryness by an acclaimed poet

Nicola is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a university archive dedicated to women's art, because she 'wants to read about women who can't make things'.

There she discovers one side of a correspondence beginning in 1976 and spanning a dozen years, written from one woman  –  a ceramics graduate, uncannily like Nicola – to her friend, who is living a contrasting and conventionally moored life. As she reads on, an acute sense of affinement turns to obsession, and she abandons one job after another to make time for the archive.

The litany of coincidences in the letters start to chime uncomfortably, and Nicola's feeling of ownership begets a growing what if she doesn't like what the letters lead to?

In This is NOT what I want to tell you: she looks at the many attacks carried out by teenagers in Palestine in 2015 and 2016. The teens, all children aged between 10 and 15, were shot dead or sentenced to years in prison. The series of almost daily knife attacks by these lone wolves reflected the hopelessness and despair among the young people of Palestine. They wanted to send a message to the world, but were unable to convey this in ordinary language.

In Two Ladybugs the fates of three characters, a Belgian woman, a Palestinian girl and an Israeli soldier, are closely intertwined. The players don't feel comfortable in this new, strange world and they don't hide that from the public.

Broken Shapes: A young woman in a city that has been occupied for decades, on the day of her father’s funeral, discovers his architectural drawings. Overcome with grief, she slips into the dream worlds and imagined places that he created.

Rimah Jabr Rimah Jabr (Nablus, Palestine, 1980) is a theatre director, playwright, screenwriter and Ph.D. candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University. She completed a master’s degree in theatre-making from the RITCS in Brussels. She wrote and directed several plays produced in Belgium, Canada, and Palestine. She actively collaborates with visual artists to craft unique performances. Her doctoral research is a performance ethnography research-creation with Palestinian Designers from Hebron, examining the impact of confinement on the creative process involved in set design. Broken Shapes is a collaborative project co-created by Toronto-based theatremaker Rimah Jabr and Brussels-based visual artist Dareen Abbas.

Aveux non Avenus is considered to be Claude Cahun’s masterpiece. Published in 1930 it defied description (it still does) and also showcased the incredible photomontages that Cahun and her lifelong partner, Marcel Moore, created together.

Cancelled Confessions reveals Claude Cahun to be a major surrealist writer and pioneering queer theorist almost a century ahead of her time.

Cahun and Moore’s appeal is wide and universal. They were adventurers in life as in art. Cahun famously terrified Andre Breton in the 1920s when she appeared in a Paris café with her head shaved and painted gold. Having moved to Jersey in 1938, Cahun and Moore waged a mischievous two-person resistance campaign against the occupying Nazi forces from 1940. Finally caught and imprisoned in 1944, they were sentenced to death in 1945, saved at the very last moment by the armistice.

With Amelia Groom Susan de Muth Claude Cahun Marcel Moore Pierre Mac Orlan François Leperlier

Designed by Joe Hales Sam Eccles

Guest editor: Orla Barry, City Report Brussels: Maxime Fauconnier and Natural Contract Lab, Kasper König, Kendell Geers, Lucy McKenzie, Nástio Mosquito, Lisa Vlaemminck, Paloma Bosquê, Joar Nango, Sandrine Colard, Wu Tsang, Busan Biennale

Worms and Luncheon have come together to bring the tastiest of fertilisers, to accompany your lunch for one. Think of this publication as a wine pairing for bookworms. Each story has been tailored to your taste, with a serving suggestion accompanying each piece. Not to be read in the company of others, and only to be consumed with food.

Featuring contributions from Eileen Myles, Cecilia Pavón, Clem MacLeod, Kate Morgan, Pierce Eldridge, Juliet Jacques, Lynne Tillman, Estelle Hoy, Jodie Hill, Leone Ross, Slutty Cheff, Izdihar Afyouni, Gabriela Aquije and Stephanie LaCava. With photographs by Chieska Fortune Smith.

The 88 page thread bound publication consists of poetry, short stories, personal essays, illustrations and photographs of the cosiest spots to dine alone in.

Concept initiated by Clem MacLeod and France Armstrong Jones

Writing Commissioned by Clem MacLeod 

Editors Clem MacLeod, Caitlin McLoughlin, Pierce Eldridge, Arcadia Molinas and Violet Conroy 

Cover image by Annie Collinge  

Art direction and design by Caitlin McLoughlin and Mariana Sameiro 

Illustrations by Clemmie Bache

“the following text was written in July 2024 in St Imier, Switzerland.
it's a fragment of Lettres à Bébé, a book I've been writing for some time in which I - Ethan - find myself helping and communicating by letter with a Marxist Baby whose political project is not to grow up so as not to become a tool of Capital. While he develops his project and tells it to me, I live my life and tell it too, observing and commenting on the ignoble state of the world, its language, its architecture, managing my heartbeat, meeting people, working, fucking, eating (...)”. - Ethan Assouline

Published by La Dépendance, St imier (2024)

Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion of "the intertwined and overlapping histories" in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.

Nox is an epitaph in the form of a book, a facsimile of a handmade book Anne Carson wrote and created after the death of her brother. The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of “Poem 101” by Catallus “for his brother who died in the Troad.” Nox is a work of poetry, but arrives as a fascinating and unique physical object. Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages and sketches on pages. The poems, typed on a computer, were added to this illustrated “book” creating a visual and reading experience so amazing as to open up our concept of poetry.

The contents of Reading Like a Computer. A Sematic Guide to Facebook's Content Moderation Policies are from leaked PowerPoint slides used to train Facebook content moderators. The contents have not been embellished or editorialized. By organizing and graphically presenting the subtle discrepancies between what Facebook allows and doesn’t allow in a post, the book highlights the contradictions and challenging logic of Facebook's community standards.

“Sketchbook 1-10” with Antoinette d’Ansembourg bundles a complete collection of pocket sketches created between 2020 and 2023, stretched across ten different notebooks. These sketches, despite their two-dimensionality, form the mainstay of her sculptural output, offering a glimpse into the intimate process behind her stately installations.

“There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth. Yet, whatever happened at the Shitshow holds six truths.” Welcome to the Shitshow with Casper Boone was launched on Friday, December 2nd at KBK Brussels. We celebrated the birth of our inaugural publication, allied with an exhibition with works by Casper.

Published on occasion of Arnaud Eubelen’s solo exhibition My Homies, curated by Jeanne Mouffe presented by Medusa. Enveloped with a poem by Romain Beaudot, the publication, intended to complement the exhibition, traces Arnaud’s footsteps to the conception of his trash-to-treasure practice. 

Published in tumult of “Planters, a garden show” by COUR: with Noëmi Orgaer, Orson Van Beek, Charlotte Bombel, Moreno Schweikle, Shun Yoon, Yen Proesmans, Benny Van den Meulengracht-Vrancx, HansWuyts, Malte van der Meyden, Fritz Adamski, Hannah Kuhlmann, Delphine Lejeune, Grażyna Mielech and Giseok Kim. 

the second poetry collection from Natalie Briggs titled ‘FLOWER ENGINE’. This collection of cinched, bright free-verse explores the passing locations of love and the slow, private operations of pain’s knocking counterweight. The book extends Briggs’ relay of concise universal suggestions, translating them through brief, intimate utility. 

Ostensibly as documentarian as his work on The Family of Man, Image Storage Containers (2012) does something closely related in intention to the latter and yet very different. On one level, it can be described as condensing, as Marie Muracciole has noted, two moments in the myth of photography as a “universal language”: the first involving The Family of Man as imperial project; the second, photography’s sheer technicity as a mechanical means of reproduction, with all its attendant connotations ofobjectivity and scientificity.

Atop this interfolding of meanings one can discern two additional layers: the Image Storage Container as a kind of “thought experiment,” an auto-pedagogical exercise to schematize the human nervous system, and, a more polemical read, as a proposition about the present conditions for viewing photographs within today’s networked image regime—at a moment when computer technologies, themselves predicated upon neuroscience findings on human perception and cognition, have precipitated a mass transformation of psycho-social behavior.

With contributions by Michael Baers.

Le Soleil et l’Acier est un recueil de textes assemblé par Laurianne Bixhain lors de clubs de lecture qui se sont tenus pendant sa résidence au Musée de l’imprimerie et de la carte à jouer de Grevenmacher (Luxembourg). Pour faire écho au travail de Monique Wittig, Roxanne Maillet a dessiné de nouvelles ligatures pour la Baskervvol, notamment une ligature « je ».

Clouds are, narratively speaking, some tricky things. They are both full and empty. They are vacant and shifting, a site of tension between the material and the immaterial, the perceptible and the invisible. Clouds is also the title of German artist Esther Kläs’ first monograph, which spans over 15 years of sculptures, drawings, and performances. As an organic rendering of a complex practice, this book mirrors both the formal impact of each artwork and the conceptual outreach of a collection of gestures, attitudes, movements, and moods happening around the works. Because Esther’s practice has no tight borders or hard edges. Each piece escapes definition and breaks loose from the patterning power of language. Still, regardless of the medium, everything Kläs does seems to have a common denominator: it is a reiteration of a way of thinking – her way of thinking – through a body in space – her body, as well as a social body.

With four commissioned contributions (Marc Navarro with Ester Partegàs, Julie Boukobza, Chloe Chignell, and Francesco Pedraglio) and six short, loose texts edited by Elena Tavecchia and Kläs herself, the book is a canvas whose patterns shift following the artist’s elaborated work. What stays hovering in the air are sparks of decisions, constant movements, recurrent repetitions, and propositions.