The first authorized biography of postmodernism's literary hero, Kathy Acker.

Acker's life was a fable; and to describe the confusion and love and conflicting agendas behind these memorials would be to sketch an apocryphal allegory of an artistic life in the late twentieth century. It is girls from which stories begin, she wrote in her last notebook. And like other lives, but unlike most fables, it was created through means both within and beyond her control.—from After Kathy Acker

Rich girl, street punk, lost girl and icon… scholar, stripper, victim, and media-whore: The late Kathy Acker's legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, created mostly by Acker herself. Twenty years after her death, Acker's legend has faded, making her writing more legible.In this first, fully authorized, biography, Chris Kraus approaches Acker both as a writer and as a member of the artistic communities from which she emerged. At once forensic and intimate, After Kathy Acker traces the extreme discipline and literary strategies Acker used to develop her work, and the contradictions she longed to embody. Using exhaustive archival research and ongoing conversations with mutual colleagues and friends, Kraus charts Acker's movement through some of the late twentieth century's most significant artistic enterprises.

This book, from inter-genre, bilingual writer Nathanaël, investigates the relationship between image and language through a philosophical and poetic meditation on a self-portrait by Surrealist photographer and writer Claude Cahun.

"In Absence Where As, Nathanael reads the unread book, ‘the book that comes’ to us nevertheless, that haunts and hovers unopened and dreamt, proceeding from the Ecrits of the visionary and revolutionary artist-activist Claude Cahun, to life’s library. Through this constellatory essay in the faults of thought, in reading’s flaw, Nathanael comes to know and know how, creating new epistemological and aesthetic territory in the radiant continuum between lyric and narrative, the text and the dream of text, which is literature itself." - John Keene

In A Talk on Rhyme, a text distilled from a lecture given in 2014, poet David Brazil reflects on rhyme’s “emergence, progress, inoperativity, and prospect.” The Talk is supplemented by an essayistic bibliography on subjects ranging from classical prosody to American folk music, via writings on and by poets long dead whose names are obvious: Saint Paul, Dickinson, Herbert, Spicer, Hölderlin, Dante, O’Hara.

The poet and writer Cristina Campo (Vittoria Guerrini, 1923-1977) is primarily known in Italy as a translator, especially of modernist poetic works and the writings of Simone Weil. Translation was for her an essential task and experience. As Margherita Pieracci Harwell recalls, “the hospitality offered to the poet to be translated, this self-emptying of the interpreter (a participatory offering, in which all the powers of her genius are stretched to the extreme because the other’s voice lives without distortions)—Cristina more than anyone proposed this as a goal.” 

This bilingual volume proposes to reflect on this interface of reading and writing by focusing on the commentarial potential of Campo’s work, whose penetrating quality of attention flashes like a spark across the margin between the thing to be transmitted and the act of transmission. In a contemporary context in which the disconnection between the old and the new makes both strictly inaccessible, Cristina Campo’s work stands like a diamond point through which one may reflect on the multitemporal (and eternal) dimension of writing.

With translations and contributions by Andrea di Serego Alighieri, Visnja Bandalo, Laura Boella, Daniela Cascella, Monica Farnetti, Cristina Mazzoni, Nicola Masciandaro, Snejanka Mihaylova, Nicola di Nino, Adrian Nathan West, Chiara Zamboni.

Edited by Nicola Masciandaro & Andrea di Serego Alighieri.

published 2021

McKenzie Wark combines an autobiographical account of her relationship with Kathy Acker with her transgender reading of Acker's writing to outline Acker's philosophy of embodiment and its importance for theorizing the trans experience.

Over the decades readers have found a punk Acker, a feminist Acker, a queer Acker, a kink Acker, and an avant-garde Acker. In Philosophy for Spiders, McKenzie Wark adds a trans Acker.

Wark recounts her memories of Acker (with whom she had a passionate affair) and gives a comprehensive reading of her published and archived works. Wark finds not just an inventive writer of fiction who pressed against the boundaries of gender but a theorist whose comprehensive philosophy of life brings a conceptual intelligence to the everyday life of those usually excluded from philosophy's purview.

As Wark shows, Acker's engagement with topics such as masturbation, sadism, body-building, and penetrative sex are central to her distinct phenomenology of the body that theorizes the body's relation to others, the city, and technology.

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.  

Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing "practices of freedom" by which we negotiate our interrelation with, indeed, our inseparability from others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion.  

For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture, from recent art-world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis, is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.

"In order to write" said Simone de Beauvoir, "the first essential condition is that reality can no longer be taken for granted."

She and four other French women writers of the second half of the twentieth century-Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Condé-illustrate that producing autobiography is like performing a tightrope act on the slippery line between fact and fiction.

Autobiographical Tightropes emphasizes the tension in the works of these major writers as they move in and out of "experience" and "literature," violating the neat boundaries between genres and confusing the distinctions between remembering and creating.

Focusing on selected works, Leah D. Hewitt for the first time anywhere explores the connections among the authors. In doing so she shows how contemporary women's autobiography in France links with feminist issues, literary tradition and trends, and postmodern theories of writing. In light of these theories Hewitt offers a new reading of de Beauvoir's memoirs and reveals how her attempt to represent the past faithfully is undone by irony, by literary and "feminine" detours. Other analysts of Nathalie Sarraute's writing have dwelt mainly on formal considerations of the New Novel, but Hewitt exposes a repressed, forbidden feminine aspect in her literary innovations. Unlike Sarraute, Duras cannot be connected with just one literary movement, political stance, style, or kind of feminism because her writing, largely autobiographical, is marked by chameleon like transformations.

The chapters on Wittig and Condé show how, within the bounds of feminism, lesbians and women of color challenge the individualistic premises of autobiography. Hewitt demonstrates that, despite vast differences among these five writers, all of them reveal in their autobiographical works the self's need of a fictive other. Leah D. Hewitt is an associate professor of French at Amherst College.

Haunting and compulsively readable, Drifts is an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession. At work on a novel that is overdue, spending long days walking neighborhood streets with her restless terrier, corresponding ardently with fellow writers, the narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, Albrecht Dürer, Chantal Akerman, and others, she photographs the residents and strays of her neighborhood, haunts bookstores and galleries, and records her thoughts in a yellow notebook that soon subsumes her work on the novel. As winter closes in, a series of disturbances--the appearances and disappearances of enigmatic figures, the burglary of her apartment--leaves her distracted and uncertain . . . until an intense and tender disruption changes everything.

A story of artistic ambition, personal crisis, and the possibilities and failures of literature, Drifts is the work of an exhilarating and vital writer.

Kate Zambreno is the author of several acclaimed books including Screen Tests, Heroines, and Green Girl. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, VQR, and elsewhere. She teaches in the writing programs at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.

Published 2021

Never before available, the unexpurgated last interview with James Baldwin.

“I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only.” When, in the fall of 1987, the poet Quincy Troupe traveled to the south of France to interview James Baldwin, Baldwin’s brother David told him to ask Baldwin about everything—Baldwin was critically ill and David knew that this might be the writer’s last chance to speak at length about his life and work.

The result is one of the most eloquent and revelatory interviews of Baldwin’s career, a conversation that ranges widely over such topics as his childhood in Harlem, his close friendship with Miles Davis, his relationship with writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, his years in France, and his ever-incisive thoughts on the history of race relations and the African-American experience.

Also collected here are significant interviews from other moments in Baldwin’s life, including an in-depth interview conducted by Studs Terkel shortly after the publication of Nobody Knows My Name. These interviews showcase, above all, Baldwin’s fearlessness and integrity as a writer, thinker, and individual, as well as the profound struggles he faced along the way.

The Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling and fortune-telling, and explore the themes that defined Benjamin. The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of the modernist artist and Bauhaus figure Paul Klee.

A captivating meditation on the power of the sentence by the author of Essayism, a 2018 New Yorker book of the year. In Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon, whom John Banville has called "a literary flâneur in the tradition of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin," has written a sequel of sorts to Essayism, his roaming love letter to literature. In this new book Dillon turns his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence--from Shakespeare to Janet Malcolm, John Ruskin to Joan Didion--the book explores style, voice, and language, along with the subjectivity of reading. Both an exercise in practical criticism and a set of experiments or challenges, Suppose a Sentence is a polemical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature. Whether the sentence in question is a rigorous expression of a state of vulnerability, extremity, even madness, or a carefully calibrated arrangement, Dillon examines not only how it works and why but also, in the course of the book, what the sentence once was, what it is today, and what it might become tomorrow.

Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include The Great Explosion (short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror: Essays, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, In the Dark Room, and with New York Review Books, Essayism. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, Frieze, Artforum, 4Columns, and The Yale Review. He is the UK editor of Cabinet magazine and teaches creative writing at Queen Mary University of London.

Published 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. 

Queen Mob's Teahouse is an online literary magazine. Queen Mob's Teahouse: Teh Book is this volume. All new, no doubts.

"Everyone has come for tea! Poets, robots, literary critics, essayists, philosophers and clouds, beamed in from around the world to think about a new order and remind you that literature really is the cure for what ails you. A humane and diverse collection of voices getting to grips with their human condition, and yours, and the end of the world, too." - Octavia Bright, co-host of Literary Friction

Queen Mob's Teahouse: Teh Book was edited by Russell Bennetts and features work by the following authors. 

Setsuko Adachi, Rion Amilcar Scott, Russell Bennetts, Gem Blackthorn, Robert Boucheron, M. Soledad Caballero, Caroline Cabrera, S Cearley, Dorothy Chan, Trinie Dalton, Dana Dawud, Amanda Earl, Icess Fernandez Rojas, Jeremy Fernando, Claire Rudy Foster, SJ Fowler, Patricia Garcia, Mark Gluth, Eloise Grills, Allison Grimaldi-Donahue, Brinda Gulati, Judson Hamilton, Susan Harlan, Heather Hughes, Erik Kennedy, Naveen Kishore, Rauan Klassnik, Virginia Konchan, Keith Kopka, Nate Lippens, Reb Livingston, Marissa Maciel, Scott Manley Hadley, rob mclennan, Jasminne Mendez, Lupe Mendez, Calliope Michail, Thomas Molander, Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, Jason Novak, Emily O’Neill, Elizabeth Onusko, Robyn Maree Pickens, Whiskey Radish, Colin Raff, Reyes Ramirez, Christina M. Rau, Raquel Salas Rivera, Vlad Savich, Michael J Seidlinger, Medha Singh, George Szirtes, Eileen R. Tabios, Chris Tse, Leah Umansky, Nadia de Vries and Kimmy Walters. 

Cover design and finishing touches on the typesetting by Shuwei Bennetts and Dostoyevsky Wannabe. Cover photo of Julia Frakes by Kathryn LeSoine. 

Liberating the Canon is an edited anthology capturing the contemporary emergence of radically innovative and nonconforming forms of literature in the UK and US. Historically, sociopolitical marginalisation and avant-garde aesthetics have not come together in UK literature, counterintuitively divorcing outsider experience and formal innovation. Bringing together intersectional identity and literary innovation, LTC is designed as an intervention against the normativity of literary publishing contexts and the institution 'Innovative Literature' as such. More widely, if literature, any literature, can act as a mode of cultural resistance and help imagine a more progressive politics in Tory Britain and beyond, it is this.

Contributors are Mojisola Adebayo, Jess Arndt (US), Jay Bernard, Richard Brammer, Victoria Brown, SJ Fowler, Juliet Jacques, Sara Jaffe (US), Roz Kaveney, R. Zamora Linmark (US), Mira Mattar, Seabright D.Mortimer, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Rosie Snajdr, Timothy Thornton, Isabel Waidner, Joanna Walsh and Eley Williams.

Isabel Waidner is a writer and cultural theorist. She is the author of three books of innovative fiction, most recently Gaudy Bauble (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2017), which is currently longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for "hardcore literary fiction and gorgeous prose". Her articles and short fictions have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including 3: AM, Berfrois, Configurations, The Happy Hypocrite, The Quietus and Minor Literature[s]. She is also the editor of Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Writing (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018) which explores the relationship between identity, intersectionality and innovation in literature. As part of the indie band Klang, Waidner released records on UK labels Rough Trade (2003) and Blast First (2004). She is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Roehampton University, London, UK.

The Annotated Reader is a publication-as-exhibition and exhibition-as-publication featuring 281 creative personalities responses and remarks on a chosen piece of writing.

Ryan Gander and Jonathan P. Watts invited a range of people, encompassing contemporary artists, designers, writers, institutional founders, musicians and so on – to imagine they’ve missed the last train.

“Is there one piece of writing that you would want with you for company in the small hours?” With this in mind, we asked people to submit a text with personal annotations and notes made directly onto it.

With over 281 contributions collected over the last few months, we have gathered a selection of contributors including Marina Abramović, Art & Language, Paul Clinton, Tom Godfrey, Ragnar Kjartansson, Sarah Lucas, Alistair Hudson and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The annotation adds a further layer, making each piece unique and a historic record of our current times.

Contributors:
Julian Abraham, Marina Abramović, Larry Achiampong, Saâdane Afif, Aaron Angell, Spencer, Anthony, Rachel Ara, Uri Aran, Cory Arcangel, Ellie Armon, Art & Language (Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden), François Aubart, Mary Aurory, Giles Bailey, Dan Baldwin, Fiona Banner, Simeon, Barclay, Anna Barham, Alvaro Barrington, Vanessa Bartlett, David Batchelor, Jacqueline Bebb, James Beckett, Frank Benson, Hans Berg, Emilia Bergmark, Vanessa Billy, Harry Bix, Juliette Blightman, John Bloomfield, John Bock, Doug Bowen, Benjamin Brett, Jack Brindley, Jim Broadbent, Yoko Brown, Hannah Brown, Stefan Brüggemann, Savinder Bual, Pavel Büchler, Nathaniel Budzinski, Gregory Burke, Wayne Burrows, Nikita Yingqian Cai, Mira Calix, Helen Cammock, Banu Cennetoglu, Tony Chambers, Rachael Champion, Alice Channer, Lou Cantor, Adam Chodzko, Perienne Christian, Martin Clark, Kaavous Clayton, Paul Clinton, Lucy Clout, William Cobbing, Gary Colclough, Beth Collar, Jack Cooke, May Cornet, Cel Crabeels, Paul Crook, Rob Crosse, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Francois Curlet, Matt Darbyshire, Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau, Gabriele De Santis, Poppy De Villeneuve, Richard Deacon, Liu Ding, Stevie Dix, Nathalie Djurberg, Gabor Domokos, Lauren Doughty, Helen Dowling, Joe Dunthorne, Sam Durant, Daniel Eatock, Shannon Ebner, Sean Edwards, George Eksts, Olafur Eliasson, gerlach en koop, Vivo Enky, Gareth Evans, Alice Andrea Ewing, Sam Falls, Abbe Faria, Chantal Faust, Jes Fernie, Spencer Finch, Alice Fisher, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Sal Fontaine, Tim Foxon, Mary Furniss, Ryan Gander, Mark Geffriaud, Alessandra Genualdo, Amir George, Alexie Glass-Kantor, Patrick Goddard, Tom Godfrey, Antony Gormley, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Rodney Graham, Lavinia Greenlaw, Hannah Gregory, Joseph Grigely, Corey Hayman, Richard Hayward, Louise Hayward, Louis Henderson, Holly Hendry, Camille Henrot, Susan Hiller, Andy Holden, Ashley Holmes, David Horvitz, Alistair Hudson, Craig Hudson, Candice Jacobs, Glen Jamieson, Tess Jaray, Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom, Sophie Jung, John Kaldor, Allison Katz, Jasleen Kaur, Jonathan Kemp, Sharon Kivland, Ragnar Kjartansson, Lorenz Klingebiel, Matthew Krishanu, Gabriel Kuri, Zak Kyes, Emily LaBarge, Suzanne Lacy, Max Lamb, Abigail Lane, Hannah Lees, Gabriel Lester, Jenny Lindblom, Hanne Lippard, Tom Lock, Sarah Lucas, Georgia Lucas, vanessa maltese, Shepherd Manyika, Céline Manz, Michael, Marriott, Rui Mateus Amaral, Midori matsui, Rebecca May Marston, Niall McClelland, Chris McCormack, Luke Mccreadie, Francis McKee, Bea McMahon, Harry Meadley, Nathaniel Mellors, Jo Melvin, Mathieu Mercier, Daisuke Miyatsu, Jonathan Monk, Jade Montserrat, Brian Moran, Franzi Mueller Schmidt, Clive Myrie, Hiroyuki Nakanishi, Shahryar Nashat, Daniel Neofetou, Kate Newby, Simon Newby, John Henry Newton, Olaf Nicolai, Helen Nisbet, Ryan Noon, Hana Noorali, Sophie Nys, Alek O, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Harold Offeh, Ahmet Ögüt, Ima-Abasi Okon, Vanessa Onwuemezi, David Osbaldeston, Kate Owens, Jonathan P. Watts, Barnie Page, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Francesco Pedraglio, Hannah Perry, Sybella Perry, Pratchaya Phinthong, Rachel Pimm, Emily Pope, Sam Porritt, Liv Preston, Paul Purgas, Tobias Rehberger, Pedro Reyes, Emily Richardson, Jacques Rogers, #Additivism Daniel Rourke, ryanna projects (Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen), syndicate (Sacha Leopold and François Havegeer), Giorgio Sadotti, prem sahib, Anri Sala, Margaret Salmon, Lucy A. Sames, Eran Schaerf, Annelore Schneider, Barry Schwabsky, Stephen Sheehan, Amy Sherlock, Anj Smith, John Smith, Bob and Roberta Smith, Renee So, Rustan Söderling, Nedko Solakov, Sriwhana Spong, Elinor Stanley, Georgina Starr, Astrid Stavro, Amy Stephens, Michael Stevenson, Jack Strange, Alfie Strong, Jamie Sutcliffe, Maki Suzuki, Rayyane Tabet, Mika Tajima, Lynton Talbot, Sally Tallant, Anne Tallentire, Maria Taniguchi, The Floors (Luke Dux, Ryan Dux and Ashley Doodkorte), Alice Theobald, Sam Thorne, Cara Tolmie, Marie Toseland, Rosemarie Trockel, Thom Trojanowski Hobson, Simon Turnbull, Lauren Velvick, Dana Venezia, Martin Vincent, Yonatan Vinitsky, Miriam Visaczki, Frances von Hofmannsthal, John Walter, Dan Walwin, Jessica Warboys, Ossian Ward, Evie Ward, Emily Wardill, Emily Warner, Nicholas Fox Weber, Lawrence Weiner, Charlott Weise, Richard Wentworth, Pae White, Riet Wijnen, Lillian Wilkie, Holly Willats, Issy Wood, Bill Woodrow, Seymour Wright, Shen Xin, Samson Young, Bruno Zhu, Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Andrea Zucchini, Heidi Zuckerman

Haunting and compulsively readable, Drifts is an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession. At work on a novel that is overdue, spending long days walking neighborhood streets with her restless terrier, corresponding ardently with fellow writers, the narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, Albrecht Dürer, Chantal Akerman, and others, she photographs the residents and strays of her neighborhood, haunts bookstores and galleries, and records her thoughts in a yellow notebook that soon subsumes her work on the novel. As winter closes in, a series of disturbances--the appearances and disappearances of enigmatic figures, the burglary of her apartment--leaves her distracted and uncertain . . . until an intense and tender disruption changes everything.

A story of artistic ambition, personal crisis, and the possibilities and failures of literature, Drifts is the work of an exhilarating and vital writer.

Kate Zambreno is the author of several acclaimed books including Screen Tests, Heroines, and Green Girl. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, VQR, and elsewhere. She teaches in the writing programs at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.

Published 2020

“Only artworks are capable of transmitting chthonic echo-signals,” Susan Howe has said.

In Concordance,she has created a fresh body of work transmitting vital signals from a variety of archives. “Since,” a semiautobiographical prose poem, opens the collection: concerned with first and last things, meditating on the particular and peculiar affinities between law and poetry, it ranges from the Permian time of Pangaea through Rembrandt and Dickinson to the dire present. “Concordance” a collage poem originally published as a Grenfell Press limited edition, springs from slivers of poetry and marginalia, cut from old concordances and facsimile editions of Milton, Swift, Herbert, Browning, Dickinson, Coleridge, and Yeats, as well as from various field guides to birds, rocks, and trees: the collages’ “rotating prisms” form the heart of the book.

The final poem, “Space Permitting,” is collaged from drafts and notes Thoreau sent to Emerson and Margaret Fuller’s friends and family in Concord while on a mission to recover Fuller’s remains from a shipwreck on Fire Island. The fierce ethic of salvage in these three very different pieces expresses the vitalism in words, sounds, and syllables—the telepathic spirit of all things singing into air.

In the collage poems language is both word and image. Source texts are cut up and repurposed, overlaid, truncated--they scatter across the page and spill into the gutter, run to the outside margins. Small blocks of quotations are buttressed and broidered by other quotations, slender and enigmatic, running in the opposite direction; some are illegible, serving more as shapes, gnomic geometries born of inscrutable utterances. To embody, in graphic or poetic form, a reconstituted approach to reading and writing, one that reaches beyond the page, through difficulty, silence, and stutters, to another kind of knowledge. -- Emily LaBarge

The women is at once a memoir, a psychological study, a sociopolitical manifesto, and an incisive adventure in literary criticism.

It is conceived as a series of portraits analyzing the role that sexual and racial identity played in the lives and work of the writer's subjects: his mother, a self-described "Negress," who would not be defined by the limitations of race and gender; the mother of Malcolm X, whose mixed-race background and eventual descent into madness contributed to her son's misogyny and racism; brilliant, Harvard-educated Dorothy Dean, who rarely identified with other blacks or women, but deeply empathized with white gay men; and the late Owen Dodson, a poet and dramatist who was female-identified and who played an important role in the author's own social and intellectual formation.

Hilton Als submits both racial and sexual stereotypes to his inimitable scrutiny with relentless humor and sympathy. The results are exhilarating. The Women is that rarest of books: a memorable work of self-investigation that creates a form of all its own.

Detour/Détours imagines debt as a language game: as a broken pun; a break in a journey; a play on value and the meaning of money as it changes hands. Or in terms of Guy Debord’s détournement — as a debt reimagined through the integration of old works into something new.

The word debtor owes etymologically to the old French deteur. But — moving into English — its first appearance dates back to the early 13th century and — sounded out as dettur, dettour or detour — debt can be read as an elaboration on the mottled intimations of a detour with a little poetic license. A detour is a deviation, a digression; a play on our various senses of direction. Exploring the will, want or need to take the long way around — and seeking to bastardize and scrutinize our relationship with (and conceptualization of) a statement of debt — here we have a set of searching works that critique all our methods of repayment. Participating authors were given free rein to produce a piece of writing in response to these ideas, and the works included herein — five first English-language translations and five original texts — wind their way around the weight of the word ‘debt’ in ten attempts to reroute its meaning.

Questions of Worth by Noémi Lefebvre, translated by Natascha Lasorak and Sophie Lewis
Silent B by Lauren Elkin

A Problem of the Greek Type by Mathieu Larnaudie, translated by Adrian Nathan West
Emotional Debt/Speed of Recovery Matrix by Selma Dabbagh

Debt Night by Preti Taneja

The Pastoral Calculation by Sandra Lucbert, translated by Jessica Spivey

The Debt Collector by Jen Calleja

Unknown Soldier by Nicolas Bouyssi, translated by Amanda DeMarco

Good Relations by Joanna Walsh

Out of Debt by Thomas Clerc, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman

Edited by Emmanuel Bouju, Dominic Jaeckle & Cécile Menon
Limited Edition of 300 copies
180 x 120, paperback, 78 pages

Bruce Boone Dismembered collects nearly five decades of writing by Bruce Boone, a founder of New Narrative and critical figure at the crossroads of late-twentieth-century avant-garde and social movement writing. At once sexy and political, gossipy and scholarly, this crucial volume includes poems, stories, essays, interviews, and reviews.

In a time of disorder and disease, Boone’s body of work acts as a mirror to our dismembered global reality. This scavenged, collaged, taped-together collection provides a “map to negotiate perils” and guides us toward reconciliation with perilous futures. This book exemplifies the poignancy that might emerge from the found and frenetic.

A guidebook to the extraordinary breadth of Duras's nonfiction. From the stunning one-page "Me" to the sprawling 70-page "Summer 80," there is not a piece in this collection that can be easily categorized. These are essayistic works written for their times but too virtuosic to be relegated to history, works of commentary or recollection or reportage that are also, unmistakably, works of art.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. The 19th issue, “very good*” is edited with Paul Abbott. Like music, the issue’s “theme” is better off unaccounted for, and up in the air, like a flock of birds (creatures who feature heavily), circling around performance, listening bodies, given time, and loving relations.

The nineteenth issue of ‘F.R.DAVID’ is edited by Will Holder and Paula Abbott, and will serve as a reader for “We can still see the horizon (and it’s curved)”, a summer residency in Scotland led by the editors. It includes a surprising array of contributions from writer Jorge Luis Borges, journalist and writer Italo Calvino, composer Hugo Cole, literary critic and theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith, percussionist Milford Graves, philosopher Michel Serres, novelist and essayist Wilson Harris, poet Bernadette Mayer, composer and music theorist Harry Partch, pianist and poet Cecil Taylor, and several others.