[Available for preorders. Ships November 2024]

Dear Miss Maxfeld . . . What I’m really afraid of is that I am a homosexual human being. I wish you were one too but I don’t think it’s possible there could be so many in one school, do you? Probably there is only one person who is homosexual in one place at one time and that one person (I am afraid) is me . . .

After sixteen-year-old Lynn writes her thirty-seven-year-old English teacher a letter they embark on one of the funniest and saddest love affairs in fiction, shrouded in secrecy and guilt. Set in the year Kennedy was shot, all Lynn knows about “lezbos” is that they wear their hair in crew cuts, buy suits like her father’s, and sprout mustaches over their upper lips. Trying to pass, Lynn continues to neck with her boyfriend and make bigoted jokes with her friends. Feigning innocence with her parents, each night she checks the mirror for tell-tale signs of perversion. Profound, witty, poignant, and highly charged, In Thrall is the first in Jane DeLynn’s trilogy of novels on sexuality and authority. It is as believable in its depiction of a closeted teen as it is heartbreaking.

With an introduction by Colm Tóibín

Flawless comic timing. —Colm Tóibín, from the Introduction

All Lynn’s phobias, aversions and hang-ups make her exaggerated but real . . . The great triumph of this novel is that DeLynn has captured the way adolescents felt, talked, and behaved during the early 1960s. —San Francisco Chronicle

A dazzlingly gritty exposure of a girlhood experience usually neglected by both private and public consciousness. —Reba Maybury

The Seers follows the first weeks of a homeless Eritrean refugee in London. Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury, where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, the novel grapples with how agency is given to the sexual lives of refugees, insisting that the erotic and intimate side of life is as much a part of someone’s story as ‘land and nations’ are.

Hannah arrives in London with her mother’s diary, containing a disturbing sexual story taking place in Keren, Eritrea, where the Allies defeated the Italians in the Second World War. In a gripping, continuous paragraph, The Seers moves between the present day and the past to explore intergenerational histories and colonial trauma alongside the psychological and erotic lives of its characters as their identities are shaped, but refused to be suppressed, by the bureaucratic processes of the UK asylum system. 

Sulaiman Addonia is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. He spent his early life in a refugee camp in Sudan, and his early teens in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He arrived in London as an underage unaccompanied refugee without a word of English and went on to earn an MA in Development Studies from SOAS and a BSc in Economics from UCL. His first novel, The Consequences of Love (Chatto & Windus, 2008), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was translated into more than 20 languages. His second novel, Silence is My Mother Tongue (Indigo Press, 2019; Graywolf, 2020), was a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards 2021, the Firecracker (CLMP) Awards, the inaugural African Literary Award from The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, and longlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Fiction. Addonia’s essays appear in LitHub, Granta, Freeman’s, The New York Times, De Standaard and Passa Porta. He is a contributor to Tales of Two Planets (Penguin, 2020) and Addis Ababa Noir (Akashic Books, 2020). 

In Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other Danielle Dutton imagines new models for how literature might work in our fractured times. Dutton’s writing is as protean as it is beguiling, using the different styles and different spaces of experience to create a collage of the depths and strangeness of contemporary life.

This hybrid literary collection covers an inventive selection of subjects in four eponymous sections which contrast and echo one another, challenging our expectations and pushing the limits of the dream-like worlds and moods that language might create.

‘Danielle Dutton is a writer whose work I wait for. When a new book comes, I keep it very close… Her growing body of work is among the most formally inventive (and therefore essential) I can think of, and Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is a vital, enlivening addition to it.’ – Kate Briggs

Danielle Dutton is the author of the novels Margaret the First and SPRAWL, the prose collection Attempts at a Life, the illustrated nonfiction chapbook A Picture Held Us Captive, and she wrote the text interpolations for Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera. Her fiction has appeared in magazines and journals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The White Review, Harper’s, BOMB, and NOON. Dutton teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and is cofounder and editor of the award-winning feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project. Born and raised in California, she has lived on the (former) prairie now for roughly twenty years.

You wake up in the footwell of a mid-sized hatchback somewhere on a highway in outer Bangkok. You compile neurotic spreadsheets of the best ‘party destinations’ in Europe, whilst your work emails pile up without ever being read. You quit your job. You launch a banal start-up. You grieve for a past relationship. You stare endlessly at the waves coming in from a beach in Koh Pha Ngan. You vape intensely. You spend money on feelings, on the performance of your own persona, whilst you observe yourself with a detached sense of horror.

i will pay to make it bigger is a novella, by poet and artist Ahren Warner, in which ‘you’ are the main character. Through text and image – autofiction, docufiction, and just plain fiction – you work your way through a tangle of preoccupations: from what it means to buy enjoyment, to the fragile construction of your own self as a cultural product.

i will pay to make it bigger is also a photobook, a collection of images produced whilst living in Thai ‘party hostels’. Although these photographs might seem to exist as the documentation of intimate or ecstatic moments, they are in fact quite painstakingly, and artificially, constructed: composited and manipulated from multiple still frames of film footage to produce images that advertise the calculated artifice of their own hedonism, emotion and seemingly raw experience.

With a Coda by Hana K. Ohnewehr, commissioned by Yu’an Huang

The latest in writer and visual artist Renee Gladman's ever-expanding body of imaginative investigation is a sui generis novel of queerness and art-making, philosophy and sex. 

The narrator of My Lesbian Novel is Renee Gladman, an artist and writer who has produced the same acclaimed body of experimental art and prose as real-life Renee Gladman, and who is now being interviewed by an unnamed interlocutor about a project in process, a seeming departure from her other works, a lesbian romance. 

Between reflections on art making and on the genre of lesbian romance - "though aspects of the formula drive me crazy... people who write these stories understand how beautiful women are" - a romance novel of her own takes shape on the page, written alongside the interview, which sometimes skips whole years between questions, so that time and aging become part of the process. 

The result is a beautifully orchestrated dialogue between reflection and desire, or clarity and confusion, between the pleasures of form and the pleasures of freedom in the unspooling of sentences over time.

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing, and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, all published by Dorothy-- Event Factory, The Ravickians, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, and Houses of Ravicka. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and was a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize winner in fiction. She makes her home in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.

Episodic and picaresque, Fanny Howe's novella What Did I Do Wrong? tells the story of a revolutionary mutt's journey through the kennels, parks, and suburban waste spaces around Boston in search of true freedom. This dog offers a firsthand account of the cruelty meted out to both animals and forgotten members of human society. Like The Golden Ass, What Did I Do Wrong? takes on moral and spiritual questions without abandoning earthly appetites. In a twist on the fabulous tradition established by Apuleius, we are urged not to maintain our humanity but rather to look for the dog within.

Illustrated by Colleen McCallion.

Largely set in Boston, Fanny Howe's Economics examines with an unwavering eye the necessary errors of the 1960s liberalism and consequences of cold war politics. A white liberal couple adopts a black child with troubling results; two old friends from the Kennedy campaign meet years later to discover how different their lives have become; a separated working-class couple drives to the Cape in order to collect the prize from an instant lotto game. In each story, love is eroded by class expectations and financial pressures, by racial tensions and ideological hypocrisies. As a result Economics offers a raw portrait of the last three decades that is at once comic and devastating.

Arthur’s Whims is the tale of “a modern saint,” a love story born of a childhood dream of being “alone on a boat with a boy, a friend.” Arthur and his beloved Bichon—a young man who, after drinking Arthur’s tears, becomes pregnant with his child—drift through a stream of identities and circumstances: birdcatchers for a French taxidermist; sailors shipwrecked in an ice fortress; explorers of the Isles of Traitors, Babies, and Sadness; famous magicians in Oklahoma; religious and medical marvels. It is an anarchic, outrageous novel, in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Comte de Lautréamont, now available in English for the first time in translation by Dana Lupo. This edition includes Hervé Guibert’s essay “The Bear,” in which he compares his books to rooms in a house, writing: “Arthur’s Whims would be the library of the house, and the bedroom of a child who will never be.” It is “a true adventure novel in the tradition of the genre, or what I believed to be its tradition, with great journeys, disasters, shipwrecks, cataclysms.”

“This short novel, offered here along with an essay by Guibert, reads like a madcap picaresque—one in which bodies can transform, the pace is constantly accelerating, and geography proves to be malleable. A gloriously surreal account of an unexpected voyage.” — Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

Hervé Guibert was a French photographer, critic, and author. Born in 1955, he published works of autofiction, novels, short stories, and essays, including many on photography. His writing was often deeply personal, ironic, and centered on illness and the body. Guibert died from complications of AIDS in 1991, at the age of thirty-six.

Dana Lupo is a writer and translator based in New York. Their work has appeared in Entropy, Bone & Ink Press, Arcturus (Chicago Review of Books), Apricity Press, and elsewhere. Arthur’s Whims is their first published translation.

Sitt Marie Rose is the story of a woman abducted by militiamen during the civil war in Lebanon. Already a classic of war literature, this extraordinary novel won the France-Pays Arabes award in Paris and has been translated into six languages. Sitt Marie Rose is part of Comparative Literature, World Literature, Women’s Studies and Middle East Studies curricula at more than thirty universities and colleges in the U.S.

Translated by Georgina Kleege.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She is a celebrated writer, essayist, and playwright, and is the author of more than twenty books in all these disciplines. Her work as a whole is a faithful record of the times and places she has lived in Beirut, Paris, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. At least eighteen works by Adnan have been published in English. They include Sitt Marie Rose (Post-Apollo Press, 1982); The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; Premonition (Kelsey Street Press, 2014); Surge (Nightboat Books, 2018); Time (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award; and Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020). In 2021, Litmus Press published a second edition of Journey to Mount Tamalpais (originally published by The Post-Apollo Press), which included nine new ink drawings by Adnan. Her paintings, described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as "stubbornly radiant abstractions," have been widely exhibited. Spanning media and genres, Adnan's writings have led to numerous collaborations with artists and musicians, including the French part of CIVIL warS, a multi-language opera by American stage director Robert Wilson, performed in Lyon and Bobigny in 1985. In 2014 she was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France's highest cultural honor, by the French Government. She died in Paris, in 2021.

Georgina Kleege is an internationally known writer and disability studies scholar. Her collection of personal essays, Sight Unseen (1999) is a classic in the field of disability studies. Kleege’s latest book, More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art (2018) is concerned with blindness and visual art. Kleege joined the English department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 where in addition to teaching creative writing classes she teaches courses on representations of disability in literature, and disability memoir. Kleege is also the author of Home for the Summer (The Post-Apollo Press, 1989).

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

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.

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?

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

Already a member of The Feminist Writers’ Guild and one of the principal founders/proponents of the New Narrative movement, Dodie Bellamy published her first book with Hanuman Books in 1991. Feminine Hijinx brings together two long pieces, "Complicity" and "The Debbies I Have Known", along with a new introduction by the author, written for this reissue.

Dodie Bellamy (b. 1951) is an American writer, journalist, and educator, most often associated with the New Narrative movement. She is the author of The Letters of Mina Harker, Cunt-ups, Pink Steam, The TV Sutras, and co-edited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977–1997 with Kevin Killian.

The first collection of texts published in French by the Argentinian artist and poet.

Preface by Chris Kraus.

Translated from the English and Spanish by Marion Vasseur Raluy, Rosanna Puyol Boralevi and Mona Varichon.

The first issue of the magazine made by artists, founded by Donatien Grau and Thomas Lenthal. Contributions by Mathias Augustyniak, Naomi Campbell, Théo Casciani, Michael Chow, Pan Daijing, Es Devlin, Claire Fontaine, Edwin Frank, Theaster Gates, Nicolas Godin, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Hedi El Kholti, Michèle Lamy, Paul McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Eileen Myles, Marc Newson, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Diana Widmaier Picasso, Ariana Reines, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Julian Schnabel & Jason Momoa, Hanna Schygulla, Juergen Teller, Iké Udé, McKenzie Wark, Robert Wilson, Yohji Yamamoto.

Alphabet is the artists' magazine. Here, they run the show. They write, they make images, they select their own works, they interview the figures they admire, they tell us what we did not know about them nor could have ever fathomed about life. This magazine is conceived entirely to put them in the driver's seat, and to enable readers to become part of the unique vision of some of today's greatest luminaries.

It is a manifestation of the creative community, coming together from all fields, from all generations and threads of culture. Writers, musicians, designers, painters, sculptors, poets—artistic figures of every kind converse all the time in their lives, but they did not have a shared space for their editorial projects. This is it.

Everyone who finds their way into Alphabet has made a mark on life, art, and culture, in a way that signals their importance to the present. Some of the contributors may be world famous, others well respected, others on the way to becoming the legends they already are. Their relevance to culture is the same, and that is why they all belong here, in the endeavor of the creative community. There is no hierarchy of status, or domain, or apparent impact. Some of the greatest revolutions happen undercover. Some of the most established voices are still breaking ground. The magazine's premise is simple: the old opposition between pop and underground does not make sense anymore. There are many creative communities, each following its own rules, each inventing its own space. Here, wherever they come from, whatever their community, artists can exist together, with the same intention of changing, and improving, what life is; with the same belief that art matters more than anything else.

None of the contributors is here randomly. They keep life thrilling and exhilarating, challenge the perception of everything and anything. Their role in shaping every aspect of life can hardly be overstated. That is why they needed a place to elaborate their own alphabet, their way of ordering and structuring language, the world, and the fabric of life—a place of freedom, where everything would be done to highlight their visions, where the very design would be a shrine to their magic. Even the distribution of the magazine was conceived with artists—each contributor suggesting sites of their liking.

Alphabet is also the magazine of magazines. Here, readers find essays, fictions, poetry, visual projects, DIY methods, recommendations from those who know, even games and astrology—and an artist's alphabet, articulating an entire universe. Anything that has ever formed a section of a magazine could find its way here. Even the cover is conceived by an artist: it was conceived especially by the legendary Robert Wilson. Artists will rejuvenate what magazines are, and magazines will be kept forever young by and with them.

Founded by Donatien Grau and Thomas Lenthal, Alphabet is a bi-yearly art magazine. Not a magazine about art. It's a magazine made by artists. Each contribution like an œuvre, making it the ultimate collector piece. Each cover is designed, with the word Alphabet, by a different artist, initiating a cult series.

Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love is a genre-defiant sex-trip to post-human dimensions. If C.G Jung, magic-mushroom shaman Terence McKenna and Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae) had a three-way while binging on George Bataille and undergoing Hormone Replacement Therapy, their baby might be the erotic cocktail of Myth Lab. Its extreme theme is nothing less than the fate of the species.

“Brilliant and wild, Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab is a manifesto of exuberance disguised as a sci-fi sex test-center for the invention of communal futures. Skelley’s a mad scientist, scholar and poet.” - Chris Kraus, author of After Kathy Acker
 
“In Myth Lab, Jack Skelley adroitly molds an “Einsteinian elasticity between objects and ether” to the “clitoverse.”  If this formulation seems too vast, just think about a) the last time you felt good about power and b) all the ways to say yes to pleasure as a source of liberation. In conducting a “cosmologic psychoanalysis,” Myth Lab thrillingly hot wires our neurons to an endless mirror stage reflective of our own instinctual nature.” - Kim Rosenfield, author of Phantom Captain
 
"An explosion of clit-cock-and-pop-culture worship. Skelley’s eroto-celestial universe fights back not only against the denial of desire – “also known as fuckheadocracy and market forces” – but against death itself."  - Francesca Lia Block, author of Weetzie Bat
 
"A hallucinatory book that straddles gender studies, science-fiction, and cultural criticism (to name but three of many genres). Ever eager to use a newfound Skelley-ism, I urge everyone to read Myth Lab and be “Kardashian'd” with love (i.e buy it now, it's great)." - Susan Finlay, author of The Jacques Lacan Foundation
 
"In Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab, something weird and beautiful is forged in the crucible of infinite horny grief. It’s an epic, delirious descent into the inferno, navigating the concentric circles of romance and desire as literary malady, TikTok psyop, benevolent cosmological principle, and more. Simultaneously a quest, a physics experiment and an elegy. I loved following its narrator - a tender, erotomanic, Blakean particle - seeking and finding visionary head." - Daisy Lafarge, author of Love Bug

An unnamed, female narrator travels through school, then art school, then art school teaching jobs, finding or fashioning “the selves of herself” via encounters with PJ Harvey, the ghosts of Ann Quin, Susan Sontag, and a mansplaining Analyst that she first encounters in her grandparents’ garden. Both a love letter to creative life, and a requiem for all that is lost in its pursuit, UH HUH HER asks is it possible to record—and retain—our experiences of being on the outside? Or can such stories only exist within the institutions that both literally and metaphorically shape them?

It’s 2009 and summer is encroaching on the town of Bellingen when Rhiannon is forced to move from her local high school to one in Coffs Harbour. Initially reluctant to leave behind her best friend Ellie, she quickly finds herself infatuated with the enigmatic Vanora. It’s only on befriending her, does she discover that like her, Vanora is a girl whose home life is shrouded in a web of secrets. Secrets that relate to her mother.

Set in the verdant Mid North Coast of New South Wales, Australia, Thora deals with family dysfunction, emancipation through friendship, and how girlhood is affected by the isolation of the country and the solace of nature.

Tilly Lawless is a queer, Sydney-based sex worker and writer. Her debut title Nothing But My Body was published in 2021.

Cover art by Rufus Shakespeare

You Can Vibe Me On My FemmePhone follows three friends, in a near-future Los Angeles, who are trying to improve themselves using a phone with a feminist operating system. Join Veronica, Phoebe, and Remy on their absurd adventures to seduce artists, entrap local Proud Boys, and enter a kinky queer horse-play scene. Their FemmePhones, programmed with their personal values, guide them toward the transformative love and professional passions they seek. But what choices will they make when they disagree with their phones and what does this mean about their feminist values? Kamala Puligandla’s heartfelt, humorous novella takes you on a wild ride about queer love, self-knowledge and growth.

Size: 4.5" x 7", 108 pages, perfect bound

Self-published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Feminist Center for Creative Work. Copy edited by Pratishtha Kohli. Illustrations by Phoebe Unter. Designed by MJ Balvanera, Riso-printed by Neko Natalia.

Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer.

A rare book that depicts the isolation and poetry of rural life. —Annie Ernaux

What it takes to imagine social and physical freedom is what it meant to keep reading this incredible book. —Bhanu Kapil

Marouane Bakhti is a writer and arts journalist. Born in Nantes, France to a Moroccan father and a French mother, he studied history and journalism at the Sorbonne. He writes criticism for Mouvement magazine and lives in Paris. How to Leave the World is his first novel.

Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator of French and has translated over a dozen novels, including works by Zahia Rahmani, Fatima Daas, Mohamed Leftah and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. Lara was born in Tunisia, grew up in the United States and currently lives in southern France.

978-1-7395161-3-0
21.6 x 13.9 cm
112 pp, paperback
September 2024