New in translation

Dans cet essai au verbe acéré, Paul Gilroy dénonce la pathologie néo-impérialiste des politiques mises en œuvre dans les pays occidentaux, sclérosés par les débats sur l’immigration, et propose en retour un modèle de société multiculturelle. De la création du concept de « race » à la formation des empires coloniaux, le sociologue britannique soulève quelques grandes questions de notre époque, et vise à faire émerger une réelle alternative aux récits édulcorés de notre passé colonial. En choisissant de mettre en avant la convivialité et le multiculturalisme indiscipliné du centre des grandes métropoles, Paul Gilroy défend une vision cosmopolite inclusive et plaide pour l’avènement d’une société qui refuse de céder aux discours de la peur et à la violence.

En examinant l’invention de catégories hiérarchisantes fondées sur la notion de race, et ses terribles conséquences, il démontre comment les écrits de penseurs tels que Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois ou George Orwell peuvent encore faire avancer les réflexions sur le nationalisme, le postcolonialisme et les questions raciales. Mélancolie postcoloniale fait écho aux luttes postcoloniales d’aujourd’hui, en quête d’une pensée critique exigeante.

Dans Palma africana, l’anthropologue australien Michael Taussig explore la production d’huile de palme en Colombie. Alors que cette dernière envahit tout, des chips au vernis à ongles, l’auteur examine les conséquences écologiques, politiques et sociales de cette exploitation.

Bien que la liste des horreurs induites par la culture du palmier à huile soit longue, nos terminologies habituelles ne permettent plus de rendre compte des réalités qu’elles décrivent. À travers cette déambulation anthropo-poétique au cœur des marécages colombiens, c’est donc la question du langage que l’auteur interroge. Comme William Burroughs, pour qui les mots sont aussi vivants que des animaux et n’aiment pas être maintenus en pages – Michael Taussig souhaite couper ces dernières, et les rendre à leur liberté.

Pensé à partir d’une vie d’exploration philosophique et ethnographique, Palma africana cherche à contrecarrer la banalité de la destruction du monde et offre une vision pénétrante de notre condition humaine. Illustré de photographies prises par l’auteur et écrit avec la verve expérimentale propre à l’anthropologue, ce livre est le Tristes Tropiques de Michael Taussig pour le XXIe siècle.

Traduit de l’anglais par Marc Saint-Upéry.

A political and aesthetic critique of racial capitalism and modes of social experimentation in the form of resistance to the colonial commons.

Stefano Harney (born 1962) is Honorary Professor at The Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia and a Visiting Critic at Yale School of Art. He has held teaching positions in New York, Leicester, London, and Singapore. He now teaches at the Dutch Art Institute. An interdisciplinary scholar, his research spans (the intersections of) social sciences, arts and humanities, as well as the fields of business and management.

Preface by Jack Halberstam.
Collective translation (original title: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Minor Compositions, 2013).

Graphic design: Sophie Demay & Maël Fournier-Comte (In the Shade of a Tree).
 
published in February 2022
 
French edition
12,5 x 19,5 cm (softcover)
208 pages

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind...

Olga Tokarczuk has won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Book International Prize, among many other honors. She is the author of a dozen works of fiction, two collections of essays, and a children's book; her work has been translated into fifty languages.

This publication of “Autoportrait,” translated into French for the first time, is accompanied by a foreword, and a critical and biographical structure by art historian Giovanni Zapperi, showing the singularity of Carla Lonzi's project. Made up of a series of recorded interviews, subsequently transcribed and recomposed to give birth to a particular textual montage, “Autoportrait” is an experimental attempt to reinvent art criticism thanks to a fragmentary discourse and an iconography in which reproductions of works mix with intimate images. An invaluable document on Italian art in the 1960s, “Autoportrait” is a polyphonic book, “a kind of maieutic banquet” to which Carla Lonzi invites us in order to rethink the production of discourse on art and artists.

Interviews with Carla Accardi, Getulio Alviani, Enrico Castellani, Pietro Consagra, Luciano Fabro, Lucio Fontana, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Nigro, Guilio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Mimmo Rotella, Salvatore Scarpita, Guilio Turcato, Cy Twombly...

Under the direction of Patricia Falguières, the “Lectures Maison Rouge” series has as its ambition to propose artist's texts which interrogate at the same time museology, exhibition making, and the work of certain artists themselves.

The life and work of Carla Lonzi (1931–1982) is inseparable from the cultural, political, and social history of Italy in the decades following the Second World War; she occupies a singular position, which today merits reevaluation. A reputed art critic of the 1960s artistic scene, both friend and collaborator of such figures as Carla Accardi, Luciano Fabro, Giulio Paolini, and Jannis Kounellis, she wrote “Autoportrait” in 1969, a “love letter” to the artists and to creation, but also a farewell chorus to art criticism and the art world. The following year she founded Rivolta Femminile, an active feminist collective, thus becoming the central figure of Italian feminism.

A nuanced, feminist, and deeply personal take on beauty culture and YouTube consumerism, in the tradition of Maggie Nelson's Bluets.

As Daphné B. obsessively watches YouTube makeup tutorials and haunts Sephora's website, she's increasingly troubled by the ways in which this obsession contradicts her anti-capitalist and intersectional feminist politics. In this poetic treatise, she rejects the false binaries of traditional beauty standards and delves into the celebrities and influencers, from Kylie to Grimes, and the poets and philosophers, from Anne Boyer to Audre Lorde, who have shaped the reflection she sees in the mirror. At once confessional and essayistic, Made-Upis a meditation on the makeup that colours, that obscures, that highlights who we are and who we wish we could be.

The original French-language edition was a cult hit in Quebec. Translated by Alex Manley—like Daphné, a Montreal poet and essayist—the book's English-language text crackles with life, retaining the flair and verve of the original, and ensuring that a book on beauty is no less beautiful than its subject matter.

Published 2021.

Recorded and transcribed throughout the 1960s, Carla Lonzi’s Self-portrait ruptures the narration of post-war modern art in Italy and beyond. Artmaking struck Lonzi as an invitation to be together in a ‘humanly satisfying way’, and this experiment in art-historical writing is a testament to her belief. Lonzi abolishes the role of the critic, her own, seeking change over self-preservation by theorising against the act of theorising.

The life and work of Carla Lonzi (1931–1982) is inseparable from the cultural, political, and social history of Italy in the decades following the Second World War; she occupies a singular position, which today merits reevaluation. A reputed art critic of the 1960s artistic scene, both friend and collaborator of such figures as Carla Accardi, Luciano Fabro, Giulio Paolini, and Jannis Kounellis, she wrote “Autoportrait” in 1969, a “love letter” to the artists and to creation, but also a farewell chorus to art criticism and the art world. The following year she founded Rivolta Femminile, an active feminist collective, thus becoming the central figure of Italian feminism.

Interviews with Carla Accardi, Getulio Alviani, Enrico Castellani, Pietro Consagra, Luciano Fabro, Lucio Fontana, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Nigro, Guilio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Mimmo Rotella, Salvatore Scarpita, Guilio Turcato, Cy Twombly.

Afterword by Claire Fontaine.
Translated by Allison Grimaldi Donahue.

978-1916425088
105 b&w illustrations
21.6 x 13.9 cm
364 p.
Paperback
November 2021

First French translation of José Esteban Muñoz's field defining work—an intellectual inspiration for a generation of LGBTQ scholars.

Cruiser l'utopie describes a movement, a drifting advance between theory, philosophy, art criticism and personal narrative. The works cited, narrated, are mixed with family or individual narrative and more academic considerations. This practice of queer theory and aesthetics is part of a new interpretation of hope as perceived by philosopher Ernst Bloch, articulated with black radical thought and the poetic research of authors such as Fred Moten and Eileen Myles. 

Muñoz focuses here on the period of the Stonewall revolts (New York, 1969) and analyzes, for example, the works of Frank O'Hara, King Jone/Amiri Baraka, Andy Warhol, Kevin Avance, Samuel R. Delany, Fred Herko, Jill Johnston, Ray Johnson. Queer theory as a study has a new way of researching and writing, a form of hybridity between philosophy and cultural studies. The critique is, as if by anticipation, contained in the counter-normative artistic practice and daily life whose narratives, both subjective and historical, hint at a queer future, a place of transformation and liberation. 

The text, translated from English by Alice Wambergue, is accompanied by a preface by Elisabeth Lebovici and a poem by Fred Moten.

José Esteban Muñoz (1967 - 2013) is a queer scholar and art theorist. Author of The Sense of Brown (published posthumously in 2020), Cruising Utopia, the Aftermath and Elsewhere of Queer Advent (2009), and Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), he edited the collective works Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996) and Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (1997). Muñoz has long taught in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and edited the Sexual Cultures series at New University Press, where he has published works such as Jack Halberstam and Samuel Delany.

At a time when few women could write and most were denied a formal education, Hildegard von Bingen became a legendary healer, visionary, musician, artist, poet, and saint. In Physica, Hildegard presents nine "books" of healing systems: Plants, Elements, Trees, Stones, Fish, Birds, Animals, Reptiles, and Metals. In each book she discusses the qualities of these natural creations and elaborates on their medicinal use, explaining how to prepare and apply different remedies. With its emphasis on balancing the humors, Physica has strong affinity with the Oriental medical approaches gaining great respect today.

The modern reader interested in natural healing will recognize the enormous truth in the theories of this twelth-century physician, many of which prove effective today, serving as a reminder that our cures for illness depend on our natural world and our place in it.

As Hildegard states in Physica, "With earth was the human being created. All the elements served mankind and, sensing that he was alive, they busied themselves in aiding his life in every way."

Translated by Priscilla Throop a Latin and Greek scholar, she holds a master's degree from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, as well as a Certificate of Advanced Theological Studies from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge. She is a member of the Vermont Classical Language Association and is currently translating Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae. She lives in Charlotte, Vermont.

From iconic feminist writer Gail Scott comes Permanent Revolution, a collection of new essays gathered alongside a recreation of her groundbreaking text, Spaces Like Stairs. In conversation with other writers working in queer/feminist avant-garde trajectories, including l'écriture-au-féminin in Québec and continental New Narrative, these essays provide an evolutionary snapshot of Scott's ongoing prose experiment that hinges the matter of writing to ongoing social upheaval. Scott herself points to the heart of this book, writing, "Where there is no emergency, there is likely no real experiment."

With a Foreword by Zoe Whittall and an Afterword by Margaret Christakos.

Gail Scott is the author of Spare Parts (1981), Heroine (1987, re-issued in 2019 with an introduction by Eileen Myles), Main Brides (1993), My Paris (1999), Spare Parts Plus Two (2002), and The Obituary (2010). Her essays are collected in Spaces Like Stairs (1989) and in La Théorie, un dimanche (1988) which was translated into English as Theory, A Sunday (2013). Scott is co-editor of the New Narrative anthology: Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004). Her translation of Michael Delisle's Le désarroi du matelot was shortlisted for a 2001 Governor General's Literary Award. A memoir, based in Lower Manhattan during the early Obama years, is forthcoming. Scott lives in Montréal.

The seventh entry in an ongoing series of anthologies, this book features rare poems alongside new essays and interviews that engage the artists and themes explored elsewhere in Blank Forms' public programming.

Where most of prior entries, including Aspirations of Madness (2020), Intelligent Life (2019), and Music From The World Tomorrow (2018), have foregrounded little-seen or newly translated archival materials, this iteration privileges new texts produced specifically for the publication. These include an in-depth retrospective interview with the idiosyncratic Texan singer-songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen conducted by ICA Philadelphia chief curator Anthony Elms; a conversation between multidisciplinary writers—and longtime friends—Thulani Davis and Jessica Hagedorn on the occasion of Davis's latest poetry collection, Nothing but the Music, recently published by Blank Forms Editions; a recent discussion between composer Sarah Hennies and cellist Judith Hamann about their recent collaboration, which is included on Hamann's Music for Cello and Humming; and a conversation with composer-performers Tashi Wada and Charles Curtis, on the heels of a recent compilation of Curtis's work, Performances & Recordings 1998– 2018, produced by Wada. Each of these interviews shed light on the particularities of the artists' careers and methods in terms both formal and casual, practical and theoretical. 

In addition to these dialogues, this book features new critical reflections on three artists whose work Blank Forms has presented: the legendary jazz percussionist and healer Milford Graves, by Ciarán Finlayson; English multimedia artist Graham Lambkin and his beguiling 2011 album Amateur Doubles, by Alan Licht; and the UK-based experimental music trio Still House Plants, by Joe Bucciero. These articles mine historical, social, and theoretical contexts, filling gaps in the existing literature on the given artist-subjects. New and archival poems and writing about poetry complement these interviews and essays, including rare texts by Davis, Hagedorn, and René Daumal—the latter translated by Louise Landes Levi—and a suite of Auto-Mythological writings commissioned from Chicago-based composer and musician Angel Bat Dawid.

The work of Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) is considered today an invaluable testimony on the deportation and the holocaust of the Romani people during the Second World War. For the very first time, this publication considers equal to her graphic work the notes she wrote on the back of her drawings and paintings. Stojka's particular use of language, phonetically adapted from her knowledge of German, is here transcribed and translated into English, while giving access to both sides of her works.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Malmö Konsthall in 2021.

Ceija Stojka was born in 1933 in Austria to a family of Romani horse traders, the Lovaras. She was still a child when the nazi racial laws drove her into the hell of the concentration camps for 24 months. As a survivor, she covered up this trauma with a heavy silence for almost 40 years. In the 1980s, facing other tragic circumstances in her life, the denial of the Romani holocaust and the resurgence of extreme right-wing racist ideas in Austria, she felt an urgent need to testify. She wrote at first, then started to draw and eventually found her way by blending the two as a self-taught artist. She calls upon us, through her visions of childhood, to never turn a blind eye on what happened, and to remain vigilant as to what may emerge again. Ceija Stojka died in 2013 in Vienna.

Edited by François Piron.
Texts by Ceija Stojka, Noëlig Le Roux, Irka Cederberg.
Graphic design: Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé.

Divya Victor documents how immigrants and Americans navigate the liminal sites of everyday living: lawns, curbs, and sidewalks, undergirded by violence but also constantly repaved with new possibilities of belonging. Curb witnesses immigrant survival, familial bonds, and interracial parenting in the context of nationalist and white-supremacist violence against South Asians. The book refutes the binary of the model minority and the monstrous, dark "other" by reclaiming the throbbing, many-tongued, vermillion heart of kith.

"In poems of brilliant aesthetic diversity and haunting imagery ('Stop bath & rinse, / then hang up this feeling/ by its arms'), Curb illuminates and challenges the boundaries that divide and discipline us."—Evie Shockley, NPR

Divya Victor is the author of Kith, Natural Subjects (Winner of the Bob Kaufman Award), Unsub, and Things To Do With Your Mouth. Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including, more recently, BOMB, the New Museum's The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, and boundary2. Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Czech. She teaches at Michigan State University.

"In 1968-69 I wanted to die, that is to say, stop living, being killed, but it was blocked on all sides," wrote Hélène Cixous, esteemed French feminist, playwright, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. Instead of suicide, she began to dream of writing a tomb for herself. This tomb became a work that is a testament to Cixous's life and spirit and a secret book, the first book she ever authored. Originally written in 1970, Tombe is a Homerian recasting of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis in the thickets of Central Park, a book Cixous provocatively calls the "all-powerful-other of all my books, it sparks them off, makes them run, it is their Messiah."

Masterfully translated by Laurent Milesi, Tombe preserves the sonic complexities and intricate wordplay at the core of Cixous's writing, and reveals the struggles, ideas, and intents at the center of her work. With a new prologue by the author, this is a necessary document in the development of Cixous's aesthetic as a writer and theorist, and will be eagerly welcomed by readers as a crucial building block in the foundation of her later work .

Seventeen interviews conducted with Med Hondo over a period of almost half a century, most of the interviews originally published in French were translated into English.

To read Med Hondo opens us up to many perspectives: to his work and its time-historical contexts, to his interests and obsessions, to his standpoint with regard to the intertwining of politics, economics, and culture. Med Hondo describes the school of pronunciation until such point as the slightest accent is erased; he observes the insults immigrants in France have had to tolerate, and fuses their stories and histories with the present; he builds bridges to the Caribbean and to the Western Sahara, to Algeria and Burkina Faso, to Niger and Senegal, to South Africa and the USA. This publication aims to draw attention to Med Hondo's cinema and legacy.

The book originated in the long-term project Cours, cours, camarade, le vieux monde est derrière toi—Run, comrade, run, the old world is behind you—The Cinema of Med Hondo.

Franco-Mauritanian director, screenwriter, producer and actor, also known for his work in dubbing, Med Hondo (1936-2019) is one of the great figures of African cinema. His militant work denounces neo-colonialism, racism, the rupture between the peoples of Africa, immigration policies and the resulting social violence.

Translated by Simon Schuchat and Ainsley Morse. With nearly 300 pages of prose and poetry, SOVIET TEXTS is the first representative selected volume of Prigov's poetry and experimental prose texts to appear in English. It includes short stories about amazing heroes of the revolution and after, and poetic sequences that expose literature, history, and culture to the stark light of a post-modern Gogolian laughter, some of which became cult-classics for his generation—such as the cycle "Image of Reagan in Soviet Literature." A selection of post-Soviet writings, concerned with human mortality and human sinfulness, is also included. While Prigov's writing is very definitely of the Soviet and post-Soviet world, it is consonant with contemporaneous avant-garde writing elsewhere.  

Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov (1940-2007) was a leading writer of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet era. Almost until the collapse of the Soviet Union, his writing circulated solely in unofficial samizdat editions and overseas publications. He was briefly detained in a Soviet psychiatric hospital in 1986 but released after protests from establishment literary figures. A founder of Moscow Conceptualism, Prigov was a prolific writer, in all genres, as well as an accomplished visual artist. Described by some critics as Russia's ultimate post-modern trickster, Prigov mastered many personas all of which come together in what is finally an enigmatic, Warhol-esque artistic mask. Indeed, during the late Soviet period he mounted a critique of ideological culture in a similar manner to western Pop Art's engagement with consumer culture. His performative work lay the seeds for much contemporary Russian socially-engaged art, and Prigov directly encouraged and inspired the next generation of conceptual dissident artists, such as the well-known Voina (War) group and, later, Pussy Riot, who dedicated their intervention at the 2018 World Cup in Moscow to Prigov's memory. Prigov died in Moscow in 2007, at the age of 66; a lifespan longer than average for a Russian male of his generation. En route to a performance with the Voina group—for which he planned to read poems inside a wardrobe while being carried up the stairs of Moscow University—he collapsed in the subway after a heart attack.

Translated from the French by Jonathan Larson.

On the 50th anniversary of its publication, The Song Cave presents the first English translation of Francis Ponge's NIOQUE OF THE EARLY-SPRING. Ostensibly a book written to honor the season itself and the cycle of time, upon its first publication in Paris, May 1968, these notes took on a greater metaphorical meaning within this context, addressing the need for new beginnings and revolution.  

April is not always the cruelest month. In these stray notations dated early April 1950, Ponge provides a latter-day version of Stravinsky's 'Sacre du printemps' or of William Carlos Williams' 'Spring and All', a vernal enactment of all the resurrectional energies of a spring-time-to-come, as witnessed firsthand at the farmhouse of 'La Fleurie' in southern France. When subsequently published in Tel Que in May 1968, eighteen years later, Ponge's rural, pastoral text now acquired a specific urban history and Utopianism, its Lucretian 'Nioque, ' or gnosis, now speaking to the gnomic revolutionary slogans of the Left Bank barricades: 'Be realistic, demand the impossible, ' 'Beneath the cobblestones, the beach.' Jonathan Larson's careful engagement with Ponge manages to seize what is most prosaic about his poetry—its fierce communism of the ordinary, its insistence that taking the part of things means taking words at their most etymological everydayness. - Richard Sieburth  

This startlingly fresh and necessary document of the 1950s by Francis Ponge comes to us via the all too rare feat of true poetic reenactment. Understanding that each poet creates language anew, Jonathan Larson has found a poetics suitable for the occasion of Ponge's own poetic logic In this rendering, Larson's absolute care and attention to syllabic weight and measure, to the syntax and length of each line as it unwinds, allows us—as readers—to come into the drama of a text newly made, in other words, to discover a new poem in its very making. Yet, none of this comes at the cost of accuracy or through the subjugation of the original at the hands of one wielding the imperial language This is no mean feat in this day and age and, by way of Larson's exquisite ear, we are again given the poignancy and urgency of Ponge's own moment. - Ammiel Alcalay

Published for the first time in English, the debut novel of Marguerite Duras, renowned author of The Lover and The War, is the story of a family's moral reckoning and a daughter's fall from grace

Marguerite Duras rose to global stardom with her erotic masterpiece The Lover (L'Amant), which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt, has over a million copies in print in English, has been translated into forty-three languages, and was adapted into a canonical film in 1992. While almost all of Duras's novels have been translated into English, her debut The Impudent Ones (Les Impudents) has been a glaring exception, until now. Fans of Duras will be thrilled to discover the germ of her bold, vital prose and signature blend of memoir and fiction in this intense and mournful story of the Taneran family, which introduces Duras's classic themes of familial conflict, illicit romance, and scandal in the sleepy suburbs and southwest provinces of France.

Duras's great gift was her ability to bring vivid and passionate life to characters with whom society may not have sympathized, but with whom readers certainly do. With storytelling that evokes in equal parts beauty and brutality, The Impudent Ones depicts the scalding effects of seduction and disrepute on the soul of a young French girl.

Including an essay on the story behind The Impudent Ones by Jean Vallier —biographer of the late Duras—which contextualizes the origins of Duras's debut novel, this one-of-a-kind publishing endeavor will delight established Duras fans and a new generation of readers alike.

The book contextualizes the Creativity Exercises—an amateur art course led by neo-avant-garde artists Miklós Erdély and Dóra Maurer in Budapest from 1975 to 1977—within the postwar intellectual networks that connected artists, architects, educators, sociologists and other socially engaged professionals, fostering the exchange of ideas and concepts and making connections between different fields of knowledge.

How do people learn, what do they know, and how does it influence their personality, their behavior and their position in society? These questions were the focus of the research project and exhibition series entitled “Creativity Exercises” between 2014 and 2016, which displayed historical and contemporary art projects experimenting with alternative forms of learning, spanning three exhibition stations: Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, tranzit.hu in Budapest, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

The first part of the publication consists of historical texts translated into English for the first time, including the exercise descriptions that functioned as the curriculum for the Creativity Exercises, studies written on the methods employed in the Creativity Exercises course, and parallel models for progressive pedagogies and art education. In the second part of the book, newly commissioned essays offer historical and transnational context for the “case study” of the Creativity Exercises course. The impact that such “creativity exercises” had on aesthetic, educational and institutional concepts, and the impulses for participation, co-creation, knowledge production and exchange that they continue to give—even beyond the realm of art—are the central themes of the book.

Texts by Ferenc Mérei & Tamás St. Auby, László Beke, Ildikó Enyedi, Miklós Erdély, Éva Forgács, Janna Graham, Dóra Hegyi, Sándor Hornyik, Zsolt K. Horváth, Emese Kürti, Zsuzsa László, Dóra Maurer, Marion von Osten, Axel Wieder.

The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal is the portrait of a true humanist who made a career out of compassion. Hailed as a virtuoso writer and a "revolutionary whore," Grisélidis Réal (1929-2005) chanced into prostitution at thirty-one after an upper-class upbringing in Switzerland. Serving clients from all walks of life, Réal applied the anarcho-Marxist dictum "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" to her profession, charging sliding-scale fees determined by her client's incomes and complexity of their sexual tastes.

Réal went on to become a militant champion of sexual freedom and prostitutes' rights. She has described prostitution as "an art, and a humanist science," noting that "the only authentic prostitution is that mastered by great technical artists...who practice this form of native craft with intelligence, respect, imagination, heart..."

This volume includes lengthy dialogues from 1979-1981 with Réal conducted by journalist and author Jean-Luc Henning, in which she eloquently discusses the theoretical implications of sex-positive whoring and relates her experiences both inside and outside the profession: from her lengthy love affair with the "Berber" to such "psychological" and "special" clients as the "moldy rhinoceros."

The "Little Black Book" that rounds out this book is drawn from the logs in which Réal kept track of her many clients, from "Pedro, hilarious fat Spaniard, devoted, simple, honest, fat peasant face, 70F" to "Pierre 8 (from Basel), blue eyes, fifties, slightly balding, cultivated, sweet-violent...licks my finger after I remove it from his anus...100-400F." It is a journal that not only chronicles Réal's working life, but offers a clinically direct, investigative sociological analysis of the sexual subcultures of her time.

Translated by Ariana Reines.

A heart-rending meditation on aging, grief, and the universal experience of facing death.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, U.C. Berkeley, and at Harvard, and taught at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, from 1958-1972. In solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), Adnan began to resist the political implications of writing in French and became a painter. Then, through her participation in the movement against the Vietnam War (1959-1975), she began to write poetry and became, in her words, "an American poet." In 1972, she returned to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers—first for Al Safa, then for L'Orient le Jour. Her novel Sitt Marie-Rose, published in Paris in 1977, won the France-Pays Arabes award and has been translated into more than ten languages. In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris. Adnan is the author of more than a dozen books in English, including Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986), The Arab Apocalypse (1989), In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), and Sea and Fog (2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry. In 2014, she was awarded one of France's highest cultural honors: l'Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. Many of her poems have been put to music by Tania Leon, Henry Treadgill, Gavin Bryars, Zad Moultaka, Annea Lockwood, and Bun Ching Lam. Her paintings have been widely exhibited, including Documenta 13, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, The New Museum, and Museum der Moderne Salzburg. In 2014, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective of her work.

The twentieth anniversary edition of an early autofiction classic.

Born in Virginia and raised in Georgia, Douglas A. Martin moved to New York at 25 and now resides in Brooklyn. Douglas's writing spans fiction and nonfiction, traversing poetry and prose. Martin's works have been translated into Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese. Past books include: Once You Go Back (Lambda Award nomination in the Gay Memoir/Biography category), Branwell (Ferro-Grumley Award finalist), a book of stories, and volumes of poetry. An early autofiction, Outline of My Lover, was named an International Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement and adapted in part by the Forsythe Company for their ballet and live film "Kammer/Kammer." Publications with Nightboat Books include a book-length essay and lyric study, Acker, and the triptych of novellas, Your Body Figured.

Ghost Image is made up of sixty-three short essays—meditations, memories, fantasies, and stories bordering on prose poems—and not a single image. Hervé Guibert's brief, literary rumination on photography was written in response to Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, but its deeply personal contents go far beyond that canonical text. Some essays talk of Guibert's parents and friends, some describe old family photographs and films, and spinning through them all are reflections on remembrance, narcissism, seduction, deception, death, and the phantom images that have been missed.

Both a memoir and an exploration of the artistic process, Ghost Image not only reveals Guibert's particular experience as a gay artist captivated by the transience and physicality of his media and his life, but also his thoughts on the more technical aspects of his vocation. In one essay, Guibert searches through a cardboard box of family portraits for clues—answers, or even questions—about the lives of his parents and more distant relatives. Rifling through vacation snapshots and the autographed images of long-forgotten film stars, Guibert muses, "I don't even recognize the faces, except occasionally that of an aunt or great-aunt, or the thin, fair face of my mother as a young girl." In other essays, he explains how he composes his photographs, and how—in writing—he seeks to escape and correct the inherent limits of his technique, to preserve those images lost to his technical failings as a photographer.
With strains of Jean Genet and recurring themes that speak to the work of contemporary artists across a range of media, Guibert's Ghost Image is a beautifully written, melancholic ode to existence and art forms both fleeting and powerful—a unique memoir at the nexus of family, memory, desire, and photography.

Hervé Guibert (1955-91) was born and worked in Paris. A noted photographer, he also contributed articles on culture to the French newspaper Le Monde and wrote works of fiction and books on photography.

The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse—by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals—propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.

Like Roberto Bolano's 2666 or Faulkner's novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world saturated with mythology and violence—real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it's a world that becomes more and more terrifying the deeper you explore it.

Translated by Sophie Hughes.