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From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability.

At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.

The contributors to Otherwise Worlds investigate the complex relationships between settler colonialism and anti-Blackness to explore the political possibilities that emerge from such inquiries. Pointing out that presumptions of solidarity, antagonism, or incommensurability between Black and Native communities are insufficient to understand the relationships between the groups, the volume's scholars, artists, and activists look to articulate new modes of living and organizing in the service of creating new futures. Among other topics, they examine the ontological status of Blackness and Indigeneity, possible forms of relationality between Black and Native communities, perspectives on Black and Indigenous sociality, and freeing the flesh from the constraints of violence and settler colonialism.

Throughout the volume's essays, art, and interviews, the contributors carefully attend to alternative kinds of relationships between Black and Native communities that can lead toward liberation. In so doing, they critically point to the importance of Black and Indigenous conversations for formulating otherwise worlds.

Contributors. Maile Arvin, Marcus Briggs-Cloud, J. Kameron Carter, Ashon Crawley, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Chris Finley, Hotvlkuce Harjo, Sandra Harvey, Chad B. Infante, Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, Lindsay Nixon, Kimberly Robertson, Jared Sexton, Andrea Smith, Cedric Sunray, Se’mana Thompson, Frank B. Wilderson

In Juggling , Stewart Lawrence Sinclair explores the four-thousand-year history and practice of juggling as seen through his life as a juggler. Sinclair—who learned to juggle as a child and paid his way through college by busking—shares his experiences of taking up juggling after an episode of suicidal ideation, his time juggling on the streets, and ultimately finding comfort in juggling during the COVID-19 pandemic. In many ways, this is a book about loss and recovery. From his own juggling story to clowns braving military checkpoints in Bosnia and Rwanda to perform in refugee camps to contemporary avant-garde performances, Sinclair shows how the universal language of juggling provides joy as well as a respite from difficulties during hard times.

Throughout this book-length poem, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist.

In Or, on being the other woman, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life. Throughout this book-length poem, White writes through a hybrid of poetry, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist. She considers black social life—from art and motherhood to trap music and love—as unspeakably troubling and reflects on the degree to which it strands and punishes black women. She also explores what constitutes sexual freedom and the rewards and dangers that come with it. White meditates on trap music and the ways artists such as Future and Meek Mill and the sonic waves of the drum machine convey desire and the black experience. Charting the pressures of ordinary black womanhood, White pushes the limits of language, showing how those limits can be the basis for new modes of expression.

While the stock image of the anarchist as a masked bomber or brick thrower prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure should be a printer at a printing press. In Letterpress Revolution, Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of printers, whose materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Ferguson shows how printers—whether working at presses in homes, offices, or community centers—arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers, and blank space within the architecture of the page. Printers' extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and the radical ideas they published created dynamic and entangled networks that brought the decentralized anarchist movements together. Printers and presses did more than report on the movement; they were constitutive of it, and their vitality in anarchist communities helps explain anarchism’s remarkable persistence in the face of continuous harassment, arrest, assault, deportation, and exile. By inquiring into the political, material, and aesthetic practices of anarchist print culture, Ferguson points to possible methods for cultivating contemporary political resistance.

A bracing novel that asks how far we would go for the ones we love—and what we would do to destroy the ones we hate. 

Lisa has lost custody of her young twin boys. Caught between the French legal system’s sluggish bureaucracy and her sinister, scheming in-laws, she’s alone and lost, an Argentine migrant in rural France picking grapes for a pittance, only allowed to see her children in supervised visits once a month. Scapegoated and outcast, destitute and desperate, Lisa decides to take radical action: early one morning, she sneaks into her in-laws’ farmhouse, takes back her children, sets the barn ablaze, and makes her escape.

What follows is a white-knuckled road trip that explores human beings pushed to the edge. Clearly, Lisa is not in her right mind, and as Harwicz deftly mingles a chorus of contradictory voices into her very unreliable narration, the reader comes to regard the protagonist with an unsettling mixture of sympathy and suspicion. Written in savage, chiseled prose, Unfit shoots off, a gripping chase that questions all our assumptions—and points out our hypocrisies— about motherhood, custody rights, love, violence, anti-semitism, and migration. The latest novel by the acclaimed author of Die, My Love (soon to be adapted to a film starring Jennifer Lawrence), Unfit is addictively terrifying, savagely sophisticated, and shockingly brilliant.

Translated from Spanish by Jessie Mendez Sayer

The collected life-work of an interdisciplinary writer, performer, and central figure in the Black Gay cultural arts and AIDS movements.

In this timely collection of poetry, plays, fiction, and performance texts, Assotto Saint draws upon music and incantation, his Haitian heritage, and a politics of liberation to weaves together a tapestry of literature that celebrates life in the face of death. Influential to contemporary writers such as Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, and Melvin Dixon, Sacred Spells is Saint’s crucial legacy–five hundred incandescent pages of painful, lyric writing that exemplifies the visceral, spiritual dimensions of an artistic practice that’s integral to Black and LGBTQ activist movements worldwide, both historic and present.

A partly autobiographical novel that the German surrealist artist and author Unica Zürn (1916-1970) wrote for her ten-year-old daughter in 1953, although it would never be published in her lifetime. This is the first translation of the tale from German into English.

Unica Zürn tells the story of fifteen-year-old motherless Katrin, an aspiring writer, who lives with her father, also a writer. The novel is set in an imaginary world, a metropolis called Linit, split into three levels: Oberstadt (Hightown), Mittelstadt (Middletown) and Unterstadt (Lowtown), overlooked by a Volcano where the artists live and crossed by the river Emil. Presented as a book for children, apparently written for her own daughter (named Katrin), Katrin also draws on the personal biography of Zürn herself, in terms of her relationship with her father and the city of Berlin after WWII, and her experience with people on the margins of a society characterised by great tensions.

About Unica Zürn 
Nora Berta "Unika" Ruth Zürn, originally known as Ruth, was born on 6 July 1916 in Berlin. Raised in Berlin, Zürn had a contentious relationship with her mother, while she idolized her absent father. While at school she published her first short stories in magazines for young people, and in 1933 she began to work at the UFA film studios in Berlin (acronym for Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft, a major German film company producing and distributing motion pictures from 1917 until the end of the Nazi era). In 1942 she married and had two children, Katrin and Christian. Shortly after, she lost the custody of her children. For the next few years she survived by writing short stories for newspapers and radio plays. After the war, she became part of the Bohemian group of Berlin and began to call herself Unika (after her aunt Unika Pudor). She frequented the artistic milieu revolving around the DADA-surrealist cabaret Die Badewanne ("The Bathtub"). In 1953, Zürn met the artist Hans Bellmer, best known for his disassembled dolls in unconventional poses directed at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany, and became his muse. They lived together in Paris for many years, albeit in a conflictual relationship. Zürn concentrated on producing poetic anagrams supplemented by drawings, thus developing her own multidimensional surreal style. From the late 1950s, she suffered from forms of anxiety, later diagnosed as schizophrenia, and produced a wealth of remarkable textual and visual material while in psychiatric institutions across Germany and France. From 1956 to 1964, Zürn had four solo exhibitions of her drawings, and her work was included in the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme. The exploration of the unconscious dimension would increasingly lose its liberating, positive aspect and turn into a fixation on a narrow space, one in which the self is tormented by distressing visions. Her psychological difficulties inspired much of her writing, especially Der Mann im Jasmin (The Man of Jasmine, published in English in 1971). Other published texts by Zürn include Hexentexte (1954) and Dunkler Frühling (Dark Spring, 1967). Zürn died on 19 October 1970 in Paris, throwing herself from the sixth floor.