Universal Hedonics

Cactus erotica. Dykes taking T erotica. Handmade rope erotica. 
Tangentially alien erotica. Clit long like laffy taffy erotica. Death erotica.

In L.A. Warman's anti-sequel to her award-winning debut Whore Foods, two anonymous lovers traverse the vast and lonely desert which has blighted most of the continent. In their possession is the gift of the Vapors, a mystical substance which allows them to transcend death. Yet as they explore the desert realm and each other, they cannot help but wonder if their entwined destiny resides somewhere beyond transcendence.

LA Warman is a poet, performer, and teacher currently based in New York City. Warman is the author of Whore Foods, an erotic novella which recieved a Lambda Literary Award in 2020. She is the founder of Warman School, a non-accredited and body based learning center. The Warman School has taught over 500 students online and in person. She teaches topics such as erotics, death, depression, and god. Pitchfork named her piece ADMSDP one of the top 100 songs of 2020. She has had performance and installation work in shows at MOCA Cleveland, ICA Philadelphia, Time-Based Art Festival, Poetry Project, and Open Engagement. Warman has presented performative poetics research at Brown University, Hamilton College, Reed College, Hampshire College, and others. She is a founding organizer of the Free Ashley Now survivor defense campaign.

"This book is an instant waypoint on my return to the revelation: if nothing else, my tears have a place where they belong—mixed into the dust of others." — Wilmer Wilson IV

A long lost poem purportedly by Rimbaud is finally made available in English.

Referenced only in a few letters of Paul Verlaine, The Spiritual Hunt is Arthur Rimbaud's forgotten masterwork, a poem in five parts that explored the mystic philosophy that guided the young poet's heart and hand. Considered lost for years, a typewritten manuscript appeared in Paris in the late 1920s, circulating around a close-knit group of booksellers, poets, and playwrights. Yet it wasn't until 1949 that Mercure de France took the initiative to publish the unauthenticated galley and unleashed a literary controversy that shook France. Sides were drawn, with Andre Breton leading the charge of forgery, calling the work an utter hoax, and others defending it as legitimate and an essential key to understanding Rimbaud and his work. Bookstores were raided for copies, critics were skewered in journals, and tempers flared on radio and in print, but no conclusive judgement could be drawn and Mercure de France withdrew the work from publication and pulped all the copies they could find.

Now, seventy-five years after its initial imbroglio, The Spiritual Hunt is available in English for the first time with a facsimile letterpress edition of the original. Featuring Pascal Pia's original introduction along with an edifying afterword by translator Emine Ersoy.

A chance encounter with two older fellows at the movie theater has the young vagabond Ligie on his way to Lot-8, a trailer park down the road with an unconventional local reputation. There, Ligie meets Big Joe and his extended Lot-8-family: a tight-knit community of freaks all sectioned together by the landlord at the outskirts of town.

Weaving together colorful characters and outright carnal debauchery, BIG JOE is a radical pastoral of community, desire, and the strangeness of knowing one another.

Featuring color illustrations by Drake Carr and Sabrina Bockler.

Cover illustration by Drake Carr

Samuel R. Delany is the author of numerous books and novels, including the Nebula Award-winning Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, as well as Nova (now in a Library of America anthology) and Dhalgren. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. Other erotic novels include Equinox, Hogg, The Mad Man, Throu gh the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, and Shoat Rumblin. Delany was the subject of a 2007 documentary, The Polymath, by Fred Barney Taylor, and he has written a popular creative writing textbook, About Writing. He is the author of the widely taught Times Square Red/Times Square Blue and numerous books of essays; his book-length autobiographical essay, The Motion of Light in Water, won a Hugo Award in 1989. As e-books, paperbacks, or audiobooks, his works are available through his website at: www.samueldelany.com

The Queen’s Ball ingests taboo as fuel for a baroque and spiraling story of love in its most prismatic and absurd iterations. Through frightening distortions and hallucinogenic twists of fate, a demented circus of artists, writers, gender-hustling aesthetes, and religious fanatics collude in a glorious discombobulation of propriety and convention. I have never laughed this much at a novel that could somehow shock even the most irreverent of libertines, demanding, at times, absolute disgust. Truly nasty work. Iconic. —Juliana Huxtable

Translated by Kit Schluter
Afterword and notes by Thibaud Croisy, translated by Olivia Baes

Set among the flamboyant demi-monde of the 1970s Paris underground, The Queens’ Ball follows the narrator Copi in his attempt to write a novel as life comes undone around him. His Roman lover Pietro is stolen by a Marilyn Monroe impersonator whose coterie take up residence in Copi’s flat and pump out low-budget pornographic rags and films. His friends leave him, burnt out from the theatrical excess of the decade. And worst of all his editor keeps calling him, demanding to know where the book is. Propelled by Copi’s careening prose and incisive humor, The Queens’ Ball swerves from Paris to Ibiza to New York and back again in a whirlwind frenzy of love, loss, and madness. Featuring an illuminating critical appendix by Copi’s current French editor, Thibaud Croisy, Kit Schluter’s rhapsodic translation marks the début of Copi’s world-renowned fiction in English.

The Queen’s Ball is a heedless novel of transformation of bodies and tenses, a novel of enormity and loss which is, in the end, about writing a novel. Copi is a feckless romantic-his theme is the persistence of love in the phantasmagoria. His tender psychos hurtle through increasingly outré adventures that seem to expand and contract like accordions. Here is crime à la française. Here is a great queen’s verbal aggression, radiant detail, and joyous destructive energy. —Robert Glück

The Queens’ Ball is probably Copi’s masterpiece... By 1978, Copi was already an aesthetic: The Queens’ Ball was the magnet, the inverted whirlpool that brought that aesthetic to the surface. —César Aira

In the 2090s, Earth is somehow still here. Drones and clones are big business and Henries Ickles, debonair New Los Angeles infoarchitect, wants in on the action. Metaphysical theories are put into practice, invisible art is critiqued, quasicrystals are crafted, yogurt is spilled. From diplomatic misadventures with metallic herds in RealSweden to an underwater rendezvous in the free domes of MiamiVII, Ickles, ad Infinitum is a compendium of the exuberant and the abject, a refracted hologram of the absurdities of cultural production that swerves between incisive ode and knowing lampoon.

Mark von Schlegell has been pushing the envelope with independently-published experimental fiction and theory since the 1990s. He was born in New York, moved to L.A. in 2000, and currently lives in Cologne. His first novel, Venusia (Semiotext(e), 2005) was honor's listed for the Otherwise Award in Science Fiction.

It goes like this: lower and lower and lower and... Bring down all these towers! You're sinking into this. I'm alone and we don't care. Am I just passing time?

In 2015, artist Patty Chang (1972) followed the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, the longest aqueduct in the world, which brings water from southern to northern China. While walking, she collected her urine in plastic bottles, drinking their contents before refilling them, in turn drawing a connection between the large-scale infrastructural attempt to control the flow of water and the uncontrollable flows of her own body. Once back in Boston, Chang began making a series of portable urinary devices from discarded plastic bottles, which were then hand-blown in New York by glass-blower Amy Lemaire. In fashioning them from discarded plastic and rendering them permanent in glass, the devices channel Chang’s unfolding ruminations on water as a point of connection between geopolitics, human excess and waste. Designed by Sabo day, this indexical publication is the first book dedicated to depicting the series of sixty-four sculptures in its entirety. It was published on the occasion of Patty Chang’s exhibition at A Tale of A Tub, which ran from September 14–November 3, 2024.

Through more than 500 images by 95 photographers, the Musée de Grenoble's collection of photographs from Antoine de Galbert's collection and his foundation offers an impressive panorama of our times and the decisive role played by photography in shaping our perceptions and contemporary mythologies.

Works by Aalam, Bani Abidi, Antoine d'Agata, Lucien Aigner, Pilar Albarracín, Yolanda Andrade, Sammy Baloji, Ion Bîrlădeanu, Eric Baudelaire, Philippe Bazin, Guillaume Binet, Alain Bizos, Antoni Campana, Mario Carnicelli, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, Chieh-Jen Chen, Roman Cieslewicz, Christian Courrèges, David Damoison, Philippe De Gobert, Luc Delahaye, Bernard Descamps, Jean-Marie Donat, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Sandra Eleta, Fouad Elkoury, Charles Fréger, Alberto García-Alix, Laurence Geai, Agnes Geoffray, Julien Gester, Stephan Gladieu, David Goldblatt, Hengameh Golestan, Cosmin Gradinaru, Guillaume Herbaut, Chester Higgins, Kati Horna, John Isaacs, Olivier Jobard, Alain Keler, Yevgeny Khaldeï, Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Oleg Kulik, Olivier Laban-Mattei, Stéphane Lagoutte, Dorothea Lange, Le Tiers Visible, Arthur Leipzig, Alexandre Lewkowicz, Pascal Maître, Yuri Mechitov, Davood Maeili, Edouard Méhomé, Georges Melet, Lívia Melzi, Boris Mikhaïlov, Lisette Model, Etienne Montes, Yan Morvan, Genevieve Naylor, Vladimir Nikitin, Martin Parr, Paolo Pellegrin, Mathieu Pernot, Gilles Raynaldy, Marc Riboud, Sophie Ristelhueber, Hugo Schmölz & Karl Hugo Schmölz, Chantal Stoman, Paul Strand, Mikhael Subotzky, Barthélémy Toguo, Tomasz Tomaszewski, James-Iroha Uchechukwu, Alex Van Gelder, Erwan Venn, Weegee, Where dogs run, Sue Williamson, Wiktoria Wojciechowska, Pavel Wolberg, Tom Wood, Patrick Zachmann, Miron Zownir.

Texts by Antoine de Galbert, Guy Tosatto, Noëlig Le Roux, Antoine Champenois, Joséphine Givodan.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the musée de Grenoble from December 2023 to March 2024.