Zines

tender stains is a seasonal poetry zine that explores poetry as stains of memory and time. each issue moves through the seasons, holding memories as it does. every issue takes on a new physical format. 

issue 03, 'a winter memory', brings the words of elida silvey, kankisi apaak, willow swan, naja surattee, dilara koz and molly maltman in a compact envelope holding an arrangement of papers.

Published on the occasion of  '[…] kept in private. Making it public.' an installation by Lieven Lahaye, as part of the 9th Artishok Biennial, curated by Brigit Arop and Margit Säde.  "It’s one thing to assemble a collection and display it in your private space, something else entirely to reveal what has been kept in private. Making it public. I'm standing in front of my bookshelf, looking up the meaning of 'private'. Private is still a complex word but its extraordinary historical revaluation is for the most part long completed."

Designed by: Ott Metusala

The Anarchist Review of Books publishes intelligent, non-academic writing with an anti-authoritarian perspective. We are dedicated to transforming society through literature and through open, incisive critique of the media, politics, history, art and writing that shape our world.

Cover image: Fever by David Wojnarowicz 1988-89. Gelatin silver prints. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P·P·O·W, New York

In this essay, written in English and French, Vilnius-based artist Anastasia Sosunova unfolds her research on the history of printing, from Daniel Hopfer’s etchings to underground printers from the Soviet era, and connected the printing “matrix” to the mother figure, referencing Ocean Vuong and Guadalupe Nettel.

Ocean Vuong writes, “I’m not a monster. I’m a mother”; Jeanette Winterson: “She was a monster but she was my monster.” And thus, the monster I refer to is the one that gives birth to the prints that shape the tongues, fears, and beliefs of vast groups of people. Books of marvels and beasts, now considered emblems of a dark age of ignorance and superstition, proliferated in the 15th and 16th centuries thanks to emergent printing technologies and the influential naturalists they helped create. In the illustrations of scientific explorations by Fortunio Liceti, Athanasius Kircher, or Ulisse Aldrovandi, the lines between fact and fiction were irrelevant as they were impossible to discern.

This chapbook is published as part of the project “Mi-Monstre Mi-Livre,” organised by After 8 Books, Ariel Ink, Publication Studio Paris and Six Chairs Books, during a residency at Aperto, Paris, in the framework of the Lithuanian Season in France.

Speed Glum Hero. Read it as an instruction: Speed, Glum Hero. Read it as an assertion of life, like, keep living, go on. It takes this kind of serious play to make any sense of this moment we are living through. This is a pamphlet about subjectivity splintering, substance, and legend. This is a pamphlet about complicity, tenderness, and distress. This is a pamphlet about what it takes to stay gripping to the earth. The only way out is through.

D Mortimer is a writer and artist from London interested in the crip unknown. Their first book Last Night a Beef Jerk Saved My Life was published by Pilot Press in 2021. Mortimer is a Techne scholar in trans auto fictions at The University of Roehampton. Their work concerns technologies of madness and their doctoral project is entitled, Beef Journals: Naming the Uncertain in Transgender Subject Formation.

Talker is an interview zine about performance. 

This is Issue #6. It features a conversation with Spanish artist Dora García.

For over 18 years García has worked with performance to deal critically with relationships between artworks, audiences, and places. Her projects are often developed in response to works by others and deploy performers as intermediaries in ambiguous roles as undercover agents, prophets, guides or spies.

In this conversation she traces the origins of her performance practice from a diverse creative community in Brussels in the early 2000s to the Happenings by Argentinian polymath Oscar Masotta happening again in her recent work Segunda Vez (2018). 

Talker is an interview zine about performance. 

This is Issue #5. It is a transcript of an event hosted by the writer Kathy Acker at the ICA, London in February 1987 in which the performer Spalding Gray discussed his work.

A founding member of the Wooster Group, Spalding Gray gained fame for his autobiographical monologue performances. At the time of this conversation, he had just completed filming Jonathan Demme’s movie adaptation of his work Swimming to Cambodia, a performance in which he describes experiences surrounding a trip to Southeast Asia to play a small role in the film The Killing Fields (1984). In this dialogue with Acker, Gray focuses on the process of developing work and compares his experience of writing with making live performance.

The event was part of the ICA’s IN CONVERSATION series which paired up writers to talk about their practices.

“the following text was written in July 2024 in St Imier, Switzerland.
it's a fragment of Lettres à Bébé, a book I've been writing for some time in which I - Ethan - find myself helping and communicating by letter with a Marxist Baby whose political project is not to grow up so as not to become a tool of Capital. While he develops his project and tells it to me, I live my life and tell it too, observing and commenting on the ignoble state of the world, its language, its architecture, managing my heartbeat, meeting people, working, fucking, eating (...)”. - Ethan Assouline

Published by La Dépendance, St imier (2024)

Le Soleil et l’Acier est un recueil de textes assemblé par Laurianne Bixhain lors de clubs de lecture qui se sont tenus pendant sa résidence au Musée de l’imprimerie et de la carte à jouer de Grevenmacher (Luxembourg). Pour faire écho au travail de Monique Wittig, Roxanne Maillet a dessiné de nouvelles ligatures pour la Baskervvol, notamment une ligature « je ».

"We collect, translate and publish texts from Palestinian writers confronting the genocide in Gaza, to lift up their words. We urge you to share, print, publish and distribute these texts by all possible means, in support of Palestinian struggle for liberation. All volunteers in this project remain anonymous as a sign of respect and humility towards our people in Gaza. Any financial income generated from these texts is the property of the people in Gaza and must be directed back to them in full." - @gazapassages

Texts by:
Hiba Abu Nada
Hind Joudeh
Mahmoud Jouda
Noor Aldeen Hajjaj
Nour Al Swirki
Ahmed Mourtaja
Al Miqdad Jamil Miqdad
Beesan Nateel
Esam Hani Hajjaj
Ebraheem Matar
Husam Maarouf

All rights reserved to the people of Palestine

Printed by CUTT PRESS at Hopscotch Reading Room

Tenderness is back with a second edition and new title, Tenderness: A Black Queer Meditation on Softness and Rage. This second edition has all the original content from the first edition with more to explore, including a new preface from author Annika Hansteen-Izora.

What would it mean if tenderness could hold a simultaneous existence of joy and rage? How to call on tenderness as a practice of love, rather than a regurgitation of white supremacy? Author and writer Annika Hansteen-Izora explores answers in Tenderness: A Black Queer Meditation on Softness and Rage. A meditation, critical inquiry, and invitation to expand our imaginations on meanings of tenderness, this piece calls into question conceptions of tenderness that are rooted in desirability, anti-Blackness and white supremacy, and instead unfolds the potentials of tenderness as a tool, a balm, a healing agent, and a question to lean into.

Size: 5" x 7.5", 72 pages, spiral bound. Edition of 750.

Self published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Feminist Center for Creative Work. Written by Annika Hansteen-Izora. Copy Edited by Aliyah Blackmore. Designed and Illustrated by MJ Balvanera. Risograph printed by Neko Natalia. Bound by South Gate Bindery.

Designed and risograph printed by FCCW to accompany the workshop held at the Los Angeles Book Art Fair on February 25th, 2018. If you missed out on the workshop, grab a copy of the zine here! All proceeds benefit the Feminist Center for Creative Work.

Size: 5.5" x 8.5", 24 pages

Self published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Feminist Center for Creative Work. Designed by Kate Johnston, Riso-printed by Neko Natalia.

Anita Di Bianco’s ongoing project, Corrections and Clarifications, is a newspaper without headlines, a cyclical reverse-chronology of daily revisions, retractions, re-wordings, distinctions and apologies to print and online news, printed in numerous languages, locations, and formats since September 2001. An intermittent catalog of lapses in naming and classification, of tangled catchphrases, obstinate patterns of mis-speech and inflection, connotation and enumeration. The twentieth anniversary hardbound edition of the publication, entitled The Error is Regretted, was published in 2021 by The Green Box in Berlin.

This 2024 iteration, in a xeroxed edition of 100, collects corrections to news items back to 1981 — with its focus on the Eastern Mediterranean region, on patterns of mis-telling and misrepresentation through the persistent misuse of the passive voice, the omission of widely observable and verifiable facts and events, the euphemizing and toning down of deliberate actions, erasures through shifts in terminologies, through bold mistakes and tentative corrections.

Anita Di Bianco’s works in film, video, and print take up, modify and re-work existing and re-imagined patterns and characterization. Her work involves the imitative act, a taste for the possession and expulsion of narratives, the appropriation and accumulation of familiar texts and writing styles. Anita uses widely varying sources: from theatrical and historical texts to oft-quoted cinematic clips and thematic references. She lives in Frankfurt am Main.

The reading score for the presentation at rile*books on Sunday June 23, an A to Z of Indexing / Organising / Cataloguing BFTK for Two Voices.

Sur la route, de sabiche est la version housewife-poétesse kicked out de la maison où elle vivait, qui se retrouve on the road yeah, le long des pissenlits traînant d'énormes valises, pleines de livres et de bidules inutiles-essentiels, dont un crâne humain avec qui elle parle. Des lutins et Dodie Bellamy - dont sabiche traduit l'essai "L'écriture comme accumulation compulsive" - viennent l'aider...

Frustration, inflammation, licences commerciales, torture et choux qui accouchent. Ça commence mal à Montreuil. Et ça finit dans le Kentucky. Là où tout a vraiment commencé.

Seaside_009: Correlations/co-relations: was read and listened to collectively during a gathering on 13 October 2023 during BYOB Art Book Fair at Enter Enter in Amsterdam. This loosely connected patchwork of bootlegged texts and collected sounds all deal with notions of the archive and the remix in some way or another. Together they form a soft proposal for a publishing practice based around dubbing, multivocality and “speaking nearby”.

Survival Manual for Self-publishers in NL is a zine that consolidates essential knowledge for thriving as a self-publisher. With a focus on practicality, this comprehensive guide brings together previously scattered and opaque information from the self-publishing realm.

This thrid edition of mnemotope magazine features pieces from contributors that range from playlist, recipes to poetic essays to drawings to private messages to a screenplay and beyond.

Mnemotope is a community magazine, published by bog bodies press. Mnemotope magazine takes this as its inspiration-it acts as a place in which lots of stories from across timelines and borders can sit together, and cultural memories can interact. It exists to create and hold the expression and knowledge of its diverse community, because of this, the contents of the magazine are wonderfully varied; some confessional poetry, some hastily notated recipes, some fiction, some history, lots of other things, all submitted during an open call. The format put spreads together of contributions that seem to somehow be in dialogue with one another.

The name of the magazine comes from a term that's used in writings about archaeological finds - it's a little complex when we speak about it abstractly, so take, for example, a bog body. A bog body is an object, but when we look at one it takes on another function as an image. This image is the part beyond the physicality of the object-it's what makes us think about what the world must have been like when this person was walking on it, what they looked like, what they did, who found them, how much the area they were found in must have changed and so on and so on and so on. A mnemotope is something that compresses time, and allows you to be in the bog two thousand years ago and in the museum looking at the body and at home reading about it all at once.

Out of the Grid presents a critical selection of 100 Italian zines from 1978 to 2006 that display a broad spectrum of social, political, aesthetic, and technological changes in the use of language and communication strategies across the territory of self publishing.

Widely mapping Italian society, particularly youth culture—over an extended period that can be symbolically defined as the "post-movement" and "pre-internet3.0"—, this outpouring of creativity gave visibility to small, imaginative and technical shifts on paper that made mimeographs, photocopiers and offset machines tremble, and often erupted into the need to communicate through other mediums. The titles selected originated from different scenes—musical, social, artistic, literary...—within which the distances between authors and readers is eliminated. To help navigate this multitude of subcultures, each zine is introduced by a profile that provides further analysis and information. No specific structure has been imposed, leaving room for the specific characteristics of each project to emerge. 100 titles ∞ paths.

Contribution by Marta Zanoni; interviews with Dafne Boggeri, Gino Gianuizzi, Stefano Gilardino, Glezös, Fabiola Naldi, Lorenza Pignatti, Pietro Rivasi, Giulia Vallicelli [Compulsive Archive].

CSV Edition + CSV Edition (Extended Version)

The People’s Fadai (literally, “self-sacrificers”) were a prominent Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organization in Iran. The Fadai emerged in the 1960s from a diffuse movement advocating for armed struggle, in response to the monarchic regime’s increasingly violent crackdowns against all forms of dissent. Many of these original guerrilla groups were dismantled by the secret police, known as the SAVAK, before they had the chance to launch any actual militant actions.

This zine examines a selection of texts influential to or produced by the Fadai. Gradually, their period of study produced original theoretical works that would inform the guerrilla resistance in Iran. Over the course of a decade and a half, these works culminated in the radical newspaper Kar, which is still in publication today. Despite decades of militant leftist publishing and revolutionary movement, Iranian communist thought remains removed from much of the wider Marxist canon.

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.