Books

This new edition of Faux Pas, the acclaimed collection of writings by Amy Sillman, comes as an expanded edition, with the addition of new essays, including recent texts on Paul Cézanne, Carolee Schneemann, Elizabeth Murray and Louise Fishman. The previously unpublished text from a lecture on drawing complements Sillman's views on color and shape. New drawings from 2020-22 include a selection of works on paper that were part of the artist's installation at the 59th International Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, in 2022.

Since the 1970s, Sillman, a beloved and key figure of the New York art scene, has developed a singular body of work that includes large-scale gestural paintings blending abstraction with representation, as well as zines and iPad animations.

Over the past decade, Sillman has also produced stimulating essays on the practice of art or the work of other artists: for example, reevaluating the work of the abstract expressionists with a queer eye; elaborating on the role of awkwardness and the body in the artistic process; and discussing in depth the role and meanings of color and shape. Featuring a foreword by Lynne Tillman, Faux Pas gathers a significant selection of Sillman's essays, reviews and lectures, accompanied by drawings, most of them made specially for the book.

Faux Pas aims at revealing the coherence and originality of Sillman's reflection, as she addresses the possibilities of art today, favoring excess over good taste, wrestling over dandyism, forms over symbols, with as much critical sense as humor.

Based in New York City, Amy Sillman (born 1955) is an artist whose work consistently combines the visceral with the intellectual. She began to study painting in the 1970s at the School of Visual Arts and she received her MFA from Bard College in 1995. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial in 2014 and the Venice Biennale in 2022; her writing has appeared in Bookforum and Artforum, among other publications. She is currently represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York.

Beginning with the simultaneous rise of civil rights and computer revolutions in the 1960s, McIlwain, for the first time, chronicles the long relationship between African Americans, computing technology, and the Internet. In turn, he argues that the forgotten figures who worked to make black politics central to the Internet's birth and evolution paved the way for today's explosion of racial justice activism.

From the 1960s to present, the book examines how computing technology has been used to neutralize the threat that black people pose to the existing racial order, but also how black people seized these new computing tools to build community, wealth, and wage a war for racial justice.Through archival sources and the voices of many of those who lived and made this history, Black Software centralizes African Americans' role in the Internet's creation and evolution, illuminating both the limits and possibilities for using digital technology to push for racial justice in the United States and across the globe. 

A compendium of creative texts examining our complex and slippery relationships with new technologies.

What will the internet of the future make possible? Untethering the Web explores the technologies, strategies and anxieties that are coalescing in 2022 to shape a new digital paradigm. As naturalized citizens of today's always-online world and as survivors of a multiyear pandemic, the need to reform our digital tools and approaches is more pressing than ever before.

Evolved models for virtual convening, collective organizing and digital ownership are making this possible, and a reckoning for the platformed web and its monolithic tech giants is beginning to feel imminent—but how will it all unfold, and what new pitfalls will emerge? In conjunction with Pioneer Works' seventh Software for Artists Day, in October 2022, creators, technologists and members of our community share their visions for a flourishing digital multiverse, and how they imagine it manifesting over time.

Translated from the Spanish by Cecilia Rossi. THE LAST INNOCENCE and THE LOST ADVENTURES are Alejandra Pizarnik's second and third collections of poetry. Published in Buenos Aires shortly after The Most Foreign Country, her first book of poetry (which she would later disavow), these early poems blend the real and the imaginary, demonstrating the inner torment, deep solitude and acute vulnerability that would plague Pizarnik throughout her short life. This edition includes new English-language translations of both books along with an introduction by poet, translator, and Pizarnik scholar Ana Becciu.

Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) was a leading voice in twentieth-century Latin American poetry. Born in the port city of Avellaneda, in the province of Buenos Aires, to Russian- Jewish immigrants, Pizarnik studied literature and painting at the University of Buenos Aires and spent most of her life in Argentina. From 1960-1964 she lived in Paris, where she was influenced by the work of the Surrealists (many of whom she translated into Spanish) and participated in a vibrant community of writers including Simone de Beauvoir and fellow expatriates Julio Cortázar and Octavio Paz. Known primarily for her poetry, Pizarnik also wrote works of criticism and journalism, experimental fiction, plays, and a literary diary. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968 and a Fulbright Scholarship in 1971. Her complete works in Spanish have been published by Editorial Lumen. A book of her critical writings, A TRADITION OF RUPTURE (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), was translated into English by Cole Heinowitz. Five books of her poetry have been translated into English: THE LAST INNOCENCE / THE LOST ADVENTURES (Ugly Duckling Presse 2019), THE MOST FOREIGN COUNTRY (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), DIANA'S TREE (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014), A Musical Hell and Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 (New Directions, 2016) and The Galloping Hour: French Poems (New Directions, 2018). She died in Buenos Aires, of an apparent drug overdose, at the age of 36.

A New Program for Graphic Design is the first communication-design textbook expressly of and for the 21st century. Three courses—Typography, Gestalt and Interface—provide the foundation of this book.

Through a series of in-depth historical case studies (from Benjamin Franklin to the Macintosh computer) and assignments that progressively build in complexity, A New Program for Graphic Design serves as a practical guide both for designers and for undergraduate students coming from a range of other disciplines.

Synthesizing the pragmatic with the experimental, and drawing on the work of Max Bill, Beatrice Warde, Muriel Cooper and Stewart Brand (among many others), it builds upon mid-to-late 20th-century pedagogical models to convey contemporary design principles in an understandable form for students of all levels—treating graphic design as a liberal art that informs the dissemination of knowledge across all disciplines. For those seeking to understand and shape our increasingly networked world of information, this guide to visual literacy is an indispensable tool.

David Reinfurt (born 1971), a graphic designer, writer and educator, reestablished the Typography Studio at Princeton University and introduced the study of graphic design. Previously, he held positions at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University School of Art. As a cofounder of O-R-G inc. (2000), Dexter Sinister (2006) and the Serving Library (2012), Reinfurt has been involved in several studios that have reimagined graphic design, publishing and archiving in the 21st century. He was the lead designer for the New York City MTA Metrocard vending machine interface, still in use today. His work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. He is the co-author of Muriel Cooper (MIT Press, 2017), a book about the pioneering designer.

Initiated in 1997 and now in its tenth and final installment, John Zorn's acclaimed Arcana series is a major source of new music theory and practice in the 21st century. Illuminating directly via the personal vision and experience of the practitioners themselves, who experience music not from a cool, safe distance, but from the white-hot center of the creative crucible itself, Arcana elucidates through essays, manifestos, scores, interviews, notebooks and critical papers.

Over 25 years the ten volumes of Arcana have presented the writings of over 300 of the most extraordinary musical thinkers of our time, who address composing, performing, improvising, touring, collaborating, living and thinking about music from diverse, refreshing and often surprising perspectives. Technical, philosophical, political, artistic and mystical in nature, these writings provide direct connections to the creative processes and hidden stratagems of musicians from the worlds of classical, rock, jazz, film soundtrack, improvised music and more.

Contributors include: Susan Alcorn, Oren Ambarchi, Ran Blake, Peter Blegvad, Tyondai Braxton, Patricia Brennan, John Butcher, Ben Coniguliaro, Amir Elsaffar, Kenny Grohowski, Tom Guralnick, Mark Helias, David Hertzberg, Stefan Jackiw, Dan Kaufman, Derek Keller, Richard Kessler, Pauline Kim, Ulrich Krieger, Hannah Lash, Dan Lippel, Annea Lockwood, Dave Lombardo, Charlie Looker, Thomas Morgan, Stephen O'Malley, Laura Ortman, Alex Paxton, Alexandria Smith, Conrad Tao, Pat Thomas, Henry Threadgill, Anna Webber, Fay Victor, Christian Wolff and Miguel Zenon.

In the 1890s and for years thereafter, America reverberated with the name of the notorious Anarchist, feminist, revolutionist, and agitator, Emma Goldberg. A Russian Jewish immigrant at the age of 17, she moved by her own efforts from seamstress in a clothing factory to internationally known radical lecturer, writer, editor, and friend of the oppressed. This book is a collection of her remarkably penetrating essays, far in advance of their time, originally published by the Mother Earth press which she founded.

In the first of these essays, Anarchism: What It Really Stands For, she says, Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual. In Minorities Versus Majorities she holds that social and economic well-being will result only through the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass. Other pieces deal with The Hypocrisy of Puritanism; Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure; The Psychology of Political Violence; The Drama: A Powerful Disseminator of Radical Thought; Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty; and The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation. A biographical sketch by Hippolyte Havel precedes the essays.

Anarchism and Other Essays provides a fascinating look into revolutionary issues at the turn of the century, a prophetic view of the social and economic future, much of which we have seen take place, and above all, a glimpse into the mind of an extraordinary woman: brilliant, provocative, dedicated, passionate, and what used to be called high-minded.

American author Kathy Acker was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Working through an experimental and avant-garde tradition, she wrote numerous novels, essays, poems, and novellas from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. As a postmodernist, plagiarist, and post-punk feminist, she continues to inspire generations of writers, philosophers, and artists. Get Rid of Meaning is the first comprehensive publication on Acker’s work from an artistic and literary perspective. It includes previously unpublished material from Acker’s personal archive and other collections. The publication is the compilation of a multipart research project including an exhibition and a symposium at Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe.

With contributions from: Kathy Acker, Eleanor Antin, Dodie Bellamy, Hanjo Berressem, Ruth Buchanan, William S. Burroughs, Anja Casser, Georgina Colby, Leslie Dick, Claire Finch, Johnny Golding, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Anja Kirschner, Chris Kraus, Sylvère Lotringer, Douglas A. Martin, Jason McBride, Karolin Meunier & Kerstin Stakemeier, Avital Ronell, Carolee Schneemann, Daniel Schulz, Matias Viegener & McKenzie Wark.

Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel réalise au printemps 2020 la série de dessins Hack’n’slash.

Ces collages sont faits à partir d’aplats de couleur autocollants Letrafilm Color/Tint Overlay, que l’on pourrait traduire par Couleur/Teinte Superposition, permettant ainsi de nommer l’importance des jeux de profondeur qui s’y trouvent. 

L’artiste se calque là-dessus et joue alors avec la confrontation entre le hack: détournement et réemploi d’outils techniques (trames numériques, encres d’imprimante, dessin manuel) – et le slash: le fait de trancher/juxtaposer les formes venant de différentes dimensions pour composer ses dessins.

Chaque édition a une couverture unique sérigraphiée sur du papier Pantone Letraset par l’Atelier PPP et un texte critique-fiction de Mia Brion.

A significantly expanded edition of Carrington's acclaimed Tarot series, featuring new archival images and research.

The British-born Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) spent a lifetime exploring the esoteric traditions of diverse cultures, and incorporated their ideas and symbols into her artistic and literary oeuvre. Tibetan Buddhism, the Kabbalah, ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian magic, Celtic mythology, witchcraft, astrology and the Tarot were filtered through her feminist lens to create a visionary, woman-centered worldview.

Carrington created a spectacular Major Arcana Tarot deck sometime during the 1950s, laying gold and silver leaf over brilliant color. Exhibited for the first time during her centennial exhibition Leonora Carrington: Magical Tales in 2018, this extraordinary work was a revelation for the public and inspired the publication of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington.

What would it be like to imagine a communism not just of wealth but also of care, love and belonging? Where the full range of human needs are met without depending on the fragile bubble of the nuclear family? That institution we are all supposed to believe will be there for us—even though so many books and films detail all the ways in which it fails. This is the difficult yet important terrain where Sophie Lewis ventures. Abolish the Family is a short, sharp shock to our assumptions about the good life and how to achieve it.

Sophie Lewis is a freelance writer living in Philadelphia, teaching courses for the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her first book was Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, Boston Review, n+1, the London Review of Books and Salvage. Sophie studied English, Politics, Environment and Geography at Oxford, the New School, and Manchester University, and is now an unpaid visiting scholar at the Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Acclaimed critic Sianne Ngai theorizes the gimmick as an aesthetic category reflecting the fundamental laws of capitalism. Gimmicks make promises of saving labor and increasing value that we distrust but also find attractive. Exploring the use of this form, Ngai shows how its aesthetic dissatisfactions reflect deeper anxieties about capitalism.

Sianne Ngai is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ugly Feelings and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, winner of the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize. Her work has been translated into multiple languages.

Seventeen short stories reveal the author's sustained concern with human relationships and values in past and future worlds of fantasy, speculation, and unearthly provision.

Silence: Lectures and Writings is a book by American experimental composer John Cage (1912–1992), first published in 1961 by Wesleyan University Press. Silence is a collection of essays and lectures Cage wrote during the period from 1939 to 1961.

Most of the works are preceded by a short commentary on their origins, some have an afterword provided. Several works feature unorthodox methods of presentation and/or composition. "The Future of Music: Credo" juxtaposes paragraphs of two different texts. The text of the first part of "Composition as Process" is presented in four columns, the text of "Erik Satie" in two. "45' for a Speaker" is similar to Cage's "time length" compositions: it provides detailed instructions for the speaker as to exactly when a particular sentence or a phrase should be said. "Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing?" is presented in several types of typeface to better reflect the concept of the lecture, which was originally presented as four tapes running simultaneously. "Indeterminacy" is a collection of various anecdotes and short stories taken from life or books Cage read: the concept is to tell one story per minute, and to achieve the speaker has to either speed up or slow down, depending on the length of the story.

Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist "spirituality" based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us. 

In the near future, Berlin's real estate is being flipped in the name of "sustainability," only to make the city even more unaffordable; artists are employed by corporations as consultants; and the weather is acting strange. In search of affordable housing, young couple Anja and Louis move into a community on an artificial mountain, The Berg—yet another "eco-friendly" initiative run by a corporation called Finster. They're offered a home rent-free in exchange for keeping quiet about the seriously malfunctioning infrastructure of the experimental house. But when Louis returns home from his mother's funeral in America, Anja is convinced he has changed. He seems to be in denial of his grief and newly idealistic, consumed by a secret project at the NGO where he works as an artist-consultant. Anja is horrified when she discovers what Louis has invented: a pill called Oval that temporarily rewires the user's brain to be more generous. Louis is convinced that if he can introduce the drug into the Berlin club scene, he can finally remedy the income disparity that has made Berlin so unlivable.

Oval is a fascinating portrait of the unbalanced relationships that shape our world, as well as a prescient warning of what the future may hold.

Elvia Wilk is a writer and editor living in New York and Berlin. She writes about art, architecture, and technology for several publications, including frieze, Artforum, e-flux, Metropolis, Mousse, Flash Art, Art in America, and Zeit Online.

Violence is arrayed against us because we’re Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about, and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.

Foreword by Da’Shaun L. Harrison.
Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal.

"Joy James’s Revolutionary Love is umph-degree love; or love beyond measure. It is anything love. It is love without reckoning. It is love that dares all things, beyond which others may find the spirit-force to survive; to live to fight another day. Such love is also fighting itself, for the sake of ensuring that others may live." — Mumia Abu-Jamal

As a stretch of land cultivated for crops to grow, a field evokes sensuous associations of smells, turned soil, exposure to weather. In a sense, fields ground our entire sedentary civilization and the cultures it gave rise to. At the same time, the field is where bodies fall in battle, the site that hosts the perishing of things.

Interweaving strands of autobiography with mythological and cultural tropes, Julien Bruneau explores the field as a metaphor rich with meaning and possibility. How do we inhabit fields and their furrows? How in turn do their history and imagination traverse us? As if it were a dance on the page, Fields invites the reader to encounter, think and feel our entanglement with space and places.

Julien Bruneau is an artist working with dance, presence, drawing and writing. His interest lies in the dynamic interplay between interiority and the collective.

A novel in three parts, Sinkhole: Three Crimes submerges readers in a grotesque and comical world on the edge of collapse – much like our own. Britain is immersed in a toxic swamp, and sinkholes are opening up in the ground with alarming frequency. Amid the mayhem, three crimes take place: Stonehenge has been stolen, a porn-addicted ghost writer faces the phantoms of her past, and a murder takes place among ex-pats in a Goan village. 

‘An acidly funny vivisection of British mores and follies, delivered with razor wit and style. McLaughlin’s creative imagination is restless, wide-ranging and prescient, unveiling a terrifyingly plausible array of futures.’ – Leon Craig, author of Parallel Hells 

‘Sinkhole is a twisted dystopian satire that captures all the maladies of modern England – a sick and perverse nation – in hilarious, pin-sharp definition, as it slides back under the waves.’ – Huw Lemmey, author of Red Tory: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell

Rosanna McLaughlin is an author and cultural critic. Double-Tracking, her debut collection of satirical essays and short fiction on the subject of middle-class duplicities, was published by Carcanet in 2019. An original proposal for the book was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize in 2016. Rosanna has written on subjects including Ariana Grande, the legacy of Section 28, and the weaponisation of Ana Mendieta. In 2017, she was writer-in-residence for the British Council Caribbean, researching the political fallout following Mendieta’s death. Her reviews and essays have been published in frieze magazine, ArtReview and the Guardian, among other places. She is co-editor of The White Review.

First published in 1961, Lorenza Mazzetti’s “The Sky is Falling” (“Il cielo cade”) is an impressionistic, idiosyncratic, and uniquely funny look at the writer’s childhood after she and her sister are sent to live with their Jewish relatives following the death of their parents. Bright and bucolic, vivid and mournful, and brimming with saints, martyrdom, ideals, wrong-doing and self-imposed torments, the novel describes the loss of innocence and family under the Fascist regime in Italy during World War II through the eyes of Mazzetti’s fictional alter ego, Penny, in sharp, witty (and sometimes petulant) prose.

First translated into English as “The Sky Falls” by Marguerite Waldman in 1962, with several pages missing due to censorship, the novel has been out of print in the anglophone world for many years. We are proud to reissue the text in a beautiful new translation by Livia Franchini that carries over the playfulness and perverse naivete of the original Italian. 

“Il cielo cade” is so much more than just a book about the horrors of the Second World War. It is as much a loving homage to the picture-perfect childhood Mazzetti’s aunt and uncle provided for her and her sister before circumstances beyond their control overwhelmed them, and thus also a moving portrait of the cruel loss of childhood innocence” – Lucy Scholes, “The Paris Review”.

LORENZA MAZZETTI (1928 – 2020) drew, made films, wrote novels and towards the end of her life ran a puppet theatre in Rome.

Mazzetti first discovered filmmaking in the U.K.. Upon arriving in London in the late 1940s, Mazzetti was admitted in unconventional style to the Slade (the day before term began and having not enrolled, she went to the director and told him she was a genius) and swapped her sketchbook for celluloid after finding some film equipment in the school’s store cupboard. She was the first woman to receive public funding in the UK for her film “Together” (1956), which was presented as part of the first Free Cinema programme at the National Film Theatre in 1956 alongside films by Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz.

When Mazzetti returned to Italy in the late 1950s, she gave up filmmaking and turned to writing. Her first novel, “Il cielo cade” (1961) was awarded the prestigious Premio Viareggio prize, and still appears on the Italian school curriculum.

This volume argues that postwar writers queer the affective relations of reading through experiments with literary form. Tyler Bradway conceptualizes "bad reading" as an affective politics that stimulates queer relations of erotic and political belonging in the event of reading. These incipiently social relations press back against legal, economic, and discursive forces that reduce queerness into a mode of individuality.

Each chapter traces the affective politics of bad reading against moments when queer relationality is prohibited, obstructed, or destroyed—from the pre-Stonewall literary obscenity debates, through the AIDS crisis, to the emergence of neoliberal homonormativity and the gentrification of the queer avant-garde. Bradway contests the common narrative that experimental writing is too formalist to engender a mode of social imagination. Instead, he illuminates how queer experimental literature uses form to redraw the affective and social relations that structure the heteronormative public sphere.

Through close readings informed by affect theory, Queer Experimental Literature offers new perspectives on writers such as William S. Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany, Kathy Acker, Jeanette Winterson, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Alison Bechdel, and Chuck Palahniuk.

Queer Experimental Literature ultimately reveals that the recent turn to affective reading in literary studies is underwritten by a para-academic history of bad reading that offers new idioms for understanding the affective agencies of queer aesthetics.

A dirty cult-classic put out in a small batch by an underground publisher (Rudos and Rubes) in 2015, Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger recounts the life of an artist and "old school homosexual" who bears a big resemblance to author Brontez Purnell.

Our hero doesn't trust the new breed of fags taking over San Francisco, though. They wear bicycle helmets, seat belts, and condoms. Meanwhile, he sabotages his relationships, hallucinating affection while cruising in late night parks, bath-houses, and other nooks and crannies of a newly-conservative, ruined city.

Furiously original, vital, and messy, this funny "non-memoir" uncovers a revelatory truth for the age: there are things far scarier than HIV.

The Europe of Trusts contains three brilliant, long-unavailable books which Susan Howe first published in the early 1980s: The Liberties, Pythagorean Silence, and Defenestration of Prague.

These are the landmark books, following her volumes from the previous decade ( Hinge Picture, Chanting at the Crystal Sea, Cabbage Gardens, and Secret History of the Dividing Line), which established Howe as "one of America's foremost experimental writers" ( Publishers Weekly).

"Her work," as Geoffrey O'Brien put it, "is a voyage of reconnaissance in language, a sounding out of ancient hiding places, and it is a voyage full of risk. 'Words are the only clues we have, ' she has said. 'What if they fail us?'"

The Nonconformist's Memorial is a gathering of four long sequences that underscores Susan Howe's reputation as one of the leading experimentalists writing today.

Howe is a poet of language in history whose work resonates back through Melville, Dickinson, and Shelley to the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals and Puritans (the nonconformism of the title), and forward again to T. S. Eliot and the abstract expressionists.

The sequences fall into two sections, Turning and Conversion, in half-ironic nonconforming counterpart to Eliot's Four Quartets. Her collaging and mirror-imaging of words are concretions of verbal static, visual meditations on what can and cannot be said. For Howe, Melville's Marginalia is the essential poem in the collection, an approach to an elusive and allusive mind through Melville's own reading and the notations in his library books. This, says Howe, is Language a wood for thought.