Books

To wilt tears for an infatuation who has no name of their own. To weep rain like a sentence that passes through the unrequited glimpse. Language is the instrument of our shivers; literature the wink that slips into a wince.

Out of profane necessity we dress the missing words for each circumstance in ecstatic deprivation. Anticipation and alienation. Shock and sorrow. Craving and cruelty. Elation and tension. Emotion is the borrowed absence of transferred meaning: the sensuous "legs" of a table and the sunrise that falls-in-shadow upon the "foot" of a bed. Quintilian's "thirsty" crops that have neither tongue nor throat. Barthes' compassed "wings" of a house. Augustine's "piscina" in which no fish are to be found (and only humans drown). With delirium we endure, and delight in, the abuse of our sensibilities by the sadistic literalization of metaphor.

Featuring Will Alexander, Kimberly Alidio, César Dávila Andrade, Martine Bellen, Stanislav Belsky, Anselm Berrigan, David Buuck, Garrett Caples, Sam Cha, Logan Fry, Lawrence Giffin, Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough, E. Tracy Grinnell, Karen Holman, Elise Houcek, Andrew Joron, Inna Krasnoper, Carlos Lara, Jonathan Larson, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Michael Leong, Douglas A. Martin, olga mikolaivna, Sheila E. Murphy, Ann Pedone, Sal Randolph, Martha Ronk, Jonathan Simkins, Christophe Tarkos, Edwin Torres, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Wendy Xu & John Yau

Insula est un roman d’anticipation aussi intime que spéculatif qui mêle autofiction, confession intime, esthétique queer, jeu vidéo, et une formidable vision apocalyptique du monde contemporain. Insula (île, en latin), c’est d’abord le nom d’un jeu clandestin de réalité augmentée d’un nouveau genre : il suffit d’ingérer une pilule stupéfiante et illégale pour accéder à la simulation. Théo, le narrateur, en apprend l’existence lors d’une fête de cruising queer, au sommet d’un immeuble désaffecté du centre de Londres, dans une atmosphère d’apocalypse. Un garçon s’effondre à ses pieds quelques minutes après avoir consommé la substance, et pleure des larmes de sperme. Mais Théo doit tout interrompre pour se rendre au chevet de son père mourant, dans un hôpital parisien. C’est le moment de la dernière nuit, du dernier souffle et des derniers aveux. Le mot insula revient, cette fois dans la bouche des médecins, pour désigner une partie flottante du cerveau ravagée par la maladie, comme une île qu’on a dans la tête. Alors que les médias annoncent la disparition de plusieurs personnes qui auraient pris une pilule d’insula, l’étau se resserre sur Théo qui se résout à son tour à prendre un cachet prohibé avec l’intuition que les avatars ne sont que des fantômes, et qu’il pourra ainsi retrouver son père dans l’autre monde.

Ce roman aux accents dantesques (vision d’un enfer digital qui n’est que le double du monde réel), entre vertige technologique et exploration du désir, est marqué par la pensée critique du réel et la pop culture (Final Fantasy, Kanye West). Il ouvre un univers parallèle pour raconter l’histoire d’une traversée intime, convoquer des époques, des territoires et des identités multiples, dans une seule et même histoire qui navigue entre témoignage et fantasme. Dystopie, histoire d’amour et de fantômes, enquête et cauchemar, Insula est un portail entre plusieurs dimensions, le vrai et le faux, le réel et le digital, la vie et la mort.

It is a particularly unlovely time to be thinking about romance. The heart can be fickle, indulgent, its matters distracting, impractical. But in the heavy boots of our undesirable present, seized by colliding catastrophes, we ask: how do we get out of here? Can the simple math of desire plus futurity break us free? Or is this just a barely veiled expression of our longing for avoidance? When we declare that love is the answer, we often forget the ambivalence of which psychoanalysis warns: love emerges in tandem with hate. It is neither the antidote to aggression nor the basis of a coherent social order. 

As a narrative structure, romance insists on the future. Whether it's with a new lover hoping to break the repetition of bad patterns, in emotional growth born of the analytic couple, or inside the tremulous energy of an insurgent crowd that makes yesterday seem historically distinct from tomorrow, romance threads time with the texture of meaning. Perhaps delusional, perhaps heroic in this audacious promise, romance must also always be a fantasy, an imagined structure that has not yet met its match in the present. While this fantasy is vital to our attachment to the world and each other, it can also provide the fuel for self-serving denial and disavowal. When we say that the youth are not fucking and that they don’t care about politics, these separate charges obscure the nature of their common cause. As the world attempts to disavow the death of the earth and the removal of its peoples, our sense of continuity flees; the receding horizon is not an open road, but a vanishing point. Whither romance? 

Dependent. Detached. Trauma Bonded. The Incest Lobby. Revolution Against Romance. Reading for Love and Labor. Surrealist Bedfellows. Mad Love. Essays by Nadia Bou Ali, hannah baer, Moon Charania, Davey Davis, Kaleem Hawa, Anna Kornbluh, Thomas Ogden, and more.

Founded in 2023, A4 is a poetry review which showcases and explores contemporary writings practices. Run by Littérature Supersport collective, the object is seen as the extension of their events. The review takes the form of 4 postcards which, when placed side-by-side, form an A4-sheet. A light (even precarious) format for literature that slips into the back pocket of pants and hangs on fridge doors. Each issue features unpublished texts by 4 authors. Wrapped in colors, A4 is distributed by post and available in good bookshops, in Brussels, Liège, Paris and Marseille. 

This fourth issue presents texts by: Gorge Bataille, Marc Buchy, Samy Manga, Elke de Rijcke.

TRUT is een exclusief fysiek print-magazine, humoristisch en cultuurkritisch, met een focus op de groteske campness van (Vlaamse) popcultuur. Met bijdragen van meer dan 20 jonge makers trachten ze popcultuur-curiosa opnieuw tastbaar te maken. 

The collected run of the groundbreaking and iconoclastic zine. 

From 1977 to 1979, Search & Destroy chronicled the birth of San Francisco's punk scene with an intensity and vision that transformed music journalism. Now, for the first time, every issue of this seminal publication has been collected and meticulously restored in one definitive volume. 

Launched with a $100 loan from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Search & Destroy was the nerve center of West Coast punk culture. V. Vale and his motley cast of contributors struck a new form of guerrilla journalism with an aesthetic and attitude that was as raw and uncompromising as the music itself. 

Search & Destroy: The Complete Archive captures the texture and tension of a scene in flux through stark photography, radical design, and unfiltered interviews with legends such as William S. Burroughs, Throbbing Gristle, the Dead Kennedys, Suicide, and Negative Trend. This collected edition also features retrospective writing on the legacy of Search & Destroy, its influence on design and culture, and V. Vale's work as a publisher, researcher, and archivist.

V. Vale is an American editor, writer, interviewer, musician and SF Bay legend. He is the publisher and primary contributor to books and magazines published by his company, RE/Search Publications.

Cecily Chen is a writer and translator from Beijing, China. She is currently completing her PhD in English at the University of Chicago, where she writes about the “minor archive” of Asian American experimentalism, Marxist aesthetics, and gender and sexuality. You can find her writing at The Poetry Project, Entropy, and the tiny. She also edits poetry for Chicago Review.

Mitch Anzuoni is the founding editor of Inpatient Press and its translation imprint, Mercurial Editions. His writing has appeared in Harper's and Rhizome.

This zine is the result of the research residency "Plotting with the archive" that took place at Komplot between September 2025 and January 2026. The publication contains a subjective timeline of Komplot — its strategies, relations and projects — with the aim of organising them and at the same time speculating on possible future developments. The material was produced during a collective workshop in which the archive was explored and activated.

“Water has the power to connect us, reflects the relationship between past and present and provides space for narratives that have previously been overlooked."

In her book we as water, Leila Orth explores water as a site of memory, weaving together the stories of eight people who tell of oceans, rivers, and lakes and their own memories. Building on her many years of artistic engagement with memorials, Leila Orth uses the book to search for places, far removed from national memorials, that lead to a possible transnational form of remembrance. Water becomes a transnational site of memory, where layered stories and perspectives intertwine. It holds the traces of travellers and the drowned, the sand at the bottom of the seas, the history of the islands and coastlines where we grew up. It recalls our families, our longings, the past, the fighters, the dead, and the living.

Afghanistan is my father’s homeland. He was born in Kabul in 1945 and later moved first to France, then to Switzerland in the 1970s. In my mind, Afghanistan exists as a geography with blurred edges, something I feel the need to reconcile with. It’s a place I’ve only ever known through stories, a source of memories that, over time, have shifted and become distorted.

Contributors: Luca Cerizza, Farid Rahimi, Said Rahimi, Susanna Ravelli, Francesca Recchia, Zafar Sayan, and Dawood Tawana

Metropolitan Voids Agency is the first monographic publication dedicated to the collected works of artist Margherita Moscardini. The book recounts the work carried out by Moscardini spanning seventeen years, between 2008 and 2024, inviting a reading of her practice in its entirety as an investigation into ‘urban voids’: those which Moscardini has recognized and designated as voids, or those she has herself invented in the urban fabric.

This volume brings together 50 years of correspondence from the archive of de Appel contemporary arts centre in Amsterdam. In tracing a relational and affective history of the institution, each piece offers a glimpse into the artistic projects and programmes de Appel has commissioned and championed; the cultural shifts and careers it has nurtured; the celebrations and struggles it has weathered; and the collaborations and friendships sparked along the way. The book gathers materials from more than 100 voices, with paper and digital exchanges covering an intricate web of people, places, and events, ultimately coalescing into what can be perceived as the unified work of an institution.

Includes a light-blue satin Ribbon by Alison Knowles.

Two Revolutions a Day marks the first in-depth publication devoted to the work of Sophie Nys, whose artistic practice over the past two decades has unfolded through an enterprising interplay of research, observation, and formal experimentation. Moving between exhibition-making, design, and subtle acts of re-framing, Nys has developed an oeuvre that resists fixed categories while remaining acutely attentive to the structures – historical, linguistic, psychological – that shape how meaning is produced and circulated.

Rather than presenting a linear retrospective, Two Revolutions a Day is organised as an extended conversation between Nys and critic Christophe Van Gerrewey that mirrors the artist’s own methods. Together, they revisit key works and exhibitions from the early 2000s to today, tracing recurring motifs and questions while allowing contradictions and shifts in perspective to remain visible.

Throughout the book, Nys’s fascination with systems of power and authority intersects with a sensitivity to intimacy, subjectivity, and the everyday, engaging with feminist perspectives that examine the politics of representation. Historical figures, marginal anecdotes, and overlooked documents appear alongside reflections on resistance, collaboration, design, and the conditions under which artworks –and the social roles they inhabit – come into being. Language, in particular, emerges as both material and problem: a tool that promises clarity while constantly slipping, misfiring, or revealing its own limits.

[Available for preorders. Shipping 12 March] 

Having fled to France in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles joined the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital, where he carried out a transformative clinical practice for over twenty years, in part under the Vichy regime. 

Saint-Alban was an extraordinary event, a commune, an informal refuge in a time of extreme danger, a sort of upwelling spread through word of mouth. Those entering the asylum were welcomed, and that welcome never stopped. Care happened through a broad range of communal activities for staff and patients: theater, cinema, collective writing, horticulture, the sorting of colored pearls, gymnastics, singing, a monthly newspaper. The dignity of every patient was of foremost importance. 

Now, as then, warmongers are willing to poison and slaughter without blinking, making all of life difficult if not impossible: the pull of such asylums is obvious. Tosquelles is a ground-breaking record of the life and work of the founder of institutional psychotherapy. Assembled by Joana Masó, with many texts translated to English for the first time, it is a direct encounter with Tosquelles’s clinical, intellectual, and political writings. 

“Tosquelles’s work serves as a model for dismantling capitalist institutions, a revolutionary venture whose essence Joana Masó captures.”
Paul B. Preciado 

“This remarkable collection allows us to experience the genius of Tosquelles in all its dimensions for the first time. We accompany him through his early work in Reus and Barcelona, the development of his therapeutic ideas and inventive practices in war-torn Catalonia and in exile at the Septfonds Camp, his legendary years at Saint Alban and his lesser-known later years in Melun, Nouvelle Forge and La Candélie. Joana Masó guides us to the creative heart of a man whose counter-cultural, counter-intuitive thinking excited generations of intellectuals in France and now inspires the world.”
Rosie Stockton 

“Resistance hero, anti-Stalinist Marxist, Surrealist, revolutionary practitioner of social therapy, mentor to Frantz Fanon: Francesc Tosquelles was one of the most innovative thinkers in modern psychiatry, a visionary whose moment may finally have arrived.”
Adam Shatz

With texts by Francesc Tosquelles, trans. Robert Hurley and Mara Faye Lethem

Religion, love and revolution collide in this swashbuckling saga of Risorgimento Italy. 

Set in Italy during the Risorgimento, The Gadfly is a thrilling tale of betrayal and revolution. It follows the adventures and misadventures of a mysterious satirist, a hardworking lady radical and a Catholic cardinal with a dark secret. Published in 1897 by Irish writer Ethel Lilian Voynich (or ELV, as she preferred to be known), The Gadfly sold millions of copies in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, though it has been largely forgotten in the English-speaking world—until now. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll smuggle guns over the border and, if you're anything like the Gadfly, you'll do it all with incomparable style. Mandylion Press' second run of The Gadfly includes a new preface by Mandylion cofounder Madeline Porsella and a visual glossary illustrating the world of the novel.

Ethel Lilian (Boole) Voynich (1864–1960) was born in Cork, Ireland, and raised in Lancashire, England. Her peripatetic adult life was defined by passions for music and leftist politics. In 1902, she married Wilifrid Michael Voynich, a Polish revolutionary and antiquarian book dealer. She spent her final decades in New York City, where she worked in a music school and as a translator of Russian, Polish and French texts.

Edited by Mabel Capability Taylor, Madeline Porsella. Introduction by Madeline Porsella.

Recorded live at Amsterdam's Oude Kerk during the 2024 Sonic Acts Festival, The Organ is the World's Greatest Synthesizer finds Charlemagne Palestine returning to the Staalplaat catalog after many years. Taking its title and cover from a drawing made by Palestine during the performance, the work expands his singular mythology of sound and spirit. Opening with resonating bells and falsetto overtones before surrendering to the vast sonic tides of the church organ, the 40-minute piece unfolds as an ecstatic continuum—tones intertwining, frequencies colliding, and space itself becoming an instrument. A testament to the living dialogue between artist, instrument, and place, this is Palestine at his most immersive and transcendent.

For over six decades, Charlemagne Palestine has been a pioneering composer, performer, and multimedia artist, celebrated for his ecstatic sonic explorations and ritualistic, metaphysical performances. Emerging from the cross-disciplinary New York art scene of the 1960s and '70s, he helped shape a heretical edge of minimalism alongside figures like Conrad, Riley, Niblock, and Glass. Trained as a Jewish cantor and later as the carillonneur at St. Thomas Church, Palestine cultivated a deep fascination with resonance and overtone—an obsession that evolved through his use of percussion, early synthesizers, and monumental piano works, influencing artists from John Cale to Nick Cave.

An overview of the French artist's film remakes over a decade.

"There's something deeply unsettling about the fact that Brice Dellsperger has spirited Laura Palmer away and replaced her with a doppelganger."—Evan Moffitt

Since 1995, the French artist Brice Dellsperger has been working on remakes of cult film sequences, which he has collected under the generic title "Body Double." The doubling of the actor or actress playing all the characters, both female and male, involves cross-dressing and raises questions about gender, originality and artifice. This book covers a decade and brings together video stills from his twelve most recent films, Body Double 29 (2013) to Body Double 40 (2024), with texts by Evan Moffitt and Rebekka Seubert and views of his latest exhibitions.

Brice Dellsperger (born 1972 in Cannes, France, lives and works in Paris) pushes the boundaries of genre and gender. In his multifaceted reprises of iconic film sequences—all assembled under the generic title Body Double—the cineast and artist reenacts the selected scenes frame for frame and lets his “body doubles” perform all of the roles, be they male or female.

Brice Dellsperger has exhibited extensively in Europe and abroad, and began his well-known Body Double series in 1995. His work is in collections that include the Museum of Modern Art, Musée d'Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.

Texts by Evan Moffitt and Rebekka Seubert.

First monograph devoted to the playful, explosive and colorful paintings of the Iranian artist, featuring extensive illustrations along with a selection of drawings and preparatory studies that reveal the methods behind Hoda Kashiha's compositions, which are often constructed like collages, in which multiple layers intersect, cut-out shapes emerge, and images evolve through a combination of hand-drawing and digital manipulation.

Published following the exhibition I'm Here, I'm Not Here at Passerelle Centre d'Art Contemporain, Brest, in 2022, Hoda Kashiha's first solo public exhibition in Europe.

Developing a distinctive form of pop painting that moves freely between uninhibited Cubism and a cartoon-like visual language, Iranian artist Hoda Kashiha (born 1986 in Tehran) produces works that appear playful at first glance but reveal darker, more enigmatic, and deeply symbolic layers upon closer examination. Humour is a recurring strategy in her practice—one that fosters intimacy with viewers while enabling her to address serious and sensitive questions rooted in the social context and political climate of her home country. Her paintings also engage universal concerns, including gender relations and the place of women in society. For Kashiha, her protagonists become activists without ever speaking: they assert their differences openly and remain steadfastly optimistic. With her exuberant use of forms and colour, Kashiha creates an explosive blend of genres in which Picasso seems to drift into the world of Minecraft, joyfully dismantling the conventions of the past.

Text by Lilian Davis; conversation between Loïc Le Gall and Hoda Kashiha.

An homage and reimagining of the classic German Bildungsroman, Schernikau paid tribute to the form even as he challenged stylistic, sexual, and political conventions. Written in all lower-case, SMALLTOWNNOVELLA is a brilliant stream-of-consciousness narrative that follows b, a teenager navigating politics and queer desire in a small, West German town. When b—who is interested in communism and knitting—falls in love with leif, a popular jock, b’s life at school is very predictably upended.

“A mighty, slender record of the provocative intelligence of a queer teenage mind.” —Eliot Duncan

Ronald M. Schernikau was born in 1960 in Magdeburg, East Germany and grew up in Hanover, West Germany. After completing his Abitur in 1980, he moved to West Berlin and studied German literature, philosophy, and psychology. In 1986, he started studying at the Institut für Literatur Johannes R. Becher (German Institute for Literature) in Leipzig, GDR. In 1989 he obtained GDR citizenship and relocated to Berlin. He worked as a dramaturge, and in radio and TV until his death in 1991. His publications include Kleinstadtnovelle (Small-Town Novella, 1980); Die Tage in L. (The Days in L., 1989); Legende (Legends, 1999); Königin im Dreck (Queen in the Dirt, 2009); and Irene Binz. Die Befragung (Irene Binz. The Interview, 2010).

Lucy Jones is a British translator and writer based in Berlin. She is the translator of Brigitte Reimann’s Siblings, (Penguin Modern Classics), Anke Stelling’s Higher Ground (Scribe) and Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Lyric Novella (Seagull Books), among others. Her translations and book reviews have appeared in Asymptote, Words Without Borders and CulturMag. She is the runner-up for the Society of Author’s Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 2023.

PRAISE

“This slender book is a fierce account of queer teenage imagination: provocative, haughty, coy, insolent, and wild. As angsty as it is intelligent, Schernikau’s prose also feels protective and sweet. SMALLTOWNNOVELLA is the book, the friend, I wish I had in high school.” —Eliot Duncan

“…an earnest, seemingly offhand account of a brilliant young man growing up in a small town and realizing that his queerness and his communist politics will come to structure his life. (…) the first of Schernikau’s many attempts to lay out a gay politics that would open him to the world rather than fating him to a specific lot within it: an identity politics not constructed to elaborate and defend a single perspective, but one that sought to locate the self within a broader movement to transform society." —Ben Miller & Nicholas Courtman, LARB

Ding Dong Bell is an invitation to cross the threshold into a world that belongs not only to the imagination, but also to the concrete possibility of a different way of inhabiting reality. In this space, details weave together landscapes and reveal characters, hinting at unexpected encounters in a continuous search for shapes and textures, in a chromatic immersion and a sequence of perspectives on a syncretic and archaic world, on an alchemical pictorial practice, where the complex figurative iconography of living beings and cosmic constellations is progressively enriched with tonal stratifications and semantic density.

The collection of paintings outlines universes in which plants, animals, human beings, and subtle presences coexist outside any pre-established hierarchy. The forms cross each other lymphatically and transform without ever being fully accomplished, metamorphically generating a visual ecosystem based on the continuous exchange of substances and the visceral mixture of matter. In this fluid chorus, everything is constantly redefined in the process of becoming, yet without losing its identity. What emerges is a symbolic horizon that becomes a universal hope: an invitation to living beings, witnesses of contemporaneity, to cultivate mutual respect and nurture a providential alliance, where the different planes of existence vibrate in resonance.

The titles of the works, inspired by traditional English nursery rhymes, and the accompanying texts take the form of ancient and surreal chants, capable of evoking both the childhood of the world and its possible future. Their language, closer to illuminated manuscripts than to linear narration, constructs a vivid imaginary world in which whirlwinds and impulses evoke the idea of original totality: at the end of this long succession of worlds, everything seems to tend towards a single, shared substance of being.

Barbara Cammarata (born in 1977) lives and works in Catania (Sicily).

A long conversation about the work and life of Portuguese artist Ana Jotta, accompanied by 60 previously unpublished photographs of her homes (in Brazil, Morocco, and Zanzibar) and her years in theater in the late 1970s.

“Peau d’Ana” is a conversation with the Portuguese artist Ana Jotta (1946), conducted in January 2024 by Alice Dusapin, Martin Laborde, and Baptiste Pinteaux in the Lisbon apartment that Ana has occupied for over forty years. Through the history of both this unique place and the various other homes in which she has lived — Tangier, Madeira, Brazil, and the Portuguese countryside — Ana Jotta mischievously and playfully invites us to revisit fragments of her life. She discusses her childhood, her work as an actress and set designer, her first exhibitions in the mid-1980s, and her life in the studio. She talks about the importance of pleasure and frustration, her love of painting and literature, and the role of the irrational in her work. She shares her dislike of families, her friendships with artists and other animals, and the detours necessary for finding, and preserving, the energy essential for work… and for sleep. She disarms with the precision of her words, which describe a solitary, demanding, and profoundly vivid existence where mediocrity has no place. The interview, published in French and English, is accompanied by some sixty previously unpublished photographs and documents.

Jackie Wang's magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.

The poems in The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer's waking world with renewed energy and insight.

Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster and PhD candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, specializing in race and the political economy of prisons and police in the United States. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb. In 2018 she published a book, titled Carceral Capitalism on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the US carceral state. She is currently an Arleen Carlson and Edna Nelson Graduate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.