rile*books

An exploration of the witch as radical archetype in ancient and contemporary life, edited by cult-favourite writer Michelle Tea.

An adult woman haunted by her childhood muses on the foster system, institutions, and the medieval tale of a girl given to a witch. A genderqueer Brooklynite learns of their past life as a murdered sorceress. An uptight participant at a Northern California witch camp finds community in the kitchen. A professor uses magic to help students under attack by right-wing politicians.

In this collection of manifesto, poetry, playscripts, and prose, the archetype of the Witch is honoured and unpacked, poked and prodded, owned and othered. From work centred in antiquity to writing that illustrates how primordial occult energies continue to enliven our world today, WITCH  lays bare a wilderness of myth, magic, trickery, and power swarming beneath the surface of contemporary life.

With work from CAConrad, Frankie Miren, Sarah Shin, Edgar Fabián Frías, Amanda Yates Garcia, Ashley Ray, Brooke Palmieri, Yumi Sakugawa, Kai Cheng Thom, Ariel Gore, Myriam Gurba, Fariha Róisín, and many others.

In recent years tech companies have turned attention into a commodity, a resource to be mined and sold.

The terms of the deal appear simple: in exchange for our attention we receive information, entertainment, and convenience. But what are the hidden costs? And what happens to our inner lives when we lose the ability to decide how we wish to pay attention?

In this essay, at once personal and polemical, meditative and militant, Julia Bell examines big tech’s wide-ranging and extractive assault on human attention, while asking how we might reclaim it. Selected by Ali Smith as one of the five most important books to navigate the next twenty years, this new edition features a new foreword by radical economist Grace Blakeley and an afterword by the author.

JULIA BELL is a writer and Professor of New Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. Her work includes poetry, lyric essays and short stories published in The Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, The White Review and The New Statesman, and recorded for the BBC. She has published three novels with Macmillan/Simon & Schuster US and is co-editor of the bestselling Creative Writing Coursebook (Macmillan). Her new book Between the Lines: Life Lessons from the Writing Workshop is published by Simon & Schuster in May 2026.

An electric, smart, and boldly playful novel exploring queer suburbia and the radical implications of staying put.

Herb and Lara are busy slinging coffees in their hometown – of Watford! While Herb dreams of leaving to write big gay plays for a big gay world, Lara’s dedication to being in the here and now keeps her firmly rooted. Plus she’s fallen madly in love with Cynthia, a high-femme roboteer here to finish her PhD, teaching her way through robot post-doc hell, stamping on the brains of robo-boys as she goes. Soon Watford will use Cynthia’s inventions to reinvent itself into the communised Watford Underburg, but not yet.

Meanwhile, Lazarus is back at her mum’s. Her attempt at city life didn’t exactly go to plan, and now she spends her days working on a Yiddish translation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and playing video games. With no capacity to think about her future and trying to forget her past, what will happen? Local football coach Butch Lichenstein, that’s what.

A Pizza Hut, A Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut is a wildly inventive and funny novel that counters the idea of the suburbs as a place queers leave and plays out the radical implications of staying put.

A tender and daring novel about queer love, trauma, and aging, and the adult debut from award-winning YA author Dean Atta.

BIG MAN follows the life of Big, a middle-aged, Black British gay man who lives a gentle life with his boyfriend, Little, in their home in East London. Big and Little enjoy evenings out and group holidays with friends, as much as practising yoga together at home, and running side by side along the Hackney canals.

Big came of age in the club scene under the watchful eye of Mother, an African American trans woman who made a home and a name for herself in London, her house a refuge for wayward queer youth like Big. When he finds out Mother is releasing a memoir, the two reconnect after decades of distance, and Big finds himself having to confront a long-repressed assault that opens old – and new – wounds.

A tender, daring novel full of gentle humour, BIG MAN explores themes of identity, aging, sex, family, and trauma, turning a lens on what it means to age as a queer person, while being a double-edged love letter to the people and places that make us.

A dizzying, immersive portrait of a never-ending Nakba, as lived and relived by one displaced Palestinian family.

In Stockholm, Zein al-Abidin shivers, far from the warmth of revolt that simmered all those years ago in Shatila. In Paris, his son Nidal toils in solitude, ignoring his parents’ phone calls. Grandmother Nijmeh struggles to distinguish reality from dreams, and it’s left to fearless, level-headed matriarch Zahra to try to keep the family together. But daughter Salwa, with guidance from beyond the grave, digs backward in time and discovers an unlikely channel to the one place in the world she can’t go: Ayn Ara, the Abu Sukkar family’s ancestral home in Palestine.

Sara Abou Ghazal’s debut novel traces the worldwide, timewide scatter of the Abu Sukkar family in the wake of the 1948 Nakba and its displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. At every turn, their hopes of an ordinary existence are brutally thwarted by false friends, renewed violence, and memories so vivid they refuse to be consigned to the past. Building to a surreal crescendo, Dreams of Ayn Ara maps the cosmic upheaval in which Zionist settler colonialism denies Palestinians not only a homeland, but a future.

Ghassan Kanafani’s remarkable extended essay Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation, 1948–1968 is an unyielding act of cultural and political endurance. Writing in the wake of Israel’s devastating territorial expansion in 1967, Kanafani elaborates his theory of resistance literature and offers a visceral account of life under occupation. Translated for the first time into English by one of the greatest living translators from Arabic to English, Tarif Khalidi, Kanafani’s essay offers one of the sharpest social and political analyses of life in Palestine in this early period of occupation.

In the two decades following the Nakba, Palestinian writers undertook the gruelling task of advancing a cultural struggle to protect their language, culture, and heritage. In addition to Kanafani’s groundbreaking essay, the book includes a selection of poetry, prose, and dramatic writing curated by Ghassan Kanafani himself. Alongside writing from Mahmoud Darwish, Hanna Abu Hanna, and Samih al-Qasim, among many others, Kanafani’s essay and the accompanying pieces stand as a defiant declaration of cultural survival in the wake of Israeli expansion.

This first English edition of Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation is a joint publication with the Institute for Palestine Studies.

A classic of Arabic fiction and of what Kanafani termed ‘resistance literature’

Three Palestinian men embark on a brutal and treacherous odyssey across the Iraqi desert to Kuwait, not for liberation but material betterment. Under the indifferent brutality of border bureaucracy and the blank aggression of the sun, things grow increasingly oppressive. Breezily conversational and disarmingly lyrical, this short novel delivers a shuddering dose of horror.

Collected here alongside the titular novella are six short stories, including the timeless, resonant ‘Letter from Gaza’, Kanafani’s first published work.

Baltimore. Ferguson. Tottenham. Clichy-sous-Bois. Oakland. Ours has become an “age of riots” as the struggle of people versus state and capital has taken to the streets. Award-winning poet and scholar Joshua Clover offers a new understanding of this present moment and its history. Rioting was the central form of protest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, yet it was supplanted by age of the glorious strike and labour protests of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From, from the seventies on, we're seen a return of the strike - now changed along with the coordinates of race and class.

From early wage demands to recent social justice campaigns pursued through occupations and blockades, Clover connects these protests to the upheavals of a sclerotic economy in a state of moral collapse. Riot.Strike.Riot is a tour de force of political and theoretical analysis.

WHAT WOULD A WORLD ORGANISED AROUND CARE LOOK LIKE?

The Care Manifesto is the fiercely argued demand to place care at the centre of our politics. Our lives are always interdependent. It is by nurturing these ties that we cultivate a world in which every one of us can not only survive but thrive. Care must be at the heart of the state and the economy, promoting collective joy, not the satisfaction of individual desire. It should inform how we work, interact with each other, and plan our cities. It is part of how we can rebalance our relationship with the natural world.

The Care Collective - Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynne Segal - was formed in 2017, originally as a London-based reading group aiming to understand and address the multiple and extreme crises of care. Each coming from a different discipline, we have been active both collectively and individually in diverse personal, academic and political contexts.

This is a book about typography and poetry, the typography of poetry. Which is to say, it is about the ways that poets have thought about and deployed the visual properties of language. It begins from the premise that the smallest details of typographic arrangement can make legible the relationship between what a poem says and does – its sounds, meanings, unmeanings – and the physical and social processes that bear upon it. The book brings together letters, manuscripts, proofs, and other archival documents that illuminate the shadow labour of textual production (editing, typesetting, printing), particularly in experimental and small-press poetry. It prioritizes documentary sources and the words of poets and their collaborators over theoretical argument, though there is some of that too.

Making Verse was edited, designed, and printed in sixteen-page signatures over two and a half years and bound in the autumn of 2026. It contains commentary on and archival material relating to Kamau Brathwaite, Karen Brodine, Emily Dickinson, Robert Duncan, Friedrich Hölderlin, Bernadette Mayer, Charles Olson, J.H. Prynne, John Wieners, and others. With contributions by Andrea di Serego Alighieri, Susan Howe, Rietlanden Women’s Office, Samuel Solomon, and Keston Sutherland.

The longest entries in its index are “labour,” “line (poetic),” and “spacing (typographic).”

Listening Glossary explores the many meanings and practices of listening. In an era shaped by climate crisis, war and deepening social inequalities, listening is increasingly called upon to bear witness – to melting glaciers, disappearing species, militarised borders, extractive infrastructures and other forms of violence and loss.

This glossary is a practical guide to listening as a social, political and imaginative practice. It gathers over two hundred terms from art, ecology, activism, psychology, education and philosophy across nine decades of thinking about listening as a way of relating to others, environments and structures of power. Entries invite listening through another’s ears or from specific perspectives, encountering forms of listening that range from the non-cochlear to the interspecies. Together, these entries reveal listening as a critical method for understanding and transforming the worlds we inhabit.

The name Rong Xin comes from a mini-mall in Flushing that cannot be found on any map. The facade of the mall immediately brings people back to 1980s and 1990s China. Shops stand side by side, dominated by a massive, eye-catching wall covered in recruitment and rental notices. This is indeed the very first landing spot for many new immigrants arriving in New York, where they get SIM cards, search for jobs, and embark on their new, uncertain journeys.

In 2023, several artists/collectives held an exhibition titled “Home-O-Stasis: Life and Livelihoods in Flushing” inside Rong Xin Plaza. The artwork were ingeniously interwoven with the daily details of the mall, creating a subtle dialogue between art, the vibrant bustle of everyday life, and the surrounding reality. Finding ourselves once again in 2026, amid a tempest of screening and deportation against immigrants, how should we engage in conversations about this complex and volatile community? Rong Xin Plaza is not only a microcosm of this community, but also a tangible thing that people can hold onto amidst the maelstrom that is our reality. Rong Xin invited ten artists and scholars, including participating artists, to re-create works spanning short stories, games, self-narratives, interviews, and photography. Through various details, the book outlines the trajectories of new immigrants from arrival and wandering to employment and settlement. Through the nuances of reading and design, one temporarily traverses the intersecting streets and alleys of Flushing, finding a transient sense of security.

Contributors:  Herb Tam, Lu Zhang, Xiyadie, Ryan Muchen Wang, Xueli Wang, Janice Chung, Anne Wu, Ou Ning, Yuki He and Qianfan Gu from Mamahuhu

Editors: Michael Guo, Kechun Qin, Herb Tam, Lu Zhang