Gertrude Stein

This is the first paperback edition of one of Stein's most revealing novels. Written in 1925-26 (but not published until 1958), it is Stein's midcareer assessment of herself, her writing, and her relationships, composed in the unique style for which she is celebrated.

In place of a traditional narrative, Stein explores the nature of narrative, its possibilities, the various genres (historical novels, the novel of manners, adventure stories) available to the writer, the conventions of novel-writing, and the novelist's relation to her materials. In a sense, the novel is about preparing a novel (the subject of chap. 50), about everything that goes through a writer's head as she begins to write.

Mixed in with her meditations on writing are daily events in her marriage to Alice B. Toklas, visits from friends - including such notable figures of the period as Josephine Baker, Virgil Thomson, Rene Crevel, and a number of expatriate American writers and artists - travels in and around France, memories of the past, inquiries into names and the nature of identity, and virtually anything else that occurs to her.

As she writes at one point, It can easily be remembered that a novel is everything, so everything of interest to Stein goes into her preparations for the novel that is A Novel of Thank You.

In 1937, Gertrude Stein wrote a sequel to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but this darker and more complex work was long misunderstood and neglected. An account of her experiences in the wake of having authored a bestseller, Everybody's Autobiography is as funny and engaging as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but it is also a meditation on the meaning of success and identity in America.

Often considered the central erotic work of Stein's middle period, this love poem written to her longtime companion, Alice B. Toklas, reveals a vulnerability and tenderness unexpected of one so famous for caustic wit. Associative in structure, the work consists of alternately cryptic and conversational fragments detailing a shared domestic life. A very brief initial section observes the hardships of gay estrangement from society, while the body of the work applauds the decision to endure these for love's sake. Readers will welcome an unusual view of Stein in this work in which lifting belly, signifying sexual union, comes to imply passionate commitment to another and acceptance of oneself.

18 July 1936, Bayonne. After hearing the news of the Fascist uprising, the Spanish dancer and bailaora Antonia Mercé y Luque, known as La Argentina, suffers a syncope and dies in fateful synchrony with the Second Republic. History, and the artist’s body, have been seized and broken by the event.

In close dialogue with images and historical documents, Isabel de Naverán pursues the reverberations of that shock and how it resonates with collective pain and artistic translations (by Federico García Lorca, Gertrude Stein, Kazuo Ohno and others). How does history affect and move through bodies? How do living bodies carry and pass on cultural legacy and collective memory? What do these complex movements reveal about the present? Wrap, History and Syncope is an affective journey that invites the reader into tracing and revisiting other bodies, to ultimately dance their difference and multiplicity for oneself.

Isabel de Naverán is a writer and researcher. Concern with the passage and use of time is the backbone of her work, which focuses on bodily transmission and the examination of the concept of historical time by way of ephemeral and fugitive practices. She holds a PhD in art from the University of the Basque Country.  

Translation from Spanish: Toni Crabb
Graphic design: Michaël Bussaer

Winter issue, featuring Mark Leckey, Ellen Cantor, Gertrude Stein, Piotr Uklański, P.Staff, Josephine Pryde, Blackhaine, Diego Marcon, Ingrid Wiener, Olivier Assayas, Jamieson Webster, Steven-Phillips-Horst...

Spike's latest issue is a beacon lit to rescue The Night. Long held under suspicion as the domain of outcasts and phantoms, the night has come under pressure to extend the horizon of work and production.

What faith, the state, and capital fear are the perils and promises of the dark's formlessness: to withdraw into the pure solitude of sleep and dreams' unreason; to blush with the pure elation of dance and a rave's ephemeral friendships; even to have one's edges undone by the murmurs of ghosts or a celestial sign.

Need a break from the tyranny of the sun? Then light a candle, a headlamp, a flare – anything but your phone – and grap your copy to follow us into the possibility of the night.

In 1985, Judy Grahn boldly declared that lesbians have a poetic tradition and mapped it from Sappho to the present day in the groundbreaking book, The Highest Apple. In this new and updated edition of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition, Grahn revisits the original text with her characteristic ferocious intellect, passion for historical research, careful close readings, and dynamic storytelling. Grahn situates poetry by Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich Paula Gunn Allen, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and Olga Broumas as central to lesbian culture—and more radically as central to society as a whole.

This new edition of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition includes Grahn’s in depth analysis of poetic work by her friend and comrade Pat Parker and suggests a transactional approach to poetry as uncovering layers of the self. Grahn assembled this text in conversation with two younger lesbian poets, Alicia Mountain and Alyse Knorr, demonstrating the continued relevance and dynamism of The Highest Apple for contemporary readers. A new introduction by Grahn, a foreword by Alyse Knorr, and editor notes by Alicia Mountain along with six responses by contemporary poets Donika Kelly, Kim Shuck, Serena Chopra, Zoe Tuck, Saretta Morgan, and Khadijah Queen highlight the on-going significance of The Highest Apple to readers, writers, and thinkers.

Collected for the first time, four landmark works of queer experimental poetry by reclusive cult poet David Melnick, known for his prowess with invented language and sound poetry.

David Melnick's Nice: Collected Poems spans twenty crucial years of gay life and experimentation with poetic form, bringing together four masterworks of American literature: Eclogs (1967-70), ten episodes in the urban afterlife of pastoral; PCOET (1972), written in an unknown tongue, verse for a world that's yet to be; Men in Aida (1983-85), Melnick's masterpiece, a giddy epic of queer community; and A Pin's Fee (1988), a backward glance and elegy, a cry of pain, howl of anger.

David Melnick was born in Illinois in 1938 and raised in Los Angeles, educated at the University of Chicago (where he studied with Hannah Arendt) and the University of California at Berkeley. Although he spent time in France, Greece, and Spain (whence his mother's ancestors emigrated in 1492), most of his adult life was centered in San Francisco. For an author's note he once wrote, "This poet's politics are left, his sexual orientation gay, his family Jewish.... He is short, fat, and resembles Modeste Moussorgsky in face and Gertrude Stein in body type and posture." A participant in the Free Speech movement, Melnick was a key member of G.A.W.K. (Gay Artists and Writers Kollective) and an early inspiration to the Language Poets. His masterpiece, Men in Aida, began in a reading group organized by Robert Duncan. Melnick passed away in 2022, a day before his 84th birthday. 

Robert Glück's new book I, Boombox is a long poem fashioned from the author's misreadings. In that sense, it's a queer autobiography in which Glück dreams on the page.

"Rimbaud infamously claimed that I is an other, but for Bob I is a flicker of error, or a wandering ear that invents. He has made a home for several decades of errant listening in this sinuous long poem, which light heartedly teases the modernist tradition it also subverts. In true mock-heroic manner, Bob reveals from his gay marble desk how God's laughter glides in and out of garden festival, action film, and sublet alike. I have been waiting for this book for years and it sweetly exceeds all of my hopes."—Lisa Robertson

"In I, Boombox, Robert Glück makes it clear that dreams are as real as the spurts of sentences we use to discover them. Scoring the 'umbilical/indescribabilia' that accompanies unconscious feeling into a thin strip of thickly montaged verse, the 'invisible speakers' that populate Glück's poem—their misreadings and cant half-truths, their headlines and lies—turn dream's content into poetic foam. In this mind's eye—the 'suburb' is blithely rendered into a thing 'superb, ' and 'loneliness' roars with the face of a 'lioness /and intimacy.' I, Boombox is a poem of frothy divinations tempered by the slapstick of speech. It suggests that desire without sense is desire nevertheless—and this is a delight to understand."—Shiv Kotecha

Winner of the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in English.

Robert Glück served as director of San Francisco State University's The Poetry Center, co-director of Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and associate editor at Lapis Press. His books include two novels, Jack the Modernist and Margery Kempe, two books of stories, ELEMENTS OF A COFFEE SERVICE and Denny Smith, a book of poems, Reader, and with Kathleen Fraser, a book of prose poems, In Commemoration of the Visit. With Bruce Boone, Glück translated La Fontaine for a book of that name. With Camille Roy, Mary Berger, and Gail Scott, he edited Biting the Error: Writers on Narrative. Glück prefaced Between Life and Death, a volume of Frank Moore's paintings, and, with artist Dean Smith, made the film Aliengnosis, based on readings from I, Boombox. Other books include Communal Nude: Collected Essays, and Parables, an editioned artist book with Cuban artists José Angel Toirac and Meira Marrero D'az. Margery Kempe was republished by NYRB Classics in 2020 and his novel About Ed by NYRB in 2023.

A previously unpublished anthology of classic texts from Something Else Press, assembled in the 1970s by Dick Higgins, with works by John Cage, Al Hansen, Claes Oldenburg and many more.

Conceived by poet, publisher, artist, composer and writer Dick Higgins (1938-98) in the early 1970s to celebrate Something Else Press—the legendary publishing company he founded in 1963 to showcase Fluxus and other experimental artists—this volume, which was never realized in Higgins' lifetime, collects an amazing array of 1960s avant-garde creativity. Something Else Press published some of the most radical art and literature of its time and provided a foundation and template for the artist's book medium, which has flourished internationally since the 1960s.

The Reader features selections from rare and out-of-print Something Else classics such as Claes Oldenburg's Store Days; John Cage's Notations; Emmett Williams' An Anthology of Concrete Poetry; Richard Kostelanetz's Breakthrough Fictioneersanthology; Jackson Mac Low's pioneering poetry collection, Stanzas for Iris Lezak; Gertrude Stein's Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein; Bern Porter's I've Left; Wolf Vostell's Dé-coll/age Happenings; Al Hansen's A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art; and other pamphlets and artist projects for the page by Robert Filliou, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alison Knowles, Nam June Paik, Philip Corner, Daniel Spoerri, André Thomkins and Richard Meltzer, among others. A critical checklist/bibliography assembled by Hugh Fox and Higgins' introduction from 1973 completes the original manuscript.

Launched in New York City, in 1992, the Lesbian Avengers rejected the picket line and ordinary demo for media-savvy, nonviolent direct action.

They were superheroes arriving "to make the world safe for baby dykes everywhere;" warriors with capes and shields doing a line dance; dykes "Lusting for Power," pushing a giant bed float down Sixth Avenue in New York (with lesbians on it); nationally-ambitious Avengers eating fire in front of a hostile White House; lovers reuniting a statue of Alice B. Toklas with Gertrude Stein, then waltzing in the snow in Bryant Park. And homos who shamelessly chanted, "Ten percent is not enough, recruit, recruit, recruit."

Originally published in 1993, Homocom edition 2021

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

A collection of texts defining utopia as a place existing only within the domain of language, Utopia gives a synthesis of historical utopias and a snapshot of the 1970-1980's poetic scene.

An avant-garde writer associated with the New York School of poets, Bernadette Mayer was born in 1945 in Brooklyn, New York, where she lives and works. From 1967 to 1969, she published the experimental newspaper 0 to 9 with artist Vito Acconci, which combined texts and works of writers and conceptual artists based on the use of language (Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Aram Saroyan, Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, Morton Feldman or Sol LeWitt).

In 1967—along with Lewis Warsh—she founded the publishing house United Artists Books which published a number of influential writers such as Robert Creeley, Anne Waldman, Hannah Weiner, James Schuyler, Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley as well as Mayer's own books like 1978's The Golden books of Words or 1984's Utopia. Known for her innovative use of language, Mayer rose to prominence with the exhibition “Memory,” which combined photography and narration. During July 1971 Mayer took daily photographs and recorded her thoughts. These materials formed the basis for the exhibition, and for the eponymous book published in 1975. In 1980, Mayer became director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York where she also ran literary workshops. She also initiated the Poetry Project's Reading Series.
Mayer's composition methods such as chance operation, collage and cut-up identifies her as being close to the likes of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low or Frank O'Hara—central figures of the New York School—as well as more contemporary figures associated with the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Mayer's work is also influenced by modernist figures such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and the Dadaists or classical authors (Catullus).

French Edition.
Published in June 2016.

Poet, philosopher, speculative architect and transdisciplinary artist, Madeline Gins is well known for her collaborations with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on the experimental architectural project Reversible Destiny, in which they sought to arrest mortality by transforming the built environment. Yet, her own writings — in the form of poetry, essays, experimental prose and philosophical inquiries — represent her most visionary and transformative work. Like Gertrude Stein before her, Gins transfigures grammar and liberates words. Like her contemporaries in conceptual art, her writing is attuned to the energized, collaborative space between reader and page.

The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader is a revelatory anthology, edited and with an introduction by the writer and critic Lucy Ives. It brings never-before-published poems and essays together with a complete facsimile reproduction of Gins' 1969 masterpiece, WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G, R, E, T, A, G, A, R, B, O, It Says), along with substantial excerpts from her two later books What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984) and Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994). Long out of print or unpublished, Gins' poems and prose form a powerful corpus of experimental literature, one which is sure to upend existing narratives of American poetics at the close of the 20th century.

Edited by Lucy Ives.