A Lover's Discourse

For nearly two years the author collected phrases from the exhibition press releases she received through email, posting certain of them on Facebook in a rather unsystematic way (that is to say, when she felt like it), with only one change, that of the personal pronoun, so each statement appeared vainglorious, absurd, even tragic. She supposes the measure was if they made her laugh or gasp or used words she deplores when thinking or writing about art. The posts gathered quite a following. Some people still mention them to her, and others have asked her to look at their own press releases before circulation.

These extracts have provoked laughter, disbelief (especially when performed as public readings, when she has  been obliged to swear to their veracity), self-recognition, and yes, shame.

She had only three rules: 1) She would not quote the press release of anyone she knows (certainly she could have done—she must admit that both a friend and someone she dislikes intensely have slipped in, and she fervently hopes neither ever reads this book); 2) She would not alter anything except the pronoun (this is largely true; however, for this book, she corrected some errors of punctuation and spelling, changed spellings to their English form, and employed her beloved Oxford comma); and 3) She would not use anything the artist had written (this, too, is true, save for one exception that was too wonderful not to include).

Finally, she  gathered a collection of endorsements, some along the way, others when she indicated this work was done. She is still alive and she continues to labour in obscurity. 

Following the publication of Centrefold in Artforum, November 1974, Benglis says that Penthouse wanted to use the image, but instead she proposed ‘a take-off on a traditional pieta, depicting a beautiful girl as the Madonna with a nude man on her lap’. They refused, ‘we cannot do that, we cannot allow artists to make a centrefold.’

Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of that Centrefold, and shifting between 1970s New York and Los Angeles and the Corbyn years in Tower Hamlets, London, this Centrefold enacts an ambivalent ‘full accounting’ of Lynda Benglis’s Artforum spread, as well as her gender ‘mockeries’ and Secrets series. Taking in nursery privatisation, artworld silencing and censorship, maintenance art, muddled Marxism, performances of motherhood, and masturbation, Louise O’Hare weighs up the various impacts and forms of disciplining at play in both column and dildo inches.

I acquired Sonia’s copy of Fraser Darlingʼs book in 2010 when my cousins, sister, and I were going through Soniaʼs house following her death. From one of her glassed-in bookshelves, the spineʼs distinctive artwork caught my eye. When I put my hand in to grab it, it was immediately apparent there was something odd. Turning it over, I realised the book contained enclosures. It had been used as a flower press. Between its pages were eleven sheets of specimens, each sheet masked off with two pieces of neatly arranged blotting paper. All the sheets were titled in pencil: ‘Aviemore—May 1961’. 

Sonia Campbell Penney was a professional gardener, keen botanist, and the author’s aunt. Her ‘book’ is a copy of Natural History in the Highlands and Islands by F. Fraser Darling, interleaved with eleven sheets of plant specimens, guarded by blotting paper, which Sonia collected around Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands in May 1961. Functionally, if sporadically, annotated with plant names and, occasionally, places of finding, these sheets might be interpreted as a form of nature writing or a holiday diary almost without words. Sixty years on, Bridget Penney asks what a close, though thoroughly unscientific, consideration of these unmediated traces might reveal.

Expect anger. Expect joy, joy interspersed with anger, anger with joy, anger and joy in equal proportions, till joy is eclipsed by anger, or anger by joy. Expect decline. Expect steady and sudden decline, in fortune and wellbeing, a decline in wellbeing in places as far afield as Corby and Inverness, London, Manchester, and Yorkshire. 

Massive Massive Oil Slick is a monologue written in sentences that begin with the verbs expect, suppose, and avoid, delivered in a seminar room of an unnamed institution. The audience is invited to participate in imagined scenarios: predicaments, thought-experiments, moral quandaries. Themes range from profound to mundane, serious to absurd: homelessness, drug trials, social exclusion, traffic, Brazil nuts, carveries, contact with extra-terrestrial life. The result is a prophecy, and the reader the central character through whom multiple futures are posited, dismissed, and revived. 

Books in dreams were once made of scrolls and parchments. Once, books in dreams could only manifest themselves as clay. Scratches became meaningful. Books still tumble down. Most rooms are flooded; the waters are generally at ankle height.

Shapes Found for Living offers short tales—rumours and fables coalescing  from the uneven experience of living in this century and vivifying the reader’s imagined memory theatre. The collection moves from rude immediacy via questioning forms of language depicting unstable mental states, the near madness of trying to live or love,  to the absurd remnants of an (envisioned) ancestral recall. 

The straplines of a number of advertisements drawn from magazines of the 1950s are turned into drawings, as though a particularly vain and narcissistic woman speaks (as of course she does), She is ‘en pleine forme’ of her beauty. (2016).

Somewhere between fact and fiction, 
memoir and novelisation ... 
a tidal thread of correspondences. 

A novel-in-correspondence, a neither/nor publication defying easy category—a book that rests somewhere between fiction and memoir—Envois is a collection of letters sent to Sharon Kivland by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan during the course of their long and stormy love affair from 1953 until his death in 1981.

A publication assembled chronologically—following the yearly seminars of Lacan and structured per their delivery—and in which love emerges as a form of appropriation; a litmus for authenticity; a look book for learning; an atlas for forms of yearning; a map for multimodal thinking; a log book for passing hours; a calendar to keep track of the quickening of time; an itinerary of preoccupations; a discipline; a vocation; a dressing up and dressing down of language; a lens; an aperture; a tool shed; a window; a corridor; and/or an arena of investigation. Kivland was not listening for psychoanalytic theory and she is faithful to the words of her beloved, attuned to his speech towards her and her alone... And yet, well, and yet, all that remains as her master breaks the silence.

In Bab Al-Saha, a quarter of Nablus, Palestine, sits a house of ill repute. In it lives Nuzha, a young woman ostracized from and shamed by her community. When the Intifada breaks out, Nuzha’s abode unexpectedly becomes a sanctuary for those in the quarter: Hussam, an injured resistance fighter; Samar, a university researcher exploring the impact of the Intifada on women’s lives; and Sitt Zakia, the pious midwife.

In the furnace of conflict at the heart of the 1987 Intifada, notions of freedom, love, respectability, nationhood, the rights of women, and Palestinian identity—both among the reluctant residents of the house and the inhabitants of the quarter at large—will be melted and re-forged. Vividly recounted through the eyes of its female protagonists, Passage to the Plaza is a groundbreaking story that shatters the myth of a uniform gendered experience of conflict.

In moderate physical decline, and with an immoderate weed habit, the novelist Dunja Anko returns home to the Adriatic coast to play detective and solve the mystery of her brother’s death. The going is arduous, the people inscrutable; her old friends have had years to forget – or to convince themselves they don’t remember. Dunja must contend with desire and disgust, curiosity and fear, as she begins to doubt her reasons for returning. Elegantly plotted, funny and self-reflexive, Flood Tide is a psychologically deft exploration of the trauma wrought by human limitation and indecision.

"A dazzling mix of narrative styles (even genres), a linguistic rollercoaster, and a book that demands both close attention and literary sensibility . . . The reader is hooked." — Boštjan Videmšek

"Mysterious, precise and haunting, Flood Tide suggests that every homecoming is a return to a crime scene." — Chris Kraus

Ana Schnabl (b. 1985) is a Slovenian writer and editor. She writes for several Slovenian media outlets and is a monthly columnist for the Guardian. Her collection of short stories Razvezani (Beletrina, 2017) met with critical acclaim and won the Best Debut Award at the Slovenian Book Fair, followed by the Edo Budiša Award in Croatia; the collection has been translated into German and Serbian. Three years later Schnabl published her first novel Masterpiece (Mojstrovina, Beletrina, 2020). She toured Europe with the English, German and Serbian translations of the book, which included a residence in the Museumsquartier in Vienna, the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, and the first European Writer’s Festival in London. The novel was given favourable reviews and mentions in numerous Austrian, German and English media, and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel Flood Tide (Plima, Beletrina, 2022) was nominated for the Slovenian Kresnik Award. Her third novel September (Beletrina, 2024) won the Kresnik Award in 2025.

Rawley Grau has been translating literary works from Slovenian for over twenty years, including by such first-rate novelists as Dušan Šarotar, Mojca Kumerdej, Sebastijan Pregelj, Gabriela Babnik and Vlado Žabot. Six of his translations have been longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, while his translations of Šarotar’s Panorama and Billiards at the Hotel Dobray were shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. He has also translated poetry by Miljana Cunta, Miklavž Komelj, Janez Ramoveš and Tomaž Šalamun, among others. In 2021, he received the prestigious Lavrin Diploma from the Association of Slovenian Literary Translators. Translations from other languages include A Science Not for the Earth: Selected Poems and Letters by the Russian poet Yevgeny Baratynsky, which received the AATSEEL prize for best scholarly translation, and, co-translated with Christina E. Kramer, The Long Coming of the Fire: Selected Poems by the modernist poet Aco Šopov, which won the 2025 International Dragi Award for best translation from Macedonian. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, he has lived in Ljubljana since the early 2000s.

“I had a dream last night in which I was being escorted across the Styx Bridge by a serpent. The bridge, long and thin and seemingly suspended in space, impressed me, and I asked the serpent who it was that had built it. He said something, but I cannot remember what. Upon awakening, I felt terribly lost. It seemed clear to me that my nights were being controlled by mystic forces.”

This 32-page chapbook is an “occult diary” of sorts.

BRENDAN CONNELL was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1970. He has had fiction published in numerous places, including McSweeney’s, Adbusters, and the World Fantasy Award winning anthologies Leviathan 3 (The Ministry of Whimsy 2002), and Strange Tales (Tartarus Press 2003). His works of fiction include Unpleasant Tales (Eibonvale Press, 2013), The Architect (PS Publishing, 2012), Lives of Notorious Cooks (Chômu Press, 2012), Miss Homicide Plays the Flute (Eibonvale Press, 2013), Cannibals of West Papua (Zagava, 2015), Jottings from a Far Away Place (Snuggly Books, 2015), and Against the Grain Again: The Further Adventures of Des Esseintes (Tartarus Press, 2021). As editor he has worked on various projects, including The Neo-Decadent Cookbook (Eibonvale Press, 2020), which was co-edited by Justin Isis.

Chapbook of 100 hand-numbered copies, lithographically printed on 95 g/m Italian gesso paper with a “hammered” texture. The cover is lithographically printed on 285 g/m recycled birch-colored Italian paper.

A moving story about love, AIDS, grief, and memory by one of the most adventurous writers to come out of San Francisco's LGBTQ+ scene.

Bob Glück met Ed Aulerich-Sugai in 1970. Ed was an aspiring artist; Bob wanted to write. They were young men in San Francisco at the high tide of sexual liberation and soon, and for eight years, they were lovers, after which they were friends. Ed was an explorer in the realms of sex. He was beautiful, fragile, exasperating, serious, unassuaged. In 1994 he died of HIV. His dream notebooks became a touchstone for this book, which Glück has been working on for some two decades, while also making his name as a proponent of New Narrative writing and as one of America's most unusual, venturesome, and lyrical authors. About Ed is about Ed, who remains, as our dead do, both familiar and unknowable, faraway and close. It is about Bob too.

The book is a hybrid, at once fiction and fact, like memory, and it takes in many things through tales of political activism and domestic comedy and fury to questions of art and love and experiences of longing and horror. The book also shifts in register, from the delicate to the analytic, to funny and explicit and heartbroken. It begins in the San Francisco of the early 1980s, when Ed and Bob have been broken up for a while. aIds is spreading, but Ed has yet to receive his diagnosis. It follows him backward through his life with Bob in the 1970s and forward through the harrowing particulars of death. It holds on to him and explores his art. It ends in his dreams.

The Stone Door is a surrealist allegory intertwining myth, mysticism, and romance. Written by Leonora Carrington after World War II, the novel follows a woman's symbolic journey through esoteric teachings, ancient lands, and dreamlike visions in pursuit of spiritual awakening and the unification of male and female forces. Both a metaphysical adventure and a tribute to Carrington's personal love story, it offers a visionary exploration of transformation and liberation.