An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures (paperback)

Midwinter Day, as Alice Notley noted, is an epic poem about a daily routine. A poem in six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day-morning, afternoon, evening, night-to dreams again:...

a plain introduction to modes of love and reason/ Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season/ Now I've said this love it's all I can remember/ Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December// Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light/ That takes the bite from winter weather/ And weaves the random cloth of life together/ And drives away the long black night!

In Água Viva Clarice Lispector aims to 'capture the present'. Her direct, confessional and unfiltered meditations on everything from life and time to perfume and sleep are strange and hypnotic in their emotional power and have been a huge influence on many artists and writers, including one Brazilian musician who read it one hundred and eleven times. Despite its apparent spontaneity, this is a masterly work of art, which rearranges language and plays in the gaps between reality and fiction.

Clarice Lispector (December 10, 1920 – December 9, 1977) was a Brazilian writer acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, as an infant she moved to Brazil with her family, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War. 

Yoko Tawada's first essay collection in English presents and electrifying new side of the National Book Award-winner as she dives deep into her lifelong fascination with cross-hybridizing languages. The accent here, as in her fiction, is on the art of drawing closer to the world through defamiliarization. Tawada famously writes in both Japanese and German, but her interest in language reached beyond any mere dichotomy. 

The term "exophonic," which she first heard in Senegal, has a special allure for the author: "I was already familiar with similar terms. 'immigrant literature,' or 'creole literature,' but 'exophonic' had a much broader meaning, referring to the general experience of existing outside of one's mother tongue." Exophony opens a new vista into Yoko Tawada's world and delivers more of her signature erudite wit—at once cross-grained and generous, laser-focused and multidimensional, slyly ironic and warmly companionable.

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025. Translated from Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda.

A bracing novel that asks how far we would go for the ones we love—and what we would do to destroy the ones we hate. 

Lisa has lost custody of her young twin boys. Caught between the French legal system’s sluggish bureaucracy and her sinister, scheming in-laws, she’s alone and lost, an Argentine migrant in rural France picking grapes for a pittance, only allowed to see her children in supervised visits once a month. Scapegoated and outcast, destitute and desperate, Lisa decides to take radical action: early one morning, she sneaks into her in-laws’ farmhouse, takes back her children, sets the barn ablaze, and makes her escape.

What follows is a white-knuckled road trip that explores human beings pushed to the edge. Clearly, Lisa is not in her right mind, and as Harwicz deftly mingles a chorus of contradictory voices into her very unreliable narration, the reader comes to regard the protagonist with an unsettling mixture of sympathy and suspicion. Written in savage, chiseled prose, Unfit shoots off, a gripping chase that questions all our assumptions—and points out our hypocrisies— about motherhood, custody rights, love, violence, anti-semitism, and migration. The latest novel by the acclaimed author of Die, My Love (soon to be adapted to a film starring Jennifer Lawrence), Unfit is addictively terrifying, savagely sophisticated, and shockingly brilliant.

Translated from Spanish by Jessie Mendez Sayer

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (Times Literary Supplement). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous.

The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction—there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions. Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, "A man is another persona woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own") has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature.

Near to the Wild Heart, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, introduced Brazil to what one writer called "Hurricane Clarice" a twenty-three-year-old girl who wrote her first book in a tiny rented room and then baptized it with a title taken from Joyce: "He was alone, unheeded, near to the wild heart of life."

Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue frame the life of Joana, from her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence, when she proclaims: "I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt."

A wickedly funny work of depraved genius by one of Brazil’s most radical twentieth-century writers; imagine the Marquis de Sade as written by Clarice Lispecter.

An electrifying masterpiece by one of modern Brazilian literature’s most significant and controversial writers, Hilda Hilst takes us into the disorder and beauty of a mind restlessly testing its own limits.

Every month I ingested the body of God, not in the way one swallows green peas or agrostis, or swallows swords, I ingested the body of God the way people do when they know they are swallowing the More, the All, the Incommensurable, for not believing in finitude I would lose myself in absolute infinity…

The Obscene Madame D tells the story of Hillé, a sixty-year-old woman who has decided to abandon conventional life and spend the rest of her days in contemplation in a recess under the stairs. There, she is haunted by the perplexity of her recently deceased lover, Ehud, who cannot understand her rejection of common sense, sex and a simple life in favour of metaphysical speculations that he considers delusional and vain. 

In a stream-of-consciousness monologue that’s part James Joyce, part Clarice Lispector, and part de Sade, Hillé speaks of her search for spiritual fulfilment from a space of dereliction, as she searches for answers to great questions of life, death and the relationship between body and soul.

Translated by Nathanaël and Rachel Gontijo Araujo

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.

The devastating final work by Brazil’s greatest modern writer, The Hour of the Star tells the haunting tale of Macabéa—a typist who lives in the slums of Rio—underfed, sickly, and unloved, yet inwardly free.

Translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser. With a contribution by Paulo Gurgel and Valente Colm Tóibín.

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

Max Rabinowitz, a butch lesbian bartender at an East Village club, is shaken when her friend, a transvestite, is murdered. As the community of cross-dressers, drag queens, lesbians, and gay men stand together in the face of this tragedy, Max taps into the activist spirit she thought had disappeared.

Leslie Feinberg is an editor, writer, and political organizer. Stone Butch Blues, Feinberg's first novel, is an internationally acclaimed classic of trans literature. It won the Lambda Award and the American Library Association Lesbian and Gay Book Award. Feinberg's other works Trans Liberation, Trans Gender Warriors, and Transgender have also been at the forefront of the trans movement. Feinberg lives with her wife, Minnie Bruce Pratt, near New York City.

It is 1974. American and English expatriates, artists, writers, and eccentrics find their home in a quiet town on the island of Crete. Among them is Horace Vaughn, a sixty-five-year-old gay American writer who has long been at work on Household Gods, his attempt at the Great American Novel, and who in the meantime supports himself by dashing off detective stories.

Horace’s young Greek lover often annoys him, provides little satisfaction, and Horace idles his time away with alcohol, friends, and machinations. That is, until a young, enigmatic nineteen-year-old American woman named Helen arrives, another outsider. In Helen, Horace discovers someone brilliant, beautiful, and stubbornly mysterious. He is fascinated by her punk style and elusive pose. In this small town, gossip spreads fast, and Helen’s past begins to follow her to Crete: a suicidal ex-lover appears without warning, and there are whispers of her long-dead sister. The Henry Moore crowd dislike her, and a Greek waiter’s wife threatens to murder her.

When Helen vanishes, Horace is determined to follow her, to find her, especially her diary. His journey around Crete in his beat-up VW bug is funny and poignant, and for Horace, the mystery continues.

Once upon a time there was a shopping center just off Dam Square, a stone’s throw from the Madame Tussauds, not far from Primark, two streets across De Bijenkorf overshadowing the Magna Plaza, and just a couple doors down the Royal Palace in the middle of Amsterdam. It was the place where drag queen Tuu Lipa performed and Yeung sold eau de car engine oil. It was also where Mr. R looked for his human lover, where Inez became a millionaire, and where Yahoo launched its metaverse. “Welcome to the YAniverse,” greeted the Yahoo assistant…

Retail Vérité is the outcome of writing workshops organized by A Maior at San Serriffe. Through a blend of improvisation, larping and speed dating, the participants sketched characters and dialogues on-site.
This cohort featured Anouk Asselineau, Alva Bücking, Katherina Gorodynska, Chieri Higa, SeungJi Jo, Simon Marsiglia, Christina Ntanovasili, Young Eun Park, Ignacy Radtke, Matthew Senkowycz, Maja Simisic, Mehmet Süzgün, Simone Wegman, Bruno Zhu and others.

A Maior is a clothing and home goods store located in the outskirts of Viseu, Portugal. Since 2016, an eponymous exhibition program has taken place within the shopping environment. A Maior is managed by the staff, the artist Bruno Zhu and his family. A Maior has been featured in exhibitions at Melly, Rotterdam; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; Kunsthalle Freeport, Porto; X Museum, Beijing; Life Sport and BQ, both Berlin. In 2022, A Maior was the writer-in-residence at San Serriffe in Amsterdam, who commissioned Retail Verité, A Maior’s first novella.

With A Maior, Anouk Asselineau, Alva Bücking, Katherina Gorodynska, Chieri Higa, SeungJi Jo, Simon Marsiglia, Christina Ntanovasili, Young Eun Park, Ignacy Radtke, Matthew Senkowycz, Maja Simisic, Mehmet Süzgün, Simone Wegman, Bruno Zhu.
Designed by Elisabeth Klement