Biography of X

A bold, innovative biography that offers a new understanding of the life, work, and enduring impact of Audre Lorde. 

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity-center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde's teachings on "the creative power of difference" may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today.

Lorde's understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation. Possibly the focus on Lorde's quotable essays, to the neglect of her complex poems, has led us to ignore her deep engagement with the natural world, the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For her, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be of earth on earth, and how to survive—to live the ethics that a Black feminist lesbian warrior poetics demands.In Survival Is a Promise, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde's manuscript archives, illuminates the eternal life of Lorde. Her life and work become more than a sound bite; they become a cosmic force, teaching us the grand contingency of life together on earth.

Blending memoir with critique, an award-winning poet and essayist's devastating exploration of sickness and health, cancer and the cancer industry, in the modern world

A week after her 41st birthday, Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living payslip to payslip, the condition was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness.

In The Undying - at once her harrowing memoir of survival, and a 21st-century Illness as Metaphor - Boyer draws on sources from ancient Roman dream diarists to cancer vloggers to explore the experience of illness. She investigates the quackeries, casualties and ecological costs of cancer under capitalism, and dives into the long line of women writing about their own illnesses and deaths, among them Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker and Susan Sontag.

Genre-bending, devastating and profoundly humane, The Undying is an unmissably insightful meditation on cancer, the cancer industry and the sicknesses and glories of contemporary life.

Winner of The Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction 2020; Windham Campbell Prize for Nonfiction 2020

In this dazzlingly original reassessment of women’s stories, bodies, and art, Lauren Elkin—the celebrated author of Flâneuse—explores the ways in which feminist artists have taken up the challenge of their work and how they not only react against the patriarchy but redefine their own aesthetic aims. How do we tell the truth about our experiences as bodies? What is the language, what are the materials, that we need to transcribe them? And what are the unique questions facing those engaged with female bodies, queer bodies, sick bodies, racialized bodies?  

Encompassing a rich genealogy of work across the literary and artistic landscape, Elkin makes daring links between disparate points of reference—among them Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography, Kara Walker’s silhouettes, Vanessa Bell’s portraits, Eva Hesse’s rope sculptures, Carolee Schneemann’s body art, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s trilingual masterpiece DICTEE—and steps into the tradition of cultural criticism established by Susan Sontag, Hélène Cixous, and Maggie Nelson.  

An erudite, potent examination of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political, the ambiguous and the opaque, Art Monsters is a radical intervention that forces us to consider how the idea of the art monster might transform the way we imagine—and enact—our lives.

Destined to become a new classic . . . Elkin shatters the truisms that have evolved around feminist thought.
—Chris Kraus

A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages—sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature—always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.

At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author’s mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. “I learned to see in my mother’s house,” writes Sharpe. “I learned how not to see in my mother’s house . . . My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words.” Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to the page. She practices an aesthetic of "beauty as a method,” collects entries from a community of thinkers toward a “Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness,” and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a brilliant new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.

A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond.

The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history — the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities. In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.

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.

In this characteristically sexy, daring, and hyperliterate novel, Kathy Acker interweaves the stories of three characters who share the same tragic flaw: a predilection for doomed, obsessive love. Rimbaud, the delinquent symbolist prodigy, is deserted by his lover Verlaine time and time again. Airplane takes a job dancing at Fun City, the seventh tier of the sex industry, in order to support her good-for-nothing boyfriend. And Capitol feels alive only when she's having sex with her brother, Quentin. In Memoriam to Identity is at once a revelatory addition to, and an irreverent critique of, the literature of decadence and self-destruction.

You Can Vibe Me On My FemmePhone follows three friends, in a near-future Los Angeles, who are trying to improve themselves using a phone with a feminist operating system. Join Veronica, Phoebe, and Remy on their absurd adventures to seduce artists, entrap local Proud Boys, and enter a kinky queer horse-play scene. Their FemmePhones, programmed with their personal values, guide them toward the transformative love and professional passions they seek. But what choices will they make when they disagree with their phones and what does this mean about their feminist values? Kamala Puligandla’s heartfelt, humorous novella takes you on a wild ride about queer love, self-knowledge and growth.

Size: 4.5" x 7", 108 pages, perfect bound

Self-published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Feminist Center for Creative Work. Copy edited by Pratishtha Kohli. Illustrations by Phoebe Unter. Designed by MJ Balvanera, Riso-printed by Neko Natalia.

Pati Hill's cult novel, available for the first time since 1976.

Impossible Dreams was Pati Hill's last published novel, released in 1976 after it was partially published two years earlier in the Carolina Quarterly under the title "An Angry French Housewife." Hill tells the story of Geneviève, a middle-aged woman whose life is turned upside down when she unexpectedly falls in love with her neighbor, Dolly. Mixing anecdotes with existential thoughts, the novel describes the gradual disruption of the heroine's daily life. Almost every chapter (the length of which varies from a single sentence to no more than three pages) is accompanied by a xerograph of a photograph, selected by Hill with permission from its maker. The resulting combination of text and image constitutes her most ambitious attempt to produce a work in which "the two elements fuse to become something other than either."

This novel is also one of the most incisive examples of Hill's writing—dry and impartial, yet managing to capture the contradictory feelings of her characters. In a letter addressed to the photographer Eva Rubinstein asking for reproduction rights, she writes: "My book is about a woman with a little girl and a husband who falls in love with a woman and a little girl and a husband and loses them all, just like in your mirror. It doesn't sound very cheerful but it is mainly funny."

Daisy, an independent publishing house, releases a facsimile of the out-of-print work that, after almost 50 years since its initial publication, has become a coveted collector's item.

"Impossible Dreams charmed me with its droll and irreverent tone when it was first published. Hill's use of embedded photographs was unexpected and transgressive for its me. Brilliant!"
Anne Turyn, photographer, educator and founding editor, Top Stories

Pati Hill (1921, Ashland, Kentucky – 2014, Sens, France) left behind a litterary and artistic output spanning roughly 60 years . After a short but dazzling career as a model, between 1951 and 1962 she wrote a dozen short stories—several of which were published in George Plimpton's prestigious literary journal, The Paris Review—and five books which earned her real critical recognition. Hill published One Thing I Know in 1962 after giving birth to her first and only daughter. She was then forty-one years old, and would later claim to have decided at that time to "stop writing in favour of housekeeping.''

Edited by Ana Baliza and Baptiste Pinteaux.

History and literature seem to be losing ground to the brave new world of electronic media and technology, and battle lines are being drawn between the humanities and technology, the first world and the third world, women and men. Narrator Mira Enketei erases those boundaries in her punning monologue, blurring the texts of Herodotus with the callers to a talk-radio program, and blending contemporary history with ancient: fairy-tale and literal/invented people (the kidnappers of capitalism, a girl-warrior from Somalia, a pop singer, a political writer), connected by an elaborate mock-genealogy stretching back to the Greek gods, move in and out of each other's stories. The narrator sometimes sees herself as Cassandra, condemned by Apollo to prophesy but never to be believed, enslaved by Agamemnon after the fall of Troy. Brooke-Rose amalgamates ancient literature with modern crises to produce a powerful novel about the future of culture.

Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her later, experimental novels.