Boys Alive

An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel.

Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth's rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is "hard of hearing" but "full of life."

First published in 1994, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe is one of the most provocative, poignant, and inventive American novels of the last quarter century.

The book tells two stories of romantic obsession. One, based on the first autobiography in English, the medieval Book of Margery Kempe, is about a fifteenth-century woman from East Anglia, a visionary, a troublemaker, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and an aspiring saint, and her love affair with Jesus. It is complicated. The other is about the author’s own love for an alluring and elusive young American, L. It is complicated. Between these two Margery Kempe, the novel, emerges as an unprecedented exploration of desire, devotion, abjection, and sexual obsession in the form of a novel like no other novel.

Robert Glück’s masterpiece bears comparison with the finest work of such writers as Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. This edition includes an essay by Glück about the creation of the book titled "My Margery, Margery's Bob."

A widowed writer begins to work on a biography of a novelist and artist—and soon uncovers bizarre parallels between her life and her subject’s—in this chilling and singularly strange novella by a contemporary master of horror and fantasy.

The narrator of Lisa Tuttle’s uncanny novella is a recent widow, a writer adrift. Not only has she lost her husband, but her muse seems to have deserted her altogether. Her agent summons her to Edinburgh to discuss her next book. What will she tell him? At once the answer comes to she will write the biography of Helen Ralston, best known, if at all, as the subject of W.E. Logan’s much-reproduced painting Circe , and the inspiration for his classic children’s book.

But Ralston was a novelist and artist in her own right, though her writing is no longer in print and her most storied painting too shocking, too powerful—malevolent even—to be shown in public. Over the months that follow, Ralston proves a reluctantly cooperative subject, even as her biographer uncovers eerie resonances between the older woman’s life and her own. Whose biography is she writing, really?

Published on the centenary year of Pasolini’s birth, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper is a dual edition that stages a dialogue between cinema today and Pasolini’s timeless films and words.

The two complementary volumes slide into one another, forming a unique set that evokes and celebrates Pasolini’s enduring influence. The smaller book features his epic autobiographical poem ‘Poet of the Ashes’, in a revised translation by esteemed poet Stephen Sartarelli; the larger book comprises original tributes by vital filmmakers from across the contemporary cinema landscape.

Twenty filmmakers shared personal reflections in the form of essays, poems, photographs, drawings and more: Catherine Breillat, Luise Donschen & Helena Wittmann, Jia Zhangke, Radu Jude, Payal Kapadia, Alexandre Koberidze, Dane Komljen, Mike Leigh, Mariano Llinás, Roberto Minervini, Valérie Massadian, Luc Moullet, Ben Rivers, Angela Schanelec, Ulrich Seidl, Basma al-Sharif, Deborah Stratman, Anocha Suwichakornpong and Gustavo Vinagre.

An original reading of Pier Paolo Pasolini's work and “impulses”, between aesthetic and psychoanalytic reflection.

Une lecture originale du corpus et de la biographie de Pier Paolo Pasolini, sous le signe de l'éthique et des « pulsions » qui y sont à l'œuvre, entre réflexions esthétique et psychanalytique.

Relue à l'aune de la psychanalyse et des théories queer, l'œuvre de Pier Paolo Pasolini constitue un Dehors fertile pour la réflexion contemporaine. Pour faire face à l'apathie, pour affronter la souffrance, pour réveiller la réalité désabusée, comment tirer parti de la descente aux enfers pasoliniens ? Comment son travail peut-il aider à mieux appréhender le contemporain sans le condamner d'une traite ? Pasolini aimait se définir comme « une force du passé ». Il ne faut pas laisser sombrer sa lutte contre le conformisme petit bourgeois et le développement du capitalisme dans un conservatisme quelconque. La lutte pasolinienne, son combat au corps-à-corps avec la langue, le visible, le dicible ne peut rester vain.

Re-lire et re-revoir Pasolini pour nommer le contemporain : le chantier est vaste, d'autant plus imposant qu'il est resté inachevé. Films, pièces de théâtre, romans, poésies, essais... en chaque lieu, surgit la suspension des certitudes bien-pensantes et résonnent les voix des sans-voix : ragazzi, prostituées, spectres, lucioles, sous-prolétariat du monde entier. S'ensuit une série de questions déterminantes pour l'actualité de la pratique psychanalytique et de la pensée. Comment (se) dit-on ? Comment (se) réfléchit-on ? Comment (se) désire-t-on ? Où et comment retrouver un peu de « grande santé » ? Où et comment trouver un nouveau cap ?

D'Edipo Re à Salo, d'Orgia à Petrolio, de Comizi d'amore aux Ecrits corsaires, Pasolini décline des corps, des visages, des personnages animés par des pulsions qui ne cessent d'inventer une logique mettant au défi le moralisme de l'autorité paternelle. Ces pulsions répètent sans cesse un même échec. Que signifie cette omniprésence de l'échec, l'insistance de la foirade tant dans l'œuvre filmée qu'écrite ? Comment articuler le refus du père pasolinien avec son attachement revendiqué à l'œuvre freudienne? Répondre à ces questions, c'est entrer dans la poétique même de l'écriture pasolinienne et dans des questions psychanalytiques de la plus brûlante actualité.

Rapprocher Pasolini de la psychanalyse et des théories du genre ne vise ni à psychologiser son œuvre, ni à faire du poète un précurseur des idéologies queer. S'emparer des pulsions pasoliniennes, c'est, bien plutôt, mettre au travail la praxis par les idéologies : réveiller l'écoute analytique, les idéologies queer et l'esthétique pasolinienne.

L'essai se veut une porte d'entrée pour comprendre l'éthique à l'œuvre chez Pasolini et dans la pratique de l'inconscient. Son champ référentiel principal est le corpus pasolinien analysé à partir de l'œuvre freudienne et des apports lacaniens ainsi que de leurs reprises par les avancées des théories du genre (Teresa de Lauretis, Leo Bersani, Gayle Rubin...).

Derek Jarman’s unrealised film treatment, The Assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Garden of Earthly Delights, takes as its subject matter the events leading up to and including the murder of Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini following the making of his final film Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom in 1975. 

Written in 1984, the setting of Jarman's film is inspired by the renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500), a painting that depicts both the joys and perils of temptation, and which Jarman encountered on a visit to the Museo de Prado in Madrid the year he began working on the project. 

For the first time, a facsimile of the treatment is presented alongside reproductions from the film's workbook, which show Jarman's calligraphic notes towards the film’s sequences, themes, cinematography, lighting, sound, costume, casting and props. 

2025 marks fifty years since Pasolini's murder and thirty-two since Jarman’s death due to AIDS. Against a backdrop of funding cuts to the arts and the arrival of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that vanished away so many important artists and visionaries, The Assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Garden of Earthly Delights is a powerful elegy to the decadence of queer cinema and the tragedy of its last auteur. 

Derek Jarman was one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century. His practice, as diverse as it was prolific, spanned painting, sculpture, film, writing, stage design, gardening and activism. He was an outspoken campaigner for LGBTQIA+ rights, and was one of the first public figures in the UK to raise awareness for those living with HIV/AIDS, announcing his own HIV diagnosis on the radio in 1986.

In a first-time English language translation by Cristina Viti to mark the poet’s centenary, Tenement Press will publish Pier Paolo Pasolini’s groundbreaking, filmic work of prose and verse, La rabbia / Anger.

Why is our life dominated by discontent, by anguish, by the fear of war, by war? In order to answer this question I have written La rabbia, not following a chronological or perhaps even a logical thread, but only my political reasons and my poetic sense. - Pier Paolo Pasolini

Written in response to producer Gastone Ferranti’s request for his comments on a set of newsreel items, the poet would respond with a montage of his own. Via the unfolding of a chrysalis of images, in La rabbia (1963), Pasolini’s lens pans over Soviet repression in Hungary; the Cuban revolution; (the utopian object of) space exploration; political imprisonment in Algeria; the liberation of the former European colonies; the election of Pope John XXIII; the prospect of revolution in Africa and the Middle East; in Europe and in Latin America... Here, we’ve a panoply of photorealist intimations of Pasolini’s ‘poetic sense.’ The death of Marilyn Monroe crests as an idea in this tidal pooling of reflections, and as the poet’s line lights out for conceptual rhymes and counterpoints.

In Viti’s translation, the weave of prose and poetry that forms La rabbia portrays the vitality of Pasolini’s work in its capacity to speak to both the specifics of his contexts, the character of our own present tense, and the ironic fact of a life lived against the gulf of discontent in its myriad forms. Here, we’ve a startling confrontation of a revolutionary struggle in stasis set in lines that crystallise a rallying call against blindness. ‘I’ll not have peace, not ever,’ he writes. A lucid acceptance of the poet’s restlessness, and a marker for Pasolini’s commitment to a solidarity with the oppressed that we find reaffirmed on every page, in La rabbia the poet charts how ‘the powerful world of capital takes an abstract painting as its brash banner’ in this unravelling of ‘crisis in the world.’

Charismatic Spirals is for an America circa 2024, where poetry—the art of developing new means of speaking—has never been of such artistic, technological and political consequences.

An archetypal outsider, Will Alexander released his first poetry collection aged forty-four while working at the Los Angeles Lakers' ticket office. Three decades on, he has ascended to the legendary status of the city's great living surrealist, existing, as Eliot Weinberger wrote, in a state of "imaginal hyperdrive," with forty such collections to his name.

Operating at the edge of language, Alexander deploys words in a way that feels prophetic—human psyches synthesize with technological artifacts; atoms and archetypes collide; bodies are vacated, voices are newly incarnated. His America—like Glissant's—is multinational and—like Coover and Spiegelman's—multivalent and symbolically unstable. That is to say, he belongs to an America circa 2024, where poetry—the art of developing new means of speaking—has never been of such artistic, technological, and political consequence.

In doing so, Alexander draws from a vast array of influences, from luminaries like Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philip Lamantia, to holistic visions such as Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, the Mayan numerical system, and Cheikh Anta Diop's perspectives on ancient Egypt. In a preview of Charismatic Spirals in the New York Times, Anne Boyer captured the essence of his work: "visionary poetry [that] achieves its effect through sound, not image...Cadence [that] can shatter us, set the world ablaze."
Read it syllabically, surf it quickly—there is no single way to approach this work.

Will Alexander (born 1948 in Los Angeles) is an African-American artist, philosopher, poet, novelist, essayist and pianist.