Quelques textes de Kathy Acker, écrits avant ses trente ans, traduits par Elodie Petit et Claire Finch.
The first full-scale authorized biography of the pioneering experimental novelist Kathy Acker, one of the most original and controversial figures in 20th-century American literature.
Kathy Acker (1947–1997) was a rare and almost inconceivable a celebrity experimental writer. Twenty-five years after her death, she remains one of the most original, shocking, and controversial artists of her era. The author of visionary, transgressive novels like Blood and Guts in High School ; Empire of the Senses ; and Pussy, King of Pirates , Acker wrote obsessively about the treachery of love, the limitations of language, and the possibility of revolution.
She was notorious for her methods—collaging together texts stolen from other writers with her own diaries, sexual fantasies, and blunt political critique—as well as her appearance. With her punkish hairstyles, tattoos, and couture outfits, she looked like no other writer before or after. Her work was exceptionally prescient, taking up complicated conversations about gender, sex, capitalism, and colonialism that continue today.
Impossible Princess is the third collection of gay short fiction by PEN Award–winning San Francisco–based author Kevin Killian. A member of the “new narrative” circle including Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, Killian is a master short story writer, crafting campy and edgy tales that explore the humor and darkness of desire. A former director of Small Press Traffic and a co-editor of Mirage/Periodical, Killian co-wrote Jack Spicer’s biography, Poet Be Like God, and co-edited three Spicer books, including My Vocabulary Did This To Me: Collected Poems. His latest book, Action Kylie, is a collection of poems devoted to Kylie Minogue.
Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love is a genre-defiant sex-trip to post-human dimensions. If C.G Jung, magic-mushroom shaman Terence McKenna and Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae) had a three-way while binging on George Bataille and undergoing Hormone Replacement Therapy, their baby might be the erotic cocktail of Myth Lab. Its extreme theme is nothing less than the fate of the species.
“Brilliant and wild, Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab is a manifesto of exuberance disguised as a sci-fi sex test-center for the invention of communal futures. Skelley’s a mad scientist, scholar and poet.” - Chris Kraus, author of After Kathy Acker
“In Myth Lab, Jack Skelley adroitly molds an “Einsteinian elasticity between objects and ether” to the “clitoverse.” If this formulation seems too vast, just think about a) the last time you felt good about power and b) all the ways to say yes to pleasure as a source of liberation. In conducting a “cosmologic psychoanalysis,” Myth Lab thrillingly hot wires our neurons to an endless mirror stage reflective of our own instinctual nature.” - Kim Rosenfield, author of Phantom Captain
"An explosion of clit-cock-and-pop-culture worship. Skelley’s eroto-celestial universe fights back not only against the denial of desire – “also known as fuckheadocracy and market forces” – but against death itself." - Francesca Lia Block, author of Weetzie Bat
"A hallucinatory book that straddles gender studies, science-fiction, and cultural criticism (to name but three of many genres). Ever eager to use a newfound Skelley-ism, I urge everyone to read Myth Lab and be “Kardashian'd” with love (i.e buy it now, it's great)." - Susan Finlay, author of The Jacques Lacan Foundation
"In Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab, something weird and beautiful is forged in the crucible of infinite horny grief. It’s an epic, delirious descent into the inferno, navigating the concentric circles of romance and desire as literary malady, TikTok psyop, benevolent cosmological principle, and more. Simultaneously a quest, a physics experiment and an elegy. I loved following its narrator - a tender, erotomanic, Blakean particle - seeking and finding visionary head." - Daisy Lafarge, author of Love Bug
In Close Writing, Alice Butler reflects on the diaries, letters, publications, performances, lives, and afterlives of her most beloved queer feminist writers: Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller. While the transgressive avant-garde writer Kathy Acker has developed a cult following in the decades since her death in the late-90s, the actress and writer Cookie Mueller has remained relatively obscure. In this creative-critical study, Butler participates and responds to the lives and writings of her shared “beloved," reimagining the scene of the archive as a scene of triangulated and bittersweet love that traverses the boundaries of life and death. She draws on the autofictional strategies that Acker and Mueller pioneered in their own experimental writings and performances, encountering the women in intimate theoretical spaces of sensuality, sexuality, and sickness that slip between life and text. By encountering Acker and Mueller as transgressors and innovators, but also as beloved figures in her writing life whom she addresses in love letters, Butler brings readers to new, reparative textures of understanding, embodiment, and affection through close writing.
I Want reviews the eponymous duo's double-projection film installation examining issues of gender, sexuality and performativity—and inspired by the words of punk poetess Kathy Acker and convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. This publication documents the major film installation I Want (2015) by collaborative artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, which was presented at their 2015 solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich and Nottingham Contemporary.
The double-projection film installation is based on a script that borrows texts from American punk-poet Kathy Acker (1947-1997), as well as chats and materials by convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning that speak of her reasons for revealing nearly one million secret military and diplomatic documents through WikiLeaks, at the same time exposing her transgender identity to her superiors.
Through poetic gestures of appropriation and recombination, Boudry and Lorenz examine issues around gender, sexuality, the performance of identity, and the nature of collaboration. Alongside generous color documentation, written contributions by Gregg Bordowitz, Laura Guy, Dean Spade, and Craig Willse unpack and reflect upon both the historical context and contemporary significance of this multivalent work.
A daring novel, once widely censored, about the scrappy, harrowing, and inventive lives of Rome's unhoused youth by one of Italy's greatest film directors.
Boys Alive, published in 1955, was Pier Paolo Pasolini's first work of fiction and it remains his best known. Written in the aftermath of Pasolini's move from the provinces to Rome, the novel captures the. hunger and anger, waywardness and squalor of the big city. The life of the novel is the life of the city streets; from the streets, too, come its raw, mongrel, assaultive language. Here unblinkered realism and passionate lyricism meet in a vision of a vast urban inferno, blazing with darkness and light.
There is no one story to the book, only stories, splitting off, breaking away, going nowhere, flaming out, stories in which scenes of comic debacle, bitter conflict, wild joy, and crushing disappointment quickly follow. Pasolini's young characters have nothing to trade on except youth, and the struggle to live is unending. They loot, hustle, scavenge, steal. Somehow money will turn up; as soon as it does it will get spent. The main thing, in any case, is to have fun, and so the boys boast and vie, the desperate uncertainty of their days and nights offset by the fabulous inventiveness of their words. A warehouse heist, a night of gambling, the hunt for sex: The world of Boys Alive is a world in convulsion where at any instant disaster may strike.
Tim Parks' new translation of Pasolini's early masterpiece brings out the salt and brilliance of a still-scandalous work of art.
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.
Recognized as a poet, less so as a visual artist […] Mina Loy also wrote in the style of Crystal Pantomime, a text from one hundred years ago [c. 1915] describing a ballet in prose. The writing evokes images with which actual theater effects can only interfere. It projects in the mind as onto a screen. But this restless writing does more than that, shifting registers and unfolded in equal parts fairy tale description, precise impossible stage directions, notes for impossible costumes and sets, guidelines for impossible choreography, and a glancing archeology of personal association, opinion, art historical commentary, and psychoanalysis, all floating in suspension, all shading into poetry, and with this manner of overflowing every frame defining its poetics. — Matthew Goulish
This first standalone edition of Crystal Pantomime opens with a biographical introduction by Mina Loy’s literary executor—poet Roger Conover—originally published in Eliot Weinberger’s journal Montemora in 1981, as well as a dramaturgical introduction by Matthew Goulish of Chicago performance group Every house has a door, originally prepared as opening remarks to Every house’s reading of Loy’s Pantomime at the Arts Club of Chicago in spring of 2024. In tandem these supplementary texts begin to frame what is a rather strange and singular sketch for a work never realized.
It’s fall (or autumn) 2018. The Trump administration wants to fortify the United States-Mexico border, Robert ‘Beto’ O'Rourke is running for Senate, and British grifter Nicki Smith has just secured a “low-paid glamour job” at the University of Texas’ Jacques Lacan Foundation. In between sleeping with the air-conditioning repair guy (or man) and watching Kate Moss make-up commercials (or advertisements) Nicki completes the first ever American-English translation of Lacan’s newly discovered and highly controversial notebook – without knowing any French.
An Anglo-American comedy of manners about identity and class The Jacques Lacan Foundation reveals—and revels in—the numerous pretensions that surround academia and authorship, and the institutions that foster them.
New York poet Paul Vaughn has a trick for enjoying poetry readings: He simply imagines the reader died a long time ago. Paul is twenty-seven, married, and an admired poet himself. R. T. Wode’s mission is to give offense. He’s also a poet, freshly landed in the city, and, at age sixteen, unknown.
Paul worships T. They embark on a tempestuous affair, dropping acid and crashing parties and perambulating the grit and grime of New York City circa 1972. Paul is in love with T., but T. is in love with experience. Their relationship disintegrates.
A novel of compelling originality and transcendent beauty by legendary musician and poet Richard Hell, Godlike transposes the notorious romance of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud to the East Village in its squalid, glorious ’70s heyday. The book comprises a version of Paul’s 1997 hospital notebooks: diaries amidst poems and essays, along with, most pertinently, the poet’s third-person memoir-novelette of his youthful time with the now-famous T. Godlike is infused as well with evocations—and sometimes actual poems—of many New York poets of the era, from Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett to Edwin Denby and James Schuyler. It achieves a lyricism both profane and profound as it conjures the frenetic vitality as well as the existential malaise of an era. It’s a searching meditation on art, life, love, and the impossibility of everything.