Day Book

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. 

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.

A synthesis of dreamwork and bookwork, combining collaboration with dream-vision report, creative writing, and AI—a “Media Archaeology of Dreams.” Its central character is the author’s voice in this process through ekphrasis. What/where is the separation between the ekphrastic object, the dream, and its description?

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. 

Sometimes I pretended not to notice it (the black hole), but I knew it was always there. To tell the truth, I started to like having it around. I stuck quite close to it. Not too close, mind you. But it was useful, above all, to have somewhere to put things. Unwanted things. I am attracted to your attraction, he said. (I put it in the hole.) Night by night it got a little bigger.

Holes splices forms of fiction and nonfiction. The narrator, a researcher of limits at an unidentified university, figures her entanglement with an unobtainable love object as the descent into a black hole. Everything she reads seems to shed light on the non-events that comprise their relationship, and study collapses into life as she struggles to separate events and forms, reality and ideation. Holes is a study in thematic fixation, engaging a range of ‘obsessional artists’ (including Yayoi Kusama, from whom the term is borrowed, Lee Bontecou, and Carolee Schneemann) for whom holes—as idea, imagery, philosophy—have proved evocative, inviting, and occasionally obliterative.

Hilary White is a writer and researcher, currently an IRC postdoc at Maynooth University, Ireland, working on a project entitled Forms of Sleep. She co-ran the experimental poetry reading and commission series, No Matter, in Manchester, and co-edited the zine series, Academics Against Networking. Her writing appears in MAP, Banshee, zarf, and The Stinging Fly. Holes is her first novel.

The Book of Skies, like its predecessor Excess-The Factory, emerged from poet Leslie Kaplan's experience participating in the national strike and social revolution of ’68 in France. Early in ‘68 Kaplan, like others, left her studies in order to take on factory work, as an aspect of revolutionary practice. Excess—the Factory, puts the factory experience strikingly on the page in sparse and original language. The Book of Skies takes place in the period just after the ‘68 events as the central speaker now observes the places, landscapes, and people surrounding and relying on factory production in French cities, small and large. As the poem’s speaker moves from site to site, she finds possibility within the social spaces of the market, the street, the café, and even the factory itself. While class and gendered violence threaten to shut down hopes for freedom and renewal, the sky, as reality and as figure, functions as an aperture, drawing our attention upward and outward, even or especially when domestic and work-spaces are most violent or suffocating.

From the beginning of her career, French poet, playwright, and novelist Leslie Kaplan has been an important writer of the French left. She has published over twenty books in all three genres, many of which have been translated into German, Swedish, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, and now, English. Her first book, L'exces l’usine (1982), gained the attention of writers such as Marguerite Duras and Maurice Blanchot, and became an important book for the ‘68 generation. In 2018, Commune Editions published Excess—The Factory, translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap. This was the book’s first translation into English, though it had been translated into five other languages.

Narrative/Prose issue, featuring a special section: I was writing, but it was drawing: a Renee Gladman mini-feature with work by Renee Gladman * Earl Jackson, Jr. * Bruna Mori * Alexis Almeida on Renee Gladman & Julie Carr * Lewis Freedman & Vanessa Thill on Renee Gladman & Mirtha Dermisache. as well as work by Isabel Waidner * sissi tax (translated by Joel Scott & Charlotte Theißen) * Susan Hefuna * Mira Mattar * Lital Khaikin * Maryam Madjidi (translated by Ruth Diver) * Omer Wasim & Saira Sheikh * Ilse Aichinger (translated by Christian Hawkey & Uljana Wolf) * Bronka Nowicka (translated by Katarzyna Szuster) * Maude Pilon (translated by Simon Brown) * Mehmet Dere * Syd Staiti * Jena Osman * Germán Sierra * Natani Notah * Julia Bloch on Bernadette Mayer * Robert Glück on Clarice Lispector * Rob Halpern on Bruce Boone & Dennis Cooper *Dylan Byron on/after Bruce Boone * Linda Bakke on Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today * Anna Fidler * Corey Zielinski on Bob Glück & Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-97 * Jackie Kirby on From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice * David W. Pritchard on Kevin Killian * Dale Enggass on Simone White * Allison Cardon on Anne Boyer * Robert Balun on Leslie Kaplan * Marco Antonio Huerta on Omar Pimienta * Allison Grimaldi Donahue on Josué Guébo * Sara Florian on Lasana Sekou * Louis Bury on Allison Cobb * Hugo Gibson on Annie Ernaux.

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!

Le numéro 1 de la revue de cinéma Fidback éditée par le FIDMarseille, avec un retour sur la 35e édition du festival, un regard rétrospectif sur des films qui ont fait l'actualité mondiale du cinéma en 2024, une carte blanche à Clara Schulmann, et un portrait de l'artiste et cinéaste Declan Clarke par Alice Leroy.

Retour sur six films issus de la sélection officielle du FID, par des auteurs, critiques et écrivains de langues française et étrangères. Les textes critiques sont accompagnés d'entretiens, de documents ou de matériaux inédits. De Amsevrid, premier film magistral du cinéaste algérien Tahar Kessi, jusqu'au Tríptico de Mondongo du maestro argentin Mariano Llinás, ce bouquet de films est un condensé de l'édition 2024 du festival – une poignée de films parmi tous ceux qui auraient mérité le retour.

Le choix des huit films sur lesquels nous avons invité des auteurs et autrices à poser leur regard est en soi un geste critique. Il nous a semblé que les derniers films d'Albert Serra, Miguel Gomes, Alain Guiraudie, Jia Zhangke et Victor Iriarte méritaient plus que d'autres l'inscription dans le temps long de la revue. Films restaurés, écrits édités, rétrospective et exposition au Jeu de Paume : Chantal Akerman fut pour beaucoup, cette année, une révélation. Naked Acts, le film ressuscité de Bridgett Davis, aura marqué ceux qui ont eu la chance de le voir.

Pour sa carte blanche, Clara Schulmann a choisi le film Lucciole (2021), de Pauline Curnier Jardin. Mais son texte porte au-delà de l'œuvre, il déplace le geste critique en un récit spéculatif sur la manière dont une vie et un travail se tissent sur une trame faite de lieux, d'histoires, de personnes.

Alice Leroy est la première à faire le portrait de l'artiste et cinéaste irlandais et berlinois Declan Clarke : à prendre la mesure, à tracer les perspectives d'une œuvre majeure, bien qu'encore méconnue, du cinéma d'aujourd'hui.

Fidback est une revue de cinéma éditée par le FIDMarseille. Chaque année, elle dessine une image-constellation du cinéma aimé et défendu par le festival.

Written between 1984 and 1995, this new edition collects three essays by Etel Adnan meditating on a life lived in motion: intellectual, geographic, linguistic and artistic perpetual motion. Published in honor of Adnan’s centennial (2025), these essays are a beacon and remain a piercing and profound model for reckoning with and surviving our times of war and exile.

Voyage, War, and Exile collects three essays by Etel Adnan that present a multilayered meditation on the author’s life within and without Beirut. Adnan reflects upon the intricacies of family, place, and language, asking what it means to be an Arab woman and writer in exile at the end of a century in which “Exile became the existential and metaphysical condition for every Arab.” At once deeply personal to the life of the author and yet ubiquitous in inquiry, Voyage, War, Exile pulls us into the shifting landscape of Lebanon and the United States in the 20th Century through a weaving of philosophical reflection and memory. This volume includes artwork by Simone Fattal.

Praise for Etel Adnan

The work of Etel Adnan—poet, painter, philosopher—is an interrogation of the human experience and a study in worldly engagement…Sorting through decades of memory, loss, and linguistic turns, we drift with her in a sea of thought and expansive meditation. —K.B. Thors, The Lambda Literary Review

Her poetry has the capacity to assemble and discern the ‘sides’ of the self as well as the literature and literary personalities which frame the self of her writing. —Matt Turner, Hyperallergic

Adnan’s receptivity is evident in her fine-tuned attention to detail, at the microscopic and cosmic level alike. Her lens shifts in scale and orientation, defamiliarizing the surroundings we thought we knew and re-introducing us to nature.—Noa Micaela Fields, Medium

"Dolto’s Dominique is the only case I’ve found that rivals Freud, and brings us up to date, replete with questions of incestuous trauma, repressed sexualities, autism and cognitive disability, and a profound sense for the contradictions of polite society and histories of colonial and racist violence. I love this child and encountering Dolto’s otherworldly voice as an analyst." — Jamieson Webster

While the child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto stands alongside Jacques Lacan as a leading light of the Other French School, she has been little translated and remains curiously unknown in the English-speaking world. First published in 1971, Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent is frank and close to the clinical experience. A masterpiece of the genre, it is at once a granular psychological portrait of a troubled adolescent and his familial inheritance, and a historical case study, set in the France of the 1960s, of the of the relationship between subjectivity, nationality, and time and space.

With a foreword by Michael Ryzner-Basiewicz

Translated by Ivan Kats, revised by Lionel and Sharmini Bailly

Cover image by Mike Kelley, Untitled 1975

Françoise Dolto (born 6 November 1908, Paris) was a psychoanalyst and paediatrician. Alongside private practice at her home, where she saw adults and children, Dolto practised in four institutions where she saw only children patients: the Polyclinique Ney, the Centre Claude Bernard, the Hôpital Trousseau and the Centre Etienne Marcel. From 1967 to 1969, Dolto answered adult and child listeners of the French radio station Europe No. 1, live and anonymously under the name ‘Docteur X’. The programme enjoyed excellent ratings, but Dolto found dialogue to be hindered by the demands of live broadcasting and advertising. In 1976, she agreed to return to radio with Lorsque l’enfant paraît on France Inter, on the condition that she replied to listeners’ letters, which enabled her to go into depth. The programme was a huge success, and would make her a household name. In 1978 Dolto retired as an adult psychoanalyst: her fame had become such that it distorted the therapeutic relationship with patients. She now devoted herself to prevention, training of young analysts, group and individual supervision, publications, conferences and radio and television broadcasts. She also continued her work with children in the care of the Aide Sociale à l’Enfance, some of whom she received at her home until the end of her life. In 1979, along with a small team, she founded the Maison Verte, a place for early-years socialisation welcoming children from ages zero to four along with their caregivers, for sessions of play and talk. This model spread throughout France and Europe, to Russia, Armenia and Latin America. Dolto is the author of more than a dozen books, and several essays, interviews and seminars. In English, her books have been translated as Psychoanalysis and Pediatrics (Routeledge, 2013) and The Unconscious Body Image (Routledge, 2022). Françoise Dolto died on 25 August 1988 in Paris.

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