De Scylla en Charybde

Child’s Replay is a hallucinatory homecoming. As we follow THE CHILD in a series of private re-enactments, the present self is revealed as the past’s fragile construction. Pursuing the banality of trauma, a first-person character juxtaposes childhood events with internal misrepresentations, reflections on the emotional toll of migration, psychoanalytic theory, Brazilian history, and literary criticism. An exploration of the impact that language and fiction have on real bodies, Child’s Replay assembles a hybrid portrait of memory and anti-memory. 

This publication is limited to 100 copies, which are signed and numbered by the author. 

This story was written by a Chinese activist/writer about her arrest and detention during the waves of resistance in China in late 2022. To evade censorship, she disguised it as a translation—told through the voice of an Iranian Kurdish woman amid the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising happening at the same time. 

After fleeing China, the author reclaimed the story through footnotes—uncovering hidden meanings and restoring its Chinese context. What first read as an Iranian story became, on re-reading, a coded Chinese narrative. Iran stood as both real and metaphorical—a displaced symbol, through which the interconnected struggles in different movements echoed.

The two waves of reading, months apart, became part of the story’s form. This “non-nonfiction” reveals a paradox: in China, truth must appear as fiction or elsewhere to be told—making the fiction more real than reality itself. 

Two years later, the piece was translated “back” into Persian by an Iranian Kurdish activist. And now, it arrives here, in this zine of tripped, layered languages. 

Author: Wu Qin
English Translation: Aaris WOO and Yixi
Farsi Translation: Somayeh Rostampour
Visual & Layout: Maoyi, If A, Hu Jiamin
Interior illustrations: Hu Jiamin
Published by Tofu Stand (Tofulogy 002)

sex and place is a series of workshops and publications exploring score-based and semi-anonymous writing as a tool for articulating shared concerns.

Vol. 1 ‘preliminiaries’ is written by Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen. In the midst of (learning) child care, (unlearning) performance and (experimenting with) sex, the publication interweaves three registers of writing as analogies and interruptions of each other.

The ‘sex and place’ series is part Domestic Anarchism, a project devoted to coalition-building beyond biological, chosen, or national conceptions of family. Dance serves as a set of tools and knowledge that can be applied beyond “the spectacle” to collectively study, write, and move. 

Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen are choreographers and they co-parent three-year-old Penélope Cleo. Andrea and Adriano use dance and choreography to think about the distribution of care and solidarity beyond ‘the family’, and in turn consider how such a distribution could inform their dance practice. Inevitably themes like sex, economy, gender, and class get activated. But also notions such as prefiguration, anarchism, clitoridian* thinking, zones of non-domination and coalition building. They see dance as a knowledge that can be applied to different practices. Some of these include: co-habitations, score based writing and dancing, self-organised study groups and publications, workshops and dance performances. 

This bootleg edition collects scanned copies of Monique Wittig's writing. It includes; The Lesbian Body, Les Guérillères, The Opoponax, and Lesbian Peoples: material for a dictionary— In true bootleg style, punk enough to carry the truly radical words of Wittig: scans, a little grainy, with marginalia of unknown origins. Now, we can dress ourselves in the ravishingly erotic, violent splendorous brilliance to become baby Wittigs.  

This edition was assembled out of a deep love of Wittig's work by Chloe Chignell.

Monique Wittig was a French author and feminist theorist particularly interested in overcoming gender and the heterosexual contract. She published her first novel, L'opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism.

Elizabeth in the Woolds is the product of two superimposed compositional strategies; a thematic aggregate based on notes dating back to 2008 and an epic prose narrative. Elizabeth is the device through which this simultaneous register moves. Screen writing provides a model for multiple voices. In a film script, the narrator can be the camera; there’s a machine at the centre of the story structure which figures a demand for resolution of plot; a contrario, the thematic approach (S, U, N, as electric light) obliterates chronology, and enumerates an atemporal topological figure, or the way the world is built.

(730pp., self-published first edition of 50, Kortrijk, 2021) 

New Infinity is an experimental novella that follows a woman as she lives and dreams her way through the philosophical implications of autoimmune disease. Met by a labyrinth of closing doors, she searches for meaning and connection among fragmented realities and failed relationships, finding infinitude in the healing process of bibliomancy.

Bára Hladík’s New Infinity is a glittering cross-genre debut. Weaving surrealist stories with meditative poetics, Hladík invites you into a dream world of degenerative illness, left disordered by the failures of ableism, medical professionals, and late-stage capitalism. Here, everything runs on sick time. Where physical health and financial resources grow scarce, the restorative possibilities of queer love, divination, and self-reclamation grant a defiant, yet often tenuous, abundance. Alive with Hladík’s boundless insight and wit, New Infinity is a powerful addition to the collective body of disability literature.

“I have been waiting for a book like New Infinity for years: a story of disability that oozes over the edges of ‘personal narrative’ into the surreal logics of bodies that will not be made useful under capitalism. Bára Hladík’s prose delights me with its 21st-century metamorphoses, its waiting-room dream logics, and its mystical invocations of a body in pain. Her poetry is a channel to another dimension, but one that is grounded inside our everyday sensoria—’cracking, pushing, pulsing’ like a spine writhing with snakes. Here, embodiment is never extractable from the institutions and economies whose profits are predicated on the question ‘do I matter if / I am only a pulse’? New Infinity insists upon a different kind of mattering, in which missed connections, improper fusions, and fleeting moments command the careful, caring attention that is too often denied them.” – Liz Bowen, author of Compassion Fountain (Trembling Pillow Press) and Sugarblood (Metatron Press)

“New Infinity is the most incredible fiction. It explodes the boundaries of this form so as to get to the heart of important truths about the phenomenon of physical pain and of human existence itself. While Bára Hladík’s story draws from a personal experience of survival through a struggle unlike any other, it is an entirely universal tale. In taking us into the most intimate spaces of suffering and narrating a story of a woman navigating a true labyrinth, Hladík shows us a way to face life, with the uncertainties it presents to us all. This novel is at once a profoundly moving story, a brilliant act of creativity, and an existential philosophy. It’s a book I will keep close, so as to revisit— for the thrilling inspiration of its liberated uses of form and style, as well as to learn from Hladík’s honest language, her resilient sense of humour, and her ability to capture the surreal beauty of being alive at all. I felt like I was reading Franz Kafka crossed with a fully unconstrained Anne Carson. I haven’t been so impacted by a book in a long time. It has changed my ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking about what it means to be alive.” – Molly Lynch, author of The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman (Catapult Books, 2023)

“Bára Hladík’s debut book is a blend of poetry and prose that seeks to make sense of a world that is flagrantly hostile and impatient with bodies that neither perform nor conform to the manic impatience of capitalist acceleration. An honest, vibrant, and very real account of a young writer finding a voice.” – Sina Queyras, writer, editor, professor, curator

“Bára Hladík’s New Infinity is a stirring pedagogy, philosophy, and witness. This offering of sick hybridity coils in a long, calm, and exhilarating breath while asking, ‘Do the doctors know how to breathe?’ Yes, Hladík’s prose and poems prompt, pain cosmologies are at once funny and incantatory. Each of New Infinity’s oneiric turns reads the body as an oracle and mirror, reminds us we are atmospheric. I would rather live here in this book, relearn how to breathe, than return to the ‘impossible crank’ of normal.” – Jane Shi, writer, poet, editor, organizer

Bára Hladík is a Czech-Canadian writer, editor and multimedia artist. Born in Ktunaxa Territory, she began her literary studies in the Creative Writing program at Capilano University in 2011. After studying Technical Writing at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, she received her Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Communications from the University of British Columbia in 2016. Her work can be found in Briarpatch Magazine, THIS Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Carte Blanche, EVENT Mag, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Bed Zine, Empty Mirror, Cosmonauts Avenue and elsewhere. Bára’s microchapbook Book of Mirrors was selected for the 2019 Ghost City Press Summer Micro-Chap Series and her collaborative artist book Behind the Curtain (Publication Studio, 2018) was an honourable mention for the Scorpion and Felix Prize (2017). New Infinity is Bára’s first book. She is now a guest in Esquimalt, BC.

A Map of Absence presents the finest poetry and prose by Palestinian writers over the last seventy years. Featuring writers in the diaspora and those living under occupation, these striking entries pay testament to one of the most pivotal events in modern history – the 1948 Nakba.

This unique, landmark anthology includes translated excerpts of works by major authors such as Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani and Fadwa Tuqan alongside those of emerging writers, published here in English for the first time. Depicting the varied aspects of Palestinian life both before and after 1948, their writings highlight the ongoing resonances of the Nakba.

An intimate companion for all lovers of world literature, A Map of Absence reveals the depth and breadth of Palestinian writing.

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. 

In response to surges of violent British nationalism and political paranoia around borders, and to related social and ethical crises, JT Welsch and Ágnes Lehóczky have assembled an anthology to mark the vital contribution of non-UK-born writers to this country’s poetry culture. Wretched Strangers brings together innovative writing from around the globe, celebrating the irreducible diversity such work brings to ‘British’ poetry. While documenting the challenges faced by writers from elsewhere, these pieces offer hopeful re-conceptions of ‘shared foreignness’ as Lila Matsumoto describes it, and the ‘peculiar state of exiled human,’ in Fawzi Karim’s words.

The book is published by Boiler House Press to commemorate the anniversary of the June 2016 EU Referendum and in solidarity through struggles ongoing and to come. Proceeds will be donated to charities fighting for the rights of refugees.

Alireza Abiz • Astrid Alben • Tim Atkins • Andre Bagoo • Veronica Barnsley • Khairani Barokka • Leire Barrera-Medrano • Katherine E. Bash • Áine Belton • Caroline Bergvall • Sujata Bhatt • Rachel Blau DuPlessis • Fióna Bolger • Ben Borek • Andrea Brady • Serena Braida • Wilson Bueno • James Byrne • Kimberly Campanello • J.R. Carpenter • Mary Jean Chan • che • Matthew Cheeseman • Iris Colomb • Giovanna Coppola • Anne Laure Coxam • Sara Crangle • Emily Critchley • Ailbhe Darcy • Nia Davies • Tim Dooley • Benjamin Dorey • Angelina D’Roza • Katherine Ebury • Dan Eltringham • Ruth Fainlight • Kit Fan • León Felipe • Alicia Fernández • Veronica Fibisan • Steven J Fowler • Livia Franchini • Ulli Freer • Anastasia Freygang • Kit Fryatt • Monika Genova • Geoff Gilbert • Peter Gizzi • Chris Gutkind • Cory Hanafin • Edmund Hardy • David Herd • Jeff Hilson • Áilbhe Hines • Alex Houen • Anthony Howell • Nasser Hussain • Zainab Ismail • Maria Jastrzębska • Lisa Jeschke • Evan Jones • Loma Sylvana Jones • Maria Kardel • Fawzi Karim • Kapka Kassabova • Özgecan Kesici • Mimi Khalvati • Robert Kiely • Michael Kindellan • Igor Klikovac • Ágnes Lehóczky • Éireann Lorsung • Patrick Loughnane • John McAuliffe • Aodán McCardle • Niall McDevitt • Luke McMullan • Christodoulos Makris • Ethel Maqeda • Lila Matsumoto • Luna Montenegro • Stephen Mooney • Ghazal Mosadeq • Erín Moure • Vivek Narayanan • Cristina Navazo-Eguía Newton • Alice Notley • Terry O’Connor • Wanda O’Connor • Gizem Okulu • Claire Orchard • Daniele Pantano • Astra Papachristodoulou • Fani Papageorgiou • Richard Parker • Sandeep Parmar • Albert Pellicer • Pascale Petit • Adam Piette • Jèssica Pujol Duran • Alonso Quesada • Ariadne Radi Cor • Nat Raha • Nisha Ramayya • Peter Robinson • William Rowe • Lisa Samuels • Jaya Savige • Ana Seferovic • Sophie Seita • Seni Seneviratne • Timea Sipos • Zoë Skoulding • Irene Solà • Samuel Solomon • Agnieszka Studzinska • James Sutherland-Smith • George Szirtes • Rebecca Tamás • Harriet Tarlo • Shirin Teifouri • Virna Teixeira • David Toms • Sara Torres • Kinga Toth • Claire Trévien • David Troupes • Arto Vaun • Juha Virtanen • J. T. Welsch • David Wheatley • Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese • Jennifer Wong • Isaac Xubín • Jane Yeh