Drifts (paperback)

Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes — and dead calm — of grief. It is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author’s searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of a mother’s death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modelled the book’s formless form on Bourgeois’s Cells sculptures – at once channelling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space.

Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, Book of Mutter is an uncategorisable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. It is a haunted text, an accumulative archive of myth and memory that seeks its own undoing, driven by crossed desires to resurrect and exorcise the past.

In the fifth published title of the Decadent Editions series, Christine Smallwood explores Chantal Akerman’s adaptation of Marcel Proust’s The Prisoner, the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time, in a text that moves elegantly between Akerman’s films, Proust’s novel, and Smallwood’s own life.

Sticky Fingers' Fortune Teller features wisdom from McKenzie Wark, Octavia E. Butler, Kate Zambreno, bell hooks, Clarice Lispector, Eileen Myles, Kathy Acker, Johanna Hedva, Lou Sullivan, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Anne Boyer.⁣

A3, single colour risograph

In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

Translated by Daniella Shreir with an introduction by Eileen Myles and afterword by Frances Morgan.

Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child’s life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.

The Queen’s Ball ingests taboo as fuel for a baroque and spiraling story of love in its most prismatic and absurd iterations. Through frightening distortions and hallucinogenic twists of fate, a demented circus of artists, writers, gender-hustling aesthetes, and religious fanatics collude in a glorious discombobulation of propriety and convention. I have never laughed this much at a novel that could somehow shock even the most irreverent of libertines, demanding, at times, absolute disgust. Truly nasty work. Iconic. —Juliana Huxtable

Translated by Kit Schluter
Afterword and notes by Thibaud Croisy, translated by Olivia Baes

Set among the flamboyant demi-monde of the 1970s Paris underground, The Queens’ Ball follows the narrator Copi in his attempt to write a novel as life comes undone around him. His Roman lover Pietro is stolen by a Marilyn Monroe impersonator whose coterie take up residence in Copi’s flat and pump out low-budget pornographic rags and films. His friends leave him, burnt out from the theatrical excess of the decade. And worst of all his editor keeps calling him, demanding to know where the book is. Propelled by Copi’s careening prose and incisive humor, The Queens’ Ball swerves from Paris to Ibiza to New York and back again in a whirlwind frenzy of love, loss, and madness. Featuring an illuminating critical appendix by Copi’s current French editor, Thibaud Croisy, Kit Schluter’s rhapsodic translation marks the début of Copi’s world-renowned fiction in English.

The Queen’s Ball is a heedless novel of transformation of bodies and tenses, a novel of enormity and loss which is, in the end, about writing a novel. Copi is a feckless romantic-his theme is the persistence of love in the phantasmagoria. His tender psychos hurtle through increasingly outré adventures that seem to expand and contract like accordions. Here is crime à la française. Here is a great queen’s verbal aggression, radiant detail, and joyous destructive energy. —Robert Glück

The Queens’ Ball is probably Copi’s masterpiece... By 1978, Copi was already an aesthetic: The Queens’ Ball was the magnet, the inverted whirlpool that brought that aesthetic to the surface. —César Aira

Vesicapiscis details a poetics of self-reflection / self-projection. What cannot be defined is pulled into the body, examined, dissected, regurgitated. Its form is prodded and rearranged. Every word / phrase / sentence is suseptible to mutation. And these mutations inevtiably proliferate onto the speaker's tongues, their throat, deep into their nervous system. Language is a virus, and as such, it must be studied.

Here we are, at the abyss.

Strange Tales by 
Jean Lorrain / Michael P. Daley / Lou Perliss / Marcel Schwob / Dan A. Stitzer / Jeremy Kitchen / Janice Law / Joris-Karl Huysmans / Julia Bembenek / Mark Iosifescu / Villiers de l’Isle-Adam

“This is the missing link between Baudelaire and the Area X Trilogy, strange, beautiful, and bizarre as any denizen of a romantic ruin, nuclear test site, or poisonous overgrown garden could ever want.” — CrimeReads

“Obscure, hilarious, profane, and human, Echoes of a Natural World brilliantly juxtaposes fresh oddities with classic gems of French literature. Speaking from the margins of fiction, but never marginal, each piece in this collection affirms that great, weird writing never goes out of style.” — Maryse Meijer, Heartbreaker

“Echoes of a Natural World submerges you in the high strangeness of the world around us. The eleven tales herein—both new works and rediscovered gems—form an uncanny menagerie. Its monstrous toads, murmuring fungi, and ghostly boars will haunt your imagination.” — Gabriel Mckee, Pink Beams of Light from the God in the Gutter: The Science-Fictional Religion of Philip K. Dick

Echoes of a Natural World presents a continuum of discomforting reactions to a world perpetually out of whack. Nature—so oft considered the epitome of “order” and “tranquility” in the human mind—is herein explored at its most aberrant, absurd, and nightmarish. Through eleven weird tales, Echoes of a Natural World raises questions about Nature’s influence on the mind and the mind’s unnatural influence on Nature.

Contributions include new translations of fin de siècle Decadent masters—sensual accounts of amphibian horrors and secret caverns below country inns. These sparkling 19th century pieces sit against contemporary American fiction that delivers haunting scenarios and darkly comic ontological routines. Behold accounts of whispering mold and Midwestern strip-mall desolation; occult hypnosis and regenerated limbs; void-bound train rides with a hallucinatory hustler king; ghost boars in German battlefields; spiraling anxiety that only peach trees and country cottages could produce. Parse through questionable documents that detail the aftershocks of a once idyllic world no longer salvageable.

This kaleidoscopic collection wades in those nebulous waters where the inner world and outer landscape mesh. For as we barrel into a reality where technology has seemingly penetrated even the most remote corners of the earth, one must ask: Is it even possible to have a genuine interaction with Nature anymore? Has it ever been? Or have these longings always been the romantic delusions of a species obsessed with itself? Echoes of a Natural World defies easy categorization and easy answers.

“What’s interesting about the project here—and I think that it succeeds beautifully—is that these tales represent American voices and symbolist, fin de siècle, French decadent voices with a century between them and they’re all interlocked perfectly.”—Chris Via, Leaf by Leaf

Edited by Michael P. Daley. Introduction and translations from the French by Sam Kunkel.