Escape to Berlin: A Travel Memoir

In a reality in which the boundaries between cinema, art, installation and multimedia experimentation seem to be increasingly blurred, History of a Tree by Flatform is a project that sets out to radically alter the idea of the portrait in western art. 

A non-human living organism – the Oak of the Hundred Knights of Tricase, the oldest Vallonea oak in Europe at the age of 900 years – and the territory in which it has stood for centuries become the subject: through a film and a robotized video installation, statements become a portrait, and are transformed into a work of art. 

The book retraces the genesis, development and implementation of this original idea, providing a visual score, the film in 80 images, dialogues in ten languages, the contributions of a tree searcher, an art historian and two philosophers, as well as a series of in-depth essays drawing on the fields of science, history, anthropology, music and linguistics. 

Ian Burn has been described as many things: an activist, a trade-unionist, a journalist, an art critic, a curator and an art historian—or, as he once described himself in a moment of self-deprecating alienation, ‘an ex-conceptual artist’. Born in Geelong in 1939, Burn studied painting in Melbourne and went on to live and work in London and New York. Burn moved back to Australia in 1977 and passed away in 1993 at the age of 53. Burn sought to grapple with how art history intersects and engages with contemporary art and political debate, arguing for a decentred view of the world. 

His legacy is international and can be seen in retrospective exhibitions as recent as 2022, and his work remains a key touchstone in art history. Edited by Burn’s friend, frequent collaborator and eminent art historian, Dr Ann Stephen, this volume brings together 49 pieces of Burn’s own agile and expansive writings alongside a vast collection of his artworks. The collection concludes with reflections on Burn’s life and work from prominent figures and past collaborators in the form of memorial lectures.

Ian Burn: COLLECTED WRITINGS 1966–1993 is edited by Ann Stephen and designed by Robert Milne, with contributions by Art & Language, Adrian Piper, Paul Wood, Allan Sekula, and Mel Ramsden.

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

From the author of Confessions of the Fox comes a novel in which a yenta on her deathbed gives an unrepentant account of all her failures—including her child. 

“Jordy Rosenberg might be one of our most fearless living novelists. There are no half-measures in his work, just big ideas and living characters and gorgeous sentences and metafictional panache and surprise after heart-stopping surprise. Night Night Fawn is extraordinary.”—Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House 

In a cluttered rent-controlled apartment in the middle of Manhattan, Barbara Rosenberg is terminally ill, high on opioids, and writing the story of her life. She has opinions about her smutty late husband, her career as the receptionist for a disreputable plastic surgeon, her glory days as an accomplished jazzerciser, and her failed aspirations to be a film noir actress. But what she really wants to talk about are unhinged thoughts on gender, Karl Marx, Zionism, and her two great disappointing loves: an estranged trans son and a long-lost best friend whose betrayal haunts Barbara still. As she descends further into delirium and illness, Barbara finds herself in a nightmare from which she cannot escape, and her circumstances put her on a crash course with these intimates—or are they avenging nemeses?—once again. 

Part novel, part someone’s mother’s unauthorized memoir—all diatribe, gutter schtick, and deranged manifesto, Night Night Fawn is a ferociously candid account of intergenerational conflict.

Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not.

In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand’s first major book of nonfiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, among other still widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries—tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works, and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression.

With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigor of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anticolonial light—in order to survive, and in order to live.

This is the library, the wreck, and the potential for salvage she offers us now, in a brilliant, groundbreaking, and essential work.

"The Pain Journal" is the last finished work by Los Angeles writer and artist Bob Flanagan and is the extraordinary chronicle of the final year of his life before his death from cystic fibrosis at the age of 43. Flanagan created performances with Sheree Rose that shocked and inspired audiences as he combined text, video, and live performance to create a highly personal exploration of childhood, sex, illness, and mortality.

Tender yet brutal vignettes on a girlhood in Gaza, Palestine, filled with honey and warmth.

Winner of the Creative Award in the 2022 Palestine Book Awards.

Chosen as a 2021 Book of the Year by The White Review, Middle East Eye & The New Arab.

Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies is written for those who had to leave—collected remembrances of a childhood in Gaza by a woman far from Palestine’s sun and sea. Overindulgent, chaotic and sentimental, Heba Hayek’s narrator struggles to navigate life in colder, unfamiliar worlds. She holds tightly to memories of home, hoping they will lead back to her sisters and mothers.

With brilliance and grace, Hayek’s vignettes explore the methods of survival nurtured by Palestinian women in the face of colonial occupation and patriarchy—the power of community care, and of loving what’s not meant to be loved. Her reflections reveal the intimate magnificence and quiet devastation of everyday life: a family drive on the shore, waxing for the first time with aunties, or peeling figs while waiting at a checkpoint.

Heba Hayek is a London-based, Gaza-raised Palestinian author, creative and facilitator. She completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Miami University, Ohio, and studied for an MA in Social Anthropology at SOAS University of London.

Heba’s first book, Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies, won the Creative Award in the 2022 Palestine Book Awards and was chosen as a 2021 Book of the Year by The White Review, Middle East Eye and The New Arab.

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