Ethical Portraits: In Search Of Representational Justice

Legal-high addict, gaming enthusiast, and principal shareholder of AstroLabs™, Lex Rameses, has recently discovered—and purchased—Proserpina: a planet with a near-identical ecosystem to Earth’s. Yet, although his humanistic, hipster pretensions mean that many people admire him, there is still one thing standing in the way of his space-colonization program: as of yet, there is no way to travel to Proserpina safely.

Enter a cast of mad scientists, Astro–Marxists, a neurorobotic AI hivemind, an extinction anxiety addict, the victims of an interrelated crypto-currency gaming scam, and a seemingly endless succession of ravers and gamers in search of the ultimate hallucinogenic, carcinogenic, neü-space-age high…

The Ultraviolet Catastrophe is raucous, hilarious, irreverent, and wildly smart, taking aim at techno-salvation fantasies, startup culture, and the eternal humiliation of having a body under the ridiculous conditions of late capitalism. Finlay's new novel is as unexpected and unique as all of her work. Read it now.
— Elvia Wilk, author of Oval and Death by Landscape 

The early writings of renowned poet and critical theorist Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog. 

Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang's trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping out of an MFA program, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and writing her trenchant book Carceral Capitalism. Alien Daughters charts the dream-seeking misadventures of an "odd girl" from Florida who emerged from punk houses and early Tumblr to become the powerful writer she is today. Anarchic and beautifully personal, Alien Daughters is a strange intellectual autobiography that demonstrates Wang's singular self-education: an early life lived where every day and every written word began like the Tarot's Fool, with a leap of faith.

Jackie Wang's magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.

The poems in The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer's waking world with renewed energy and insight.

Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster and PhD candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, specializing in race and the political economy of prisons and police in the United States. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb. In 2018 she published a book, titled Carceral Capitalism on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the US carceral state. She is currently an Arleen Carlson and Edna Nelson Graduate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

For the Interjection Calendar each month Montez Press invites an artist, a writer, a poet or a doer of some sorts to say things. All 12 pieces have introspection and reflection in common. They are a subjective overview of writing in the expanded field of contemporary art and writing in the year 2019. This is the Interjection Calendar 2019, the fifth collection in this series. 

With contributions by sabrina soyer, Lisa Robertson, Hatty Nestor, Adrianna Whittingham, Sondria, Claudia Pagès, Laetitia Paviani, Bella Milroy, Georgina Tyson, Son Kit, Alix Jean Vollum, Rene Matic and bleubaglife. 

Find the last 12 PDF's on montezpress.com.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the origins of cruising. While the term was used by men seeking casual encounters with other men in the parks and streets of New York City as early as the 1920s, historical records show the practice is much older. Cruising has existed for as long as anyone outside the dominant sex and gender systems has sought sexual encounters outside of sanctioned norms. This book offers a serious exploration of queer sex and sex cultures, exploring cruising as a mode of thinking with the body and communicating through sexuality. 

A creative dialogue between a queer artist and a queer academic reminiscing about and thinking with their cruising experiences, Crossings takes queer sex practices and cultures seriously as ways of knowing and world-making. The result is an erotic hybrid form hovering between scholarship and avant-garde experimentation, between critical manifesto and sex memoir. Here, the voices of each author, merged together in one, invite the reader to inhabit the erotic spacetime between self and other, the familiar and the strange, desire and pleasure, climax and release. That is, the spaces and temporalities of cruising itself. 

No Place Press is collaborating with Jalal Toufic on an ambitious publishing project: The Collected Writings (1991–2024) of a Mortal to Death: Jalal Toufic. Spanning three volumes of more than six hundred pages each, the series gathers re-edited versions of his earlier works alongside two newly written books, arranged and organized by the author himself. For new readers, the volumes provide an introduction to Toufic’s central concepts—including the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster, radical closure, silence-over, the 180-degree over-turn, and the dancer’s two bodies—while for longtime readers they offer a comprehensive view of more than three decades of thought, presented in their most rigorous and fully articulated form. Yet, in keeping with Toufic’s practice—which participates in untimely collaboration (including with future filmmakers, thinkers, and artists) and abides in the suspension of the avenir of messianism/Mahdism—some of these works remain forthcoming even after their inclusion in the Collected Writings.

Volume 1 (2025) includes newly revised editions of Toufic’s first three books—Distracted (1991/2003); (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993/2003); and Over-Sensitivity (1996/2009)—together with the script Jouissance in Postwar Beirut (2014) and, new, The Unreviewed Writings of a Peerless Thinker (2024).

Avant que Black Lives Matter et #MeToo ne viennent secouer l’Amérique et le monde occidental, bell hooks montrait, dans cet essai incisif, que l’abolition du racisme et l’éradication du sexisme vont de pair. Sans le féminisme, la lutte antiraciste reste une affaire d’hommes. Sans l’antiracisme, le féminisme s’expose à servir de courroie aux logiques de domination raciale. L'autrice insiste sur le bien-fondé de la rage qui anime les masses populaires et la jeunesse noire et sur la nécessité d’en faire un moteur de changement social radical. Elle propose une théorie et une pratique révolutionnaires, dont la fin est une communauté solidaire fondée sur l’égalité réelle et la volonté de tou.te.s de travailler au changement.

Traduit de l'anglais par Ségolène Guinard.

GLORIA JEAN WATKINS, connue sous son nom de plume BELL HOOKS, née en 1952, est une intellectuelle, féministe, et militante étasunienne. Elle a publié plus de trente livres et de nombreux articles, et est apparue dans plusieurs films documentaires. Traduits dans de nombreuses langues, ses ouvrages sont considérés parmi les plus importants sur la question aux Etats-Unis et suscitent un réel engouement en France depuis quelques années. Les éditions divergences ont déjà traduit et publié trois de ses ouvrages dont La volonté de changer et A propos d'amour.

Flusser introduces an infernal creature from the oceanic abysses, who slowly emerges, not from the oceans, but from man's own depths to gaze spitefully into his eyes and reflect back at his own existence.

Originally published only in German in 1987, this version has been edited and translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, Ph.D. candidate at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Siegfried Zielinski, from the original, unpublished and extended Brazilian-Portuguese version of the manuscript recently found at the Vilém Flusser Archive at the Universität der Kunst, Berlin. This edition is also accompanied by a selection of previously unpublished excerpts from Flusser's correspondence with Milton Vargas and Dora Ferreira da Silva, with whom he discussed the development of the present text.

Visions of the contested future of AI veer between common planetary goals and a new Cold War as culturally-specific models of intelligence, speculative traditions, and thought experiments come up against the emergence of novel forms of cognition that cannot be reduced to any historical cultural tradition.

This uniquely-positioned volume provides expert insight into this tension, using China as a touchstone for rethinking ‘artificiality’ and ‘intelligence’ as sites of difference in a way that is already present in the difficulty of precisely translating the Chinese term 人工智能.

Spanning borders between different worlds, histories, futures, and foundational models, Machine Decision is Not Final is not only a timely reappraisal of the stakes of AI development, but a toolbox for constructing more global imaginaries for the future of AI.

Moving beyond the clichés that still dominate the contemporary debate, this interdisciplinary, cross-cultural collection decenters familiar narratives to provide a fresh perspective on what artificial intelligence is today, and what it might become.

Contributors: Blaise Agüera y Arcas, An Bo, Benjamin Bratton, Chen Qiufan, Gabriele de Seta, Shuang L. Frost, Vincent Garton, Steve Goodman, Yvette Granata, Anna Greenspan, Amy Ireland, Bogna Konior, Vincent Lê, Lawrence Lek, Lukáš Likavčan, Suzanne Livingston, Iris Long, Bingchun Meng, Reza Negarestani, Wang Hongzhe, Regina Kanyu Wang, Xin Wang, Xia Jia, You Mi.