Exteriors

'My aim for Mother Reader has been to bring together examples of the best writing on motherhood of the last sixty years, writing that tells firsthand of the mother's experience.

Many of the writings in Mother Reader comment on and interpolate one another, in citations, in footnotes, in direct homage. As I was assembling this collection one text would lead to one another, treasure-hunt fashion, the clue provided by an acknowledgement or bibliography. And just as often the writing circles back.

In Mother Reader chapters are excerpted from autobiographies, memoirs, and novels; entries are lifted from diaries; essays and stories are culled from collections, anthologies, and periodicals. My project has been to assemble a compendium or sampler of these ''kindred spirit'' works on motherhood, so that readers, and especially mothers with limited time on their hands, can access in one volume the best literature on the subject and know where turn to continue reading." [Moyra Davey in the introduction]

Writings by Margaret Atwood, Susan Bee, Rosellen Brown, Myrel Chernick, Lydia Davis, Buchi Emeta, Annie Ernaux, Mary Gaitskill, Susan Griffin, Nancy Hutson, Mary Kelly, Jane Lazarre, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Ellen McMahon, Margaret Mead, Vivian Montgomery, Toni Morrison, Tillie Olsen, Alicia Ostrker, Grace Paley, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick, Lynda Schor, Mira Schor, Dena Schottenkirk, Mona Simpson, Elizabeth Smart, Joan Snyder, Elke Solomon, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Alice Walker, Joy Williams, Martha Wilson, Barbara Zucker.

The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.

Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.

On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir “written” by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the “I” for the “we” (or “they”, or “one”) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents’ generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents’ generation (and could be writing of her own book): “From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the “we” and impersonal pronouns.”

A collection of Philippa Snow's most celebrated writings, articulating with majestic precision the thorny, unbreakable bond between mass media, popular culture and art.
Snow Business marks Philippa Snow's emergence as one of the twenty-first century's greatest cultural critics. From the 2000s into the 2010s, reality television and "second-screen media," designed to play in the background while we look at phones, have proliferated, inaugurating the dumbient age. Celebrities have never been more ordinary; there have never been so many ordinary people who are celebrities.

A collection of her writing from the last half-decade, Snow Business articulates with majestic precision the thorny, unbreakable bond between mass media, popular culture and art. The memoirs of Pamela Anderson and the Kardashian sisters are just as worthy exemplars of "autofiction" as the writing of Olivia Laing and Annie Ernaux; Spring Breakers has succeeded in updating The Great Gatsby; and we are still afraid of Francis Bacon.

Snow has no interest in distinctions of high and low culture. If masterpieces of fiction, painting and cinema reflect back to us some vital and mysterious part of ourselves, mass-distributed popular culture does the same thing, and often with greater clarity and violence—if we are only brave enough to look. Fortunately, Snow does the looking for us.

Alongside her essays are also works of fiction, vignettes whose protagonists are actors, singers, child stars. These are strange, sometimes conspiratorial, and often nightmarish. Just as Snow Business can describe culture with stunning clarity, it can inhabit culture's moving parts, making it again something indescribable, a sensuous vision, a complete fever dream.

Philippa Snow is a writer whose work has redefined contemporary criticism through her analysis of popular culture, art, and media. Her work regularly appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, The New Republic, The Nation, The White Review, and the Financial Times. She is the author of Which As You Know Means Violence (Repeater, 2022), Trophy Lives (Mack, 2024), and It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me (Virago, 2025). Through her keen examination of reality television, celebrity culture, and high art, Snow illuminates the increasingly blurred boundaries between popular entertainment and artistic expression in the twenty-first century.

Après la naissance de sa baby girl, Sophie T. Lvoff tente de faire son come-back dans l’art contemporain. Elle doit se rendre au vernissage de son exposition dans un Kunstverein en Allemagne. Juste avant, elle emmène ses étudiant·es à Sainte-Marie-de-la-Mer en Camargue pour prendre des photos de flamants roses et de couchers de soleil mais rien ne se passe comme prévu…

After the birth of her baby girl, Sophie T. Lvoff tries to make her comeback in contemporary art. Before heading to the opening of her exhibition at a Kunstverein in Germany, she takes her students to Sainte-Marie-de-la-Mer in the Camargue to photograph flamingos and sunsets, but nothing goes as planned…

A manicure would be a good thing to do for her international comeback, but perhaps that could happen in Munich later.
(I'm Back, Baby!)

Carie, comme le trou qu’on bouche au plomb, est une collection de textes courts et moyens qui se glissent dans la poche. Chaque livre (la dent) de la collection (la bouche) est troué (la carie) et cerclé d’un œillet métallique (le plombage).

Carie, like the hole filled with lead, is a collection of short and medium-length texts that slip into the pocket. Each book (the tooth) in the collection (the mouth) is holed (the cavity) and circled with a metal eyelet (the filling).

Situated between memoir, social criticism, and conceptual art, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam is an incisive response to a modernist classic and an affecting exploration of the poetics and politics of our times. "We are supposed to know where we are with biography and autobiography, they are the literary equivalents of the portrait and the self-portrait," writes Jeanette Winterson about Gertrude Stein's 1932 classic, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. By narrating her own story from the perspective of her partner, Stein invented a literary form that was both intimate and uncanny, blurring lines of authority and identity as it winds through a story of two women living and loving together through a tumultuous moment in history. Almost a century later, experimental filmmaker and artist Lana Lin has resurrected Stein's project to tell another story of queer love, life, and artistic collaboration in a differently discordant age. At heart a candid chronicle of her partner Lan Thao's life journey from Vietnam during the war and her own troubled history as a gender-queer Taiwanese American, Lin's Autobiography draws in subjects as varied as photography, tropical fruit, New York real estate, and queer theorist Eve Sedgewick's eyeglasses, weaving a landscape of living that is also a critical investigation of race and gender in our time. 

Lana Lin is a writer, artist, and filmmaker based in New York and Connecticut. She is the author of the book Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer and film and video works including The Cancer Journals Revisited. Her various works and collaborative projects (with Lan Thao Lam as "Lin + Lam") have exhibited at festivals and art and educational spaces throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, and New Museum, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Gasworks, London; the Taiwan International Documentary Festival and Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute, New Taipei City; Arko Art Center, Korean Arts Council, Seoul; and the 2018 Busan Biennale. Having had three years of psychoanalytic training before dropping out, she sometimes still dreams of becoming a psychoanalyst one day.

A young woman from a long line of assassins, lives her life with the ardent mission to avoid the trappings of any enduring romantic love, while keeping one on the pursuit of an untimely death for herself. 

Not yet thirty, Bathory, or 'Bat' to those near to her, has assembled a peculiar Model, sex worker, linguist and scholar of Latin. But nothing in her lively job history employs the singular traits she inherited from her strange family, chief among them an uncanny ability to sidestep seemingly certain death(s). An appropriate atavistic instinct, for someone from a long line of assassins and spies. Her clan are assassins of a romantic bent, her parents issuing theories on love galore. However Bat is set on swerving any enduring romantic loves, and she's set on dying young. Now, if she could only avoid that one alluring figure from her father's past.

A thriller, a love story, and a dynamic examination of class, violence and connection. The images we make to share and those we strive to conceal, alienation and salvation, magic and technology, LaCava's bold new novel is propelled by the compelling violence one can seed in contradiction.

Chickens have a collective soul. Heaven is full of the skateboarders you kissed in middle school. If the algorithm is its own hell, Lauren Cook, author of the critically (and uncritically) acclaimed Sex Goblin, stands in front of it fully armored. I Love Shopping invites its readers to inhabit a world just like ours, reflected through a big, benevolent funhouse mirror.

First published in a limited edition, this is the first trade edition of the cult classic.

Can critical thinking spring from both a fortune cookie and Jacques Lacan’s most obscure seminar footnote? Estelle Hoy says yes. In saké blue, overpriced cheesecakes are the starting point for an essay on art writing; shoplifting in Berlin opens to a reflection on the economies of activist practices; fiction allows us to discuss the legacy of institutional critique, queer mélanges, or quiet melancholy. To her, the story of art becomes more nuanced in light of lyrics by Arthur Russell, the posthumous sorrow of Sylvia Plath, or a poem by Yvonne Rainer.

saké blue gathers critical essays, art reviews, and poetic fiction. Written in dialogue with the work of Martine Syms, Marlene Dumas, Hervé Guibert, or Camille Henrot, these texts combine the subjective and analytic, addressing power relations and the force of affect. Hoy spares nothing—and no one, exposing cultural clichés and urgent political issues through fast-paced acerbity. She advocates the work of women artists, mocks stereotypes, questions myths, and champions desire, sadness, and boredom. Simultaneously beautiful, lyrical, and cutthroat, her writing echoes to the reader like l’esprit d’escalier—we think of the perfect reply just a little too late.

“Estelle Hoy practises philosophy as an unsettled but deeply committed query into existing together. She reads, she looks, she writes, to find out something essential about the future and living for it.”
—Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal

“Estelle Hoy's prose slap and bite, saké blue is a sharp pleasure to read.”
—Calla Henkel, author of Scrap

“Hoy’s renditions of all-too familiar scenes are made more visceral than life with sparkling prose and a sly attention to life’s many shifting values that feels more than appropriate for anyone truly interested in art.”
—Natasha Stagg, author of Artless

Edited by Antonia Carrara
With an introduction by Lisa Robertson