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Cover of Fail Worse

Arcadia Missa

Fail Worse

Habib William Kherbek

€14.00

It was the year that autofiction was everywhere.

All the major authors were accused of writing autofiction. You, the reader, were reading autofiction, maybe even writing autofiction yourself. The little known author HWK also was working towards his own autofiction, cycling through London, drafting, redrafting, scrapping, and scraping by, spiraling through his own mind, a geography of ambient anxiety, and a rising sea of associations and dead ends. As the tides begin to overwhelm him, HWK finds lifelines in the various stories that float past.

Possible rescuers, including Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, Sheila Heti, Mario Levrero, Jay Sherman (best known by his professional title, The Critic), and the noted animated therapist Dr. Katz call out to our narrator from the shores of literary and cultural success, will he reach them before the waters close over his head? Will HWK, dear reader, reach you?

Fail Worse is the smartest novel I’ve read in a long time, at once a scathing and hilarious critique of the limitations and conventions of autofiction as well as a moving work of personal narrative. I want to give copies of this novel to every writer I know. – Madeleine Watts, author of The Inland Sea

A brilliantly audacious and thoroughly ridiculous book – skewers its subject with a grandeur and wit it scarcely deserves… a stained glass window thrown at a pebble. – Keiran Goddard, author of I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

recommendations

Cover of How To Sleep Faster 9

Arcadia Missa

How To Sleep Faster 9

Various

Periodicals €10.00

The platform, free speech and contempt

Cover of On Hell

Arcadia Missa

On Hell

Johanna Hedva

Fiction €16.00

The book transcribes a body broken by American empire, that of ex-con Rafael Luis Estrada Requena, hacking itself away from contemporary society. Johanna Hedva, author of Sick Woman Theory, takes the ferocious compulsion to escape (from capitalism, from the limits of the body-machine, from Earth) and channels it into an evisceration of oppression and authority. Equal parts tender and brutal, romantic and furious, On Hell is a novel about myths that trick and resist totalitarianism.

Cover of Ultralife

Arcadia Missa

Ultralife

William Kherbek

Big data (n) is high-volume, high-velocity and/or high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing that enable enhanced insight, decision making, and process automation.

Cover of How to Sleep Faster 5

Arcadia Missa

How to Sleep Faster 5

Various

What are our politics of refusal? Sleep? Catatonia? Hedonism? Transgression even? #hustle? 

[Can refusal can be performed as resistance and not operate as preemptively fucked. . .]

Arcadia Missa Publications; Rózsa Farkas, Holly Childs, Leila Kozma, Tom Clark (eds)

Cover of CONSTANT VIOLINS I & II

Arcadia Missa

CONSTANT VIOLINS I & II

Jordan/Martin Hell

CONSTANT VIOLINS is a hybrid book consisting of two parts, each comprised of two texts of sci-fi auto-fiction: ‘FӔTAL ATRACTUS’ & ‘COQUETTES’, ‘RATS LIVE ON NO EVIL STAR’ & ‘SOPH MOB’.  CONSTANT VIOLINS follows mutating characters & contexts that grapple & contort in half-step with the logics of a vast labyrinth of psycho para-social references, playing out across a tête-bêche (or head-to-tail) format book. The myriad ‘worlds’ occupied & embodied narratively riff on the act of world-making in itself. 

As an only child, I used to climb up onto my grandmother’s vanity & collapse the 3 way mirror over my head so I could bask in the calm of the many me’s preening inside its reflective continuum. Sometimes I would just lean against the looking glass above her bureau or pretend the wall was my simultaneous lover. No one wants to be alone. Under covers, I initiate the same sequences of experiments that virtually anyone does. 

We all imagine what our pillows witness annually would baffle sane onlookers. That’s why we practice kissing on our dorsal carpal arches, peaches in the dead of night, or remove condoms from bananas with our teeth. CONSTANT VIOLINS wants what any book wants; to become a formidable power couple with its author like a Pokemon & its precocious Trainer.

Jordan/Martin Hell (b. 1993, USA) is a Black trans(2s) writer, artist, & scholar who attended Städelschule (DE) & Cooper Union School of Art. He is currently a PhD candidate at Queen Mary’s University of London. Hell’s work is interdisciplinary & interlaced with his writing as the seedbed for his various explorations across painting, sculpture, pedagogy, music, dance, etc. In all of his work Hell is invested in the embedded associations which proliferate in the global collective subconscious & how that frames intimate (& often violent) realities in the lives of individuals whether historical, celebrity, or obscure. Closely linked with his work is a spiritualist psychoanalytic practice which spans hypnosis, theology, philosophy, Black fugitivity, & indigenous somatics.

Cover of Pathemata, Or, the Story of My Mouth

Wave Books

Pathemata, Or, the Story of My Mouth

Maggie Nelson

Essays €25.00

Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth is an experiment in interiority written in the pandemic studio. Something of a companion piece to 2009's Bluets, Pathemata merges a pain diary chronicling a decade of jaw pain with dreams and dailies, eventually blurring the lines between embodied, unconscious, and everyday life.

In scrupulously distilled prose, Pathemata offers a tragicomic portrait of a particularly unnerving and isolating moment in recent history, as well as an abiding account of how it feels to inhabit a mortal body in struggle to connect with others. Formally inspired by Hervé Guibert's The Mausoleum of Lovers, and conceptually guided by Gilles Deleuze's notion of artist as symptomologist, Pathemata is yet another urgent innovation from Maggie Nelson in the art of life-writing.

Cover of Wave of Blood

Divided Publishing

Wave of Blood

Ariana Reines

Poetry €16.00

Is it the computerization of the planet
Or a loosening of my fidelity to suffering
I don’t understand the intensity
I’ve hidden here but I know I despaired
Of finding a physical place to keep
My tears. Now what. Seas that go turquoise
When you stop looking at them . . .
 
Wrestling with the mind of war, at times shocking in its self-analysis, Wave of Blood is a furious and sincere essay, an eclipse notebook, a family chronicle, all told in the poetry of witness.

Praise for Ariana Reines:

Ariana Reines is a go-for-broke artist who honors her traditions by being like no one else. Some of us have made a fetish of our stupidity, pretending to forget history, and some of us have made a fetish of despair, congratulating ourselves on melancholia, but Ariana is too brilliant and too alive for either of those sad luxuries... I am convinced of the authenticity of the summonses she receives and the summonses she issues and when I read her I am reminded that all of this is a calling before it's an identity or career. Her voice-which is always more than hers alone is a dialectic between the very ancient and the bleeding edge. - Ben Lerner

Reines's books are works of intellectual commitment and structural sophistication; at the same time, they allow the raw stuff of being, in all its messiness, to enter the page. -The White Review

Mind-blowing. - Kim Gordon

Her writing is queer and raunchy, raw and occult, seemingly never pulling away from her deepest vulnerabilities. Yet Reines simultaneously maintains a feeling of epic poetry, of ancient intention. She moves between worlds in search of the divine and the self. - The New York Times

These are the kinds of poems that reorient you in the world, make you understand how little you know, but how much is inside you. - NYLON

Cover of Entropia Vol. 1 & 2

Abstract Supply

Entropia Vol. 1 & 2

Habib William Kherbek

Essays €22.00

Entropia (vol. I & II) – written by William Kherbek and edited in collaboration with Jack Clarke – is a publication which seeks to recount and re-examine a decade of artistic curation, production, and critique between London, Berlin, and other urban art centres from 2010 to 2020.

Comprised of two volumes, this publication contains a compendium of over one hundred reviews and interviews with luminaries of contemporary art (Vol I), as well as a speculative attempt to create a newly generated algorithmic art(ificial) critic (Vol II). Together they serve to document, excoriate, and theorise an art world which is simultaneously hegemonic and precarious, complicit and constructive, driven by values, yet fed by extraction, all filtered through Kherbek’s precise, aphoristic, acerbic, lens.

The publications include contextual contributions from both Josie Thaddeus-Johns, writer for the New York Times, The Financial Times, Frieze; and Rozsa Farkas, director of London-based gallery Arcadia Missa.