Hurricane Season

The devastating final work by Brazil’s greatest modern writer, The Hour of the Star tells the haunting tale of Macabéa—a typist who lives in the slums of Rio—underfed, sickly, and unloved, yet inwardly free.

Translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser. With a contribution by Paulo Gurgel and Valente Colm Tóibín.

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

Known as a remarkable classicist, Anne Carson weaves contemporary and ancient poetic strands with stunning style in Glass, Irony and God. This collection includes: "The Glass Essay," a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson's reading of the Bronte sisters; "Book of Isaiah," a poem evoking the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism; and "The Fall of Rome," about her trip to "find" Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of a terrible alienation there.

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.

In Água Viva Clarice Lispector aims to 'capture the present'. Her direct, confessional and unfiltered meditations on everything from life and time to perfume and sleep are strange and hypnotic in their emotional power and have been a huge influence on many artists and writers, including one Brazilian musician who read it one hundred and eleven times. Despite its apparent spontaneity, this is a masterly work of art, which rearranges language and plays in the gaps between reality and fiction.

Clarice Lispector (December 10, 1920 – December 9, 1977) was a Brazilian writer acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, as an infant she moved to Brazil with her family, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War. 

A bracing novel that asks how far we would go for the ones we love—and what we would do to destroy the ones we hate. 

Lisa has lost custody of her young twin boys. Caught between the French legal system’s sluggish bureaucracy and her sinister, scheming in-laws, she’s alone and lost, an Argentine migrant in rural France picking grapes for a pittance, only allowed to see her children in supervised visits once a month. Scapegoated and outcast, destitute and desperate, Lisa decides to take radical action: early one morning, she sneaks into her in-laws’ farmhouse, takes back her children, sets the barn ablaze, and makes her escape.

What follows is a white-knuckled road trip that explores human beings pushed to the edge. Clearly, Lisa is not in her right mind, and as Harwicz deftly mingles a chorus of contradictory voices into her very unreliable narration, the reader comes to regard the protagonist with an unsettling mixture of sympathy and suspicion. Written in savage, chiseled prose, Unfit shoots off, a gripping chase that questions all our assumptions—and points out our hypocrisies— about motherhood, custody rights, love, violence, anti-semitism, and migration. The latest novel by the acclaimed author of Die, My Love (soon to be adapted to a film starring Jennifer Lawrence), Unfit is addictively terrifying, savagely sophisticated, and shockingly brilliant.

Translated from Spanish by Jessie Mendez Sayer

Cumin Baleen is a forty-one-year-old writer living in Philadelphia—this city of hospitals—who works at the upscale grocery Sea & Poison and is navigating the onset of an autoimmune condition. To start a medication that may help, an eye exam is required and this leads to a nightmarish laser eye surgery. The laser shoots into her brain, making her language spare and her sentences clause-less, a vexing constraint that stalls her book on gynecological malpractice: she wants others, in the realm of our for-profit medical industry that "renders the Hippocratic Oath its opposite," to see poison.

Meanwhile, Cumin is kicked out of her boyfriend Mari's studio after he falls for Janine, their landlord, and starts renting a closet in Maron's bedroom—polyamorous Maron who is hooking up with Alix, whom Cumin lusts after. Disheveled from medicines and medical scams, Cumin declares, "I don't know what to say, I'm saying I have a cracked appearance. It's not a pity party, it's a character sketch. Insofar as you'll need to be looking at me, that your mind should fill me up with its own swaying cognitive and toxic reeds if we are to do this, your imagination should touch me with its ridiculous poison."

Caren Beilin's hypnotic and fractured story is at once an homage to Shusaku Endo's terrifying novel of human vivisection The Sea and Poison and the spirit of OuLipo, the pioneering French writing group that sought new literary potential through constraints.

Caren Beilin was born in Philadelphia in 1983. She is the author of the novel Revenge of the Scapegoat, which won the Vermont Book Award for Fiction. Her other books are Blackfishing the IUD, Spain, The University of Pennsylvania, and Americans, Guests, or Us. She lives in Cleveland and Philadelphia and teaches at Case Western Reserve University.

New Infinity is an experimental novella that follows a woman as she lives and dreams her way through the philosophical implications of autoimmune disease. Met by a labyrinth of closing doors, she searches for meaning and connection among fragmented realities and failed relationships, finding infinitude in the healing process of bibliomancy.

Bára Hladík’s New Infinity is a glittering cross-genre debut. Weaving surrealist stories with meditative poetics, Hladík invites you into a dream world of degenerative illness, left disordered by the failures of ableism, medical professionals, and late-stage capitalism. Here, everything runs on sick time. Where physical health and financial resources grow scarce, the restorative possibilities of queer love, divination, and self-reclamation grant a defiant, yet often tenuous, abundance. Alive with Hladík’s boundless insight and wit, New Infinity is a powerful addition to the collective body of disability literature.

“I have been waiting for a book like New Infinity for years: a story of disability that oozes over the edges of ‘personal narrative’ into the surreal logics of bodies that will not be made useful under capitalism. Bára Hladík’s prose delights me with its 21st-century metamorphoses, its waiting-room dream logics, and its mystical invocations of a body in pain. Her poetry is a channel to another dimension, but one that is grounded inside our everyday sensoria—’cracking, pushing, pulsing’ like a spine writhing with snakes. Here, embodiment is never extractable from the institutions and economies whose profits are predicated on the question ‘do I matter if / I am only a pulse’? New Infinity insists upon a different kind of mattering, in which missed connections, improper fusions, and fleeting moments command the careful, caring attention that is too often denied them.” – Liz Bowen, author of Compassion Fountain (Trembling Pillow Press) and Sugarblood (Metatron Press)

“New Infinity is the most incredible fiction. It explodes the boundaries of this form so as to get to the heart of important truths about the phenomenon of physical pain and of human existence itself. While Bára Hladík’s story draws from a personal experience of survival through a struggle unlike any other, it is an entirely universal tale. In taking us into the most intimate spaces of suffering and narrating a story of a woman navigating a true labyrinth, Hladík shows us a way to face life, with the uncertainties it presents to us all. This novel is at once a profoundly moving story, a brilliant act of creativity, and an existential philosophy. It’s a book I will keep close, so as to revisit— for the thrilling inspiration of its liberated uses of form and style, as well as to learn from Hladík’s honest language, her resilient sense of humour, and her ability to capture the surreal beauty of being alive at all. I felt like I was reading Franz Kafka crossed with a fully unconstrained Anne Carson. I haven’t been so impacted by a book in a long time. It has changed my ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking about what it means to be alive.” – Molly Lynch, author of The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman (Catapult Books, 2023)

“Bára Hladík’s debut book is a blend of poetry and prose that seeks to make sense of a world that is flagrantly hostile and impatient with bodies that neither perform nor conform to the manic impatience of capitalist acceleration. An honest, vibrant, and very real account of a young writer finding a voice.” – Sina Queyras, writer, editor, professor, curator

“Bára Hladík’s New Infinity is a stirring pedagogy, philosophy, and witness. This offering of sick hybridity coils in a long, calm, and exhilarating breath while asking, ‘Do the doctors know how to breathe?’ Yes, Hladík’s prose and poems prompt, pain cosmologies are at once funny and incantatory. Each of New Infinity’s oneiric turns reads the body as an oracle and mirror, reminds us we are atmospheric. I would rather live here in this book, relearn how to breathe, than return to the ‘impossible crank’ of normal.” – Jane Shi, writer, poet, editor, organizer

Bára Hladík is a Czech-Canadian writer, editor and multimedia artist. Born in Ktunaxa Territory, she began her literary studies in the Creative Writing program at Capilano University in 2011. After studying Technical Writing at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, she received her Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Communications from the University of British Columbia in 2016. Her work can be found in Briarpatch Magazine, THIS Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Carte Blanche, EVENT Mag, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Bed Zine, Empty Mirror, Cosmonauts Avenue and elsewhere. Bára’s microchapbook Book of Mirrors was selected for the 2019 Ghost City Press Summer Micro-Chap Series and her collaborative artist book Behind the Curtain (Publication Studio, 2018) was an honourable mention for the Scorpion and Felix Prize (2017). New Infinity is Bára’s first book. She is now a guest in Esquimalt, BC.

You Can Vibe Me On My FemmePhone follows three friends, in a near-future Los Angeles, who are trying to improve themselves using a phone with a feminist operating system. Join Veronica, Phoebe, and Remy on their absurd adventures to seduce artists, entrap local Proud Boys, and enter a kinky queer horse-play scene. Their FemmePhones, programmed with their personal values, guide them toward the transformative love and professional passions they seek. But what choices will they make when they disagree with their phones and what does this mean about their feminist values? Kamala Puligandla’s heartfelt, humorous novella takes you on a wild ride about queer love, self-knowledge and growth.

Size: 4.5" x 7", 108 pages, perfect bound

Self-published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Feminist Center for Creative Work. Copy edited by Pratishtha Kohli. Illustrations by Phoebe Unter. Designed by MJ Balvanera, Riso-printed by Neko Natalia.

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. 

Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison.