In the Jungle There Is Much to Do

Religion, love and revolution collide in this swashbuckling saga of Risorgimento Italy. 

Set in Italy during the Risorgimento, The Gadfly is a thrilling tale of betrayal and revolution. It follows the adventures and misadventures of a mysterious satirist, a hardworking lady radical and a Catholic cardinal with a dark secret. Published in 1897 by Irish writer Ethel Lilian Voynich (or ELV, as she preferred to be known), The Gadfly sold millions of copies in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, though it has been largely forgotten in the English-speaking world—until now. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll smuggle guns over the border and, if you're anything like the Gadfly, you'll do it all with incomparable style. Mandylion Press' second run of The Gadfly includes a new preface by Mandylion cofounder Madeline Porsella and a visual glossary illustrating the world of the novel.

Ethel Lilian (Boole) Voynich (1864–1960) was born in Cork, Ireland, and raised in Lancashire, England. Her peripatetic adult life was defined by passions for music and leftist politics. In 1902, she married Wilifrid Michael Voynich, a Polish revolutionary and antiquarian book dealer. She spent her final decades in New York City, where she worked in a music school and as a translator of Russian, Polish and French texts.

Edited by Mabel Capability Taylor, Madeline Porsella. Introduction by Madeline Porsella.

Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer.

A rare book that depicts the isolation and poetry of rural life. — Annie Ernaux

What it takes to imagine social and physical freedom is what it meant to keep reading this incredible book. — Bhanu Kapil

Marouane Bakhti is a writer and arts journalist. Born in Nantes, France to a Moroccan father and a French mother, he studied history and journalism at the Sorbonne. He writes criticism for Mouvement magazine and lives in Paris. How to Leave the World is his first novel.

Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator of French and has translated over a dozen novels, including works by Zahia Rahmani, Fatima Daas, Mohamed Leftah and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. Lara was born in Tunisia, grew up in the United States and currently lives in southern France.

978-1-7395161-3-0
21.6 x 13.9 cm
112 pp, paperback
September 2024

This book is built of stories and provocations—like the birth of a pearl, it transforms that which irritates, layer by layer.

Through speculative fiction and critical essays, Pear Nuallak explores what happens when messy, desiring bodies collide with the hard edge of power. The world’s neat categories are unmade and rewritten, revealing that racial capitalism’s myths are just as much fantasies as Thai bird princesses and transgender magic.

Moving playfully across folktale, horror, satire and critique, Nuallak examines how different beings are formed politically, bodily and emotionally. We discover interdimensional fungi resisting colonisation, queer monsters living on Hampstead Heath, and a mysterious canal running through the ruins of capitalism into interstitial realms. We test the borders of queer diasporic nationalism and take apart the racially melancholic memoir. In this fiery yet delicate collection, we aren’t bound by truth, but flow with it into new worlds.

Pear Nuallak is a visual artist and writer from London. They run community art workshops and co-organise a queer social hub with the Black Cap Community Benefit Society. Their writing has been published in The Dark and Interfictions. Pearls from Their Mouth is their first book.

Set in a spaced-out future in which all cities have been evacuated after an "Emergency," FLET is named for its female protagonist, an Administration flunky who begins to suspect that the Emergency may be a tool of sociopolitical oppression. An elegant entry in speculative fiction, Flet finds McSweeney slowing her distinctively hyperactive imagination down to the speed of narrative.

Oostende is a book about displacement and the sometimes-overwhelming internal monologue we live with. In between poetry, diary and novel, the book reflects on Zicari’s life in Buenos Aires and Belgium, as he navigates work fragility, friendship, sex and love, migration and the fiction laying behind everyday actions and life changing decisions.

Zícari's portrayal of his private life is far from the domain of the concrete, instead he ventures into the uncontrollable production of fantasies that sustain his inner discourse. It is around this dichotomy between the real and the imaginary, the tension between the experienced and the illusion, that Martín Zícari builds a book sustained in orality and proximity.

Martín Zícari, PhD, is a writer and producer based in Brussels. He has published poetry collections such as "Oostende" (Paripé Books, Madrid, 2023), "Del Príncipe Azul al Hombre Invisible en una Semana" (Editorial Municipal de Rosario, Argentina, 2018), and "Pequellpu" (LUMA Foundation, Switzerland, 2015), as well as the short novel "Scalabritney" (Entropia, Argentina, 2014), among others. His research has been featured in scientific journals such as Performance Research, Memory Studies, and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.