Lagoon

Pati Hill's cult novel, available for the first time since 1976.

Impossible Dreams was Pati Hill's last published novel, released in 1976 after it was partially published two years earlier in the Carolina Quarterly under the title "An Angry French Housewife." Hill tells the story of Geneviève, a middle-aged woman whose life is turned upside down when she unexpectedly falls in love with her neighbor, Dolly. Mixing anecdotes with existential thoughts, the novel describes the gradual disruption of the heroine's daily life. Almost every chapter (the length of which varies from a single sentence to no more than three pages) is accompanied by a xerograph of a photograph, selected by Hill with permission from its maker. The resulting combination of text and image constitutes her most ambitious attempt to produce a work in which "the two elements fuse to become something other than either."

This novel is also one of the most incisive examples of Hill's writing—dry and impartial, yet managing to capture the contradictory feelings of her characters. In a letter addressed to the photographer Eva Rubinstein asking for reproduction rights, she writes: "My book is about a woman with a little girl and a husband who falls in love with a woman and a little girl and a husband and loses them all, just like in your mirror. It doesn't sound very cheerful but it is mainly funny."

Daisy, an independent publishing house, releases a facsimile of the out-of-print work that, after almost 50 years since its initial publication, has become a coveted collector's item.

"Impossible Dreams charmed me with its droll and irreverent tone when it was first published. Hill's use of embedded photographs was unexpected and transgressive for its me. Brilliant!"
Anne Turyn, photographer, educator and founding editor, Top Stories

Pati Hill (1921, Ashland, Kentucky – 2014, Sens, France) left behind a litterary and artistic output spanning roughly 60 years . After a short but dazzling career as a model, between 1951 and 1962 she wrote a dozen short stories—several of which were published in George Plimpton's prestigious literary journal, The Paris Review—and five books which earned her real critical recognition. Hill published One Thing I Know in 1962 after giving birth to her first and only daughter. She was then forty-one years old, and would later claim to have decided at that time to "stop writing in favour of housekeeping.''

Edited by Ana Baliza and Baptiste Pinteaux.

The artist book Amanda is greatly inspired by “Tradeswomen” quarterly magazine for women in blue-collar work, published in the 1980’s and 1990’s in the United States. Amanda is similarly thought as a periodical dealing with the subjects of technology and industry from a feminist (not solely female) angle. The first issue contains fiction stories of an emancipatory character, citing trade associations, oil industry in Iran and ghosts of the printer feeders.

The publication is made in the framework of The Building Institute, an experimental organisation aiming to strengthen the position of femmes builders in the domain of technical construction work. Amanda brings together literary texts by Maria Toumazou, Samantha McCulloch, Sepideh Karami and Madeleine Morley, combining fiction stories with visual artwork. 

Olga Micińska is a visual artist currently living in Amsterdam. Graduated from the MA Art Praxis program at the Dutch Art Institute and holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Also trained as a woodworker, collaborates with craft studios of various domains. Recently she has initiated The Building Institute.

The Building Institute (TBI) is an experimental platform aiming to emancipate the undermined knowledges dwelling in the craft domains, and to unpack diverse questions related to technology and the means of production. TBI combines art’s speculative competences with the grounded practice of manual labor, manifesting its objectives through educational activities, exhibitions, and publications.

Tense is a never-realised publication, written and composed by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns in 1984, that only now has been released in a very limited run on our imprint. The book accompanied the exhibition Top Stories, which took a closer look at the 29 issues of the prose periodical with the same title, founded in the late 1970s by Anne Turyn.

Top Stories was dedicated to fiction by emerging women artists and writers from that time. Tense was originally intended to become part of the series as well, but never made it to print. It was only recently – during the making of the exhibition at Amsterdam’s Kunstverein – that the original mock-up was retrieved from the editor’s archives and finally sent off to the printer.

By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world's governments. In the 2050s, the insurrections reached the nerve center of global capitalism—New York City. This book, a collection of interviews with the people who made the revolution, was published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune, a radically new social order forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse.

Here is the insurrection in the words of the people who made it, a cast as diverse as the city itself. Nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes recall the collapse of life as they knew it and the emergence of a collective alternative. Their stories, delivered in deeply human fashion, together outline how ordinary people's efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world.

Shae wants to stop shagging other women's husbands and be a proper queer. Plus, she's bored of only ever getting to use her new strap on a pile of cushions. The answer seems simple enough: come out, go out, and finally get it on with the fit bird at Dyke Night. Or it would be if Evaline, a wayward silicone mistress from the future, wasn't jealous...

A surreal, dirty little book that falls somewhere between Derek McCormack, David Cronenberg, and the tentacle porn you 'accidentally downloaded', Silicone God is for those who like it very, very weird.

A chance encounter with two older fellows at the movie theater has the young vagabond Ligie on his way to Lot-8, a trailer park down the road with an unconventional local reputation. There, Ligie meets Big Joe and his extended Lot-8-family: a tight-knit community of freaks all sectioned together by the landlord at the outskirts of town.

Weaving together colorful characters and outright carnal debauchery, BIG JOE is a radical pastoral of community, desire, and the strangeness of knowing one another.

Featuring color illustrations by Drake Carr and Sabrina Bockler.

Cover illustration by Drake Carr

Samuel R. Delany is the author of numerous books and novels, including the Nebula Award-winning Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, as well as Nova (now in a Library of America anthology) and Dhalgren. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. Other erotic novels include Equinox, Hogg, The Mad Man, Throu gh the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, and Shoat Rumblin. Delany was the subject of a 2007 documentary, The Polymath, by Fred Barney Taylor, and he has written a popular creative writing textbook, About Writing. He is the author of the widely taught Times Square Red/Times Square Blue and numerous books of essays; his book-length autobiographical essay, The Motion of Light in Water, won a Hugo Award in 1989. As e-books, paperbacks, or audiobooks, his works are available through his website at: www.samueldelany.com

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.

faits divers are the various reports in a news bulletin, miscellaneous human interest stories, theorised by Roland Barthes as ‘total’ and ‘immanent’ information.

ferrara deux (faits divers) scrolls around the discovered corpse of a talented street musician named Landau, mangled and sealed into vacuum bags in the walk-in of a modern Italian-American restaurant. Street performance is content for an attention economy, playing on authenticities and profiting from recognition.

In this debut novel, artist Ivan Cheng reconfigures recent performance texts into an approximation of a murder mystery.