Lili Is Crying

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

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare. Aboard the interstellar Six Thousand Ship, the human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids. In chilling, crackling, and exhilarating prose, The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.

Yoko Tawada's first essay collection in English presents and electrifying new side of the National Book Award-winner as she dives deep into her lifelong fascination with cross-hybridizing languages. The accent here, as in her fiction, is on the art of drawing closer to the world through defamiliarization. Tawada famously writes in both Japanese and German, but her interest in language reached beyond any mere dichotomy. 

The term "exophonic," which she first heard in Senegal, has a special allure for the author: "I was already familiar with similar terms. 'immigrant literature,' or 'creole literature,' but 'exophonic' had a much broader meaning, referring to the general experience of existing outside of one's mother tongue." Exophony opens a new vista into Yoko Tawada's world and delivers more of her signature erudite wit—at once cross-grained and generous, laser-focused and multidimensional, slyly ironic and warmly companionable.

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025. Translated from Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda.

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. 

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.

In Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other Danielle Dutton imagines new models for how literature might work in our fractured times. Dutton’s writing is as protean as it is beguiling, using the different styles and different spaces of experience to create a collage of the depths and strangeness of contemporary life.

This hybrid literary collection covers an inventive selection of subjects in four eponymous sections which contrast and echo one another, challenging our expectations and pushing the limits of the dream-like worlds and moods that language might create.

‘Danielle Dutton is a writer whose work I wait for. When a new book comes, I keep it very close… Her growing body of work is among the most formally inventive (and therefore essential) I can think of, and Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is a vital, enlivening addition to it.’ – Kate Briggs

Danielle Dutton is the author of the novels Margaret the First and SPRAWL, the prose collection Attempts at a Life, the illustrated nonfiction chapbook A Picture Held Us Captive, and she wrote the text interpolations for Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera. Her fiction has appeared in magazines and journals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The White Review, Harper’s, BOMB, and NOON. Dutton teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and is cofounder and editor of the award-winning feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project. Born and raised in California, she has lived on the (former) prairie now for roughly twenty years.

The Appendixes #1-4 is an editorial series by Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré and Victoria Pérez Royo that came out of the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. For a two-year residency at Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers (2022-23), they came together as a small work group, shaping the work process, hosting presentation formats and making the publication series on paper as four cahiers.

The cahiers comprise a collection of commissioned texts and contributions created for this context, selected documents and traces from work sessions and encounters organized during the residency, texts read together and republished for this occasion, a collection of references, notes in progress, unfinished thoughts and loose fragments - on paper, between pages.

p 5-7 Almost on my way to you
p 8-10 Presque en route vers toi
Laía Argüelles Folch

p 12-13 Exercise in translation of Breve ensayo sobre la carta (Brief essay on the letter) by Laía Argüelles Folch
p 14-15 Exercice de traduction de Breve ensayo sobre la carta (Bref essai sur la lettre) de Laía Argüelles Folch
Quim Pujol, Paula Caspão, Simon Asencio, Pascal Poyet, Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré, Victoria Pérez Royo & Laía Argüelles Folch

p 16-17 Like a dinosaur upon awakening
p 18-19 Comme un dinosaure au réveil
Pascal Poyet

p 20-23 Is she a translator?
p 24-27 Est-elle traductrice?
Olivia Fairweather

p 28-29 New edition revised by my author
p 30-31 Nouvelle édition revue par mon auteur
Léa Poiré

p 32 Notes from a translation in progress
p 33 Notes d'une traduction en cours
Kate Briggs

p 34-37 Mothers & tongues
p 38-41 Langues (maternelles)
Mette Edvardsen

p 42-43 Collective reading of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
p 44-45 Lecture collective de Finnegans Wake de James Joyce
Dora García and readers, et les lecteur·rices

p 46-49 Notes for a talk that did not happen
p 50-53 Notes pour une conférence qui n'a pas eu lieu
Olivia Fairweather

p 54-65 Meticulous comparison of two books with their versions rewritten from memory, excerpts from a work document
Comparaison méticuleuse de deux livres avec leurs versions réécrites de mémoire, extraits d'un document de travail
Julián Pacomio & Ángela Millano

This eighth instalment of BFTK is on letters and letters. It takes the double meaning of this word as its point of dispatch, inviting recipients to think through and respond to — directly and indirectly — ideas around correspondence, addressing and alphabets. What it means to be in correspondence with somebody, the initiation and continuation of this communicative exchange and what happens when it is severed or lost. How to write directly towards a you, to you; to a particular reader, object, locale. The volume is littered with letters. There are letters about letters, letters to letters, letters that crease, fold, tear and rip, letters that are sent and lost, found and read. There are letters that pile up, their combinations arranged and rearranged to form comprehensive linguistic logics, and there are letters that are simply letters. Contributions sit in eight-page signatures, of which there are twenty-six in total. Of the eight hundred bound copies, twenty-six are left unbound, returned to discrete correspondence, loose abécédaire units for exchange — letters to be leafed through and addressed once more.

PLEASE TAKE A LOOK AT YOUR
SHADOW IN THAT MIRROR
Chang Yuchen
(pp.1–8, A)

BESTIARY FOR A NON-GENETIC DESCENDANT
Bhanu Kapil
(pp.9–16, B)

THROW STUFF AWAY
Hannah Regel
(pp.17–24, C)

THE MOON HATH XXX DAYS:
LETTERS FOR LETTERS
Helen Marten
(pp.25–32, D)

WHAT DOES THE LOSS FEEL LIKE?
Meg Miller
(pp.33–48, E, F)

LIGHT UP THE A
Kate Briggs
(pp.49–56, G)

THE POSTCODE CONNECTION
Rebecca Ross
(pp.57–72, H, I)

(LETTER) TO S… LABYRINTH-CORTEX
Michèle Métail, trans. Thea Petrou
(pp.73–80, J)

RACKETY CORRESPONDENCES /
A CORRESPONDING RACKET
Nisha Ramayya
(pp.81–96, K, L)

THE COIN OF THE REALM
Lucie Elven
(pp.97–104, M)

UNFOLDING FOLDED FANTASIES:
A CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE SEATED SCRIBE
Fatema Abdoolcarim
(pp.105–112, N)

DEAR DEAREST DEAR MOTHER
Alice Butler
(pp.113–120, O)

/ DON’T BOTHER THE CREASE
Tice Cin
(pp.121–128, P)

FEELING LETTERS, SEEING BLUE
Gemma Blackshaw
(pp.129–144, Q, R)

LINES OF GRACE AND DISGRACE
Francis Haselden
(pp.145–152, S)

AN ABC OF MIMICRY
Jeffrey Stuker & Jan Tumlir
(pp.153–176, T, U, V)

ADDRESS
Céline Mathieu
(pp.177–184, W)

MY VOICE FOLDS YOU
Thea Petrou
(pp.185–192, X)

A LONG DISTANCE LULLABY
Vibeke Mascini
(pp.193–200, Y)

DEBT OF GOLD CAN BE PAID OFF,
DEBT OF KINDNESS IS CARRIED OVER DEATH
Chang Yuchen
(pp.201–208, Z)

LETTERS ON LETTERS
FROM LETTERS ON LETTERS
Matthew Stuart
(covers)