MAL, Nº 4: Real Girls

Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love is a genre-defiant sex-trip to post-human dimensions. If C.G Jung, magic-mushroom shaman Terence McKenna and Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae) had a three-way while binging on George Bataille and undergoing Hormone Replacement Therapy, their baby might be the erotic cocktail of Myth Lab. Its extreme theme is nothing less than the fate of the species.

“Brilliant and wild, Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab is a manifesto of exuberance disguised as a sci-fi sex test-center for the invention of communal futures. Skelley’s a mad scientist, scholar and poet.” - Chris Kraus, author of After Kathy Acker
 
“In Myth Lab, Jack Skelley adroitly molds an “Einsteinian elasticity between objects and ether” to the “clitoverse.”  If this formulation seems too vast, just think about a) the last time you felt good about power and b) all the ways to say yes to pleasure as a source of liberation. In conducting a “cosmologic psychoanalysis,” Myth Lab thrillingly hot wires our neurons to an endless mirror stage reflective of our own instinctual nature.” - Kim Rosenfield, author of Phantom Captain
 
"An explosion of clit-cock-and-pop-culture worship. Skelley’s eroto-celestial universe fights back not only against the denial of desire – “also known as fuckheadocracy and market forces” – but against death itself."  - Francesca Lia Block, author of Weetzie Bat
 
"A hallucinatory book that straddles gender studies, science-fiction, and cultural criticism (to name but three of many genres). Ever eager to use a newfound Skelley-ism, I urge everyone to read Myth Lab and be “Kardashian'd” with love (i.e buy it now, it's great)." - Susan Finlay, author of The Jacques Lacan Foundation
 
"In Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab, something weird and beautiful is forged in the crucible of infinite horny grief. It’s an epic, delirious descent into the inferno, navigating the concentric circles of romance and desire as literary malady, TikTok psyop, benevolent cosmological principle, and more. Simultaneously a quest, a physics experiment and an elegy. I loved following its narrator - a tender, erotomanic, Blakean particle - seeking and finding visionary head." - Daisy Lafarge, author of Love Bug

Un fabuleux recueil – le premier publié en français – de poèmes et récits de l'autrice argentine Cecilia Pavón, préfacé par Chris Kraus (écrivaine dont Pavón a par ailleurs traduit des livres en espagnol).

« Cette traduction n'aurait pu voir le jour si je n'avais pas développé pendant quelques temps une obsession quasi malsaine pour l'Argentine. Cherchant à Buenos Aires les traces de lieux proches de Shanaynay que j'avais co-dirigé à Paris, je découvris au hasard sur internet l'existence d'un espace nommé Belleza y Felicidad et dirigé par Fernanda Laguna et Cecilia Pavón. Bien avant l'émergence de l'artist-run space en Europe, les deux femmes créèrent un lieu associant art et littérature. Lors d'un voyage à Buenos Aires, j'eus l'opportunité de rencontrer Cecilia Pavón qui lors d'une conversation sur l'écriture et la poésie, me proposa de traduire Licorice Candies en français. Sa poésie fut autant révélatrice qu'émancipatrice, à la fois par sa singularité et sa simplicité. Elle écrit ce qu'elle voit et ce qu'elle vit. Elle parle de certains quartiers de Buenos Aires, de ses amis, d'elle, d'un vélo qu'elle a perdu, de Timo. Il me semble qu'elle écrit comme elle parle d'amour, d'erreurs et de sexe ». Marion Vasseur Raluy, traductrice

The first collection of texts published in French by the Argentinian artist and poet.

Preface by Chris Kraus.

Translated from the English and Spanish by Marion Vasseur Raluy, Rosanna Puyol Boralevi and Mona Varichon.

In The Rebound, a short story by author Natasha Stagg (Surveys, Artless), a young woman takes a work trip in the wake of a humiliating break-up, and agrees to be set up on a blind date...

The erotic works of Anaïs Nin started out as a freelance job. To support their bohemian lifestyles, Nin and her writer friends earned a dollar a page writing pornography for an anonymous client. The writers hated The Collector, as they called him, for his repeated instructions to “Concentrate on sex. Leave out the poetry”.

The Collector, a new series of short stories published by jouissance, seeks to pay homage to writers, like Nin, who explored the erotic, the taboo and the connection between jouissance and the creative process. It also honours their chosen, but much maligned, genre. By commissioning some of our favourite female writers to compose erotic short stories, we begin what we hope will be an ever-growing collection of compelling and provocative fiction that will inspire conversation, debate and further creative expression.

Munken Pure 80gsm paper publication with red Singer Sewn binding. Featuring an illustration by Emma Rose Schwartz.

The theme for each issue of Worms tends to emerge steadily as gathering clouds. Often there is a nebulous sense of something that we want to explore, unripe fruits plucked from things we have read and heard and pocketed without much thought for later examination. It’s only when our pockets grow heavy, when ideas amass into something worthy of a second glance, that we start to name them. In the case of this one, our eleventh issue, its theme has its roots in the previous. The Love Issue—released in July 2025—explored love in all its guises: radical, complex, beautiful, violent. But in our study of the heart’s infinite mysteries there lurked an undercurrent of something else. Faith, close to love, was a persistent reoccurrence. Devotion, strength, clarity, refuge – these emerged as dimensions of love that can also be mapped across a search for something beyond the material. Worms 11: Faith & Worship began here.

FEATURING: Lamorna Ash, Clare Carlisle, Fanny Howe, Chris Kraus, Eileen Myles, Kazim Ali, Fiona Alison Duncan, Lauren J. Joseph, Olivia Laing, aja monet, Charlotte Northall, Arpan Roy, Noura Salahaldeen, Sarah Schulman, Michelle Tea.

CONTRIBUTORS: Temperance Aghamohammadi, Alaa Alqaisi, RZ Baschir, Sarah Burgoyne, F. Tibiezas Dager, Giulia De Vita, Helena Geilinger, Misha Honcharenko, Courtney Ann LaFaive, Ozziline Mercedes, Nicko Mroczkowski, Evie Reckendrees, Charlie Stuip, Clár Tillekens, Phoenix Yemi.

PHOTOGRAPHERS: Antonia Adomako, Eve Delaney, Jen Dessinger, Isabel Maccarthy, Britteny Najar, Katarzyna Postaremczak, Honor Weatherall.

ILLUSTRATORS & ARTISTS: Clara Esborraz, Eric Hesselbo, Lily Makoski, Samantha Rosenwald, Ivy Shepherd-Barron, Mary Watt, Shu Hua Xiong.

EDITORS: Caitlin McLoughlin, P. Eldridge, Clem MacLeod, Arcadia Molinas.

Proof Reader: Annalise June Kamegawa.

DESIGN: Caitlin McLoughlin & Clem MacLeod.

RUNWAY JOURNAL SUPPLEMENT

Contributors: Wassila Abboud, Anna Carlsson, Alexander Cigana, Bree Turner, Amelia Zhou.

Editors: Debris Facility, Ena Grozdanic, Victoria Pham.

Runway Supplement Design: SM Studio (Safiye Gray & Molly Cranston).

Cover Credits: Photo of Fanny Howe by Lynn Christoffers, Illustration by Mary Watt.

The seventh issue of Errant Journal is guest edited by Ghiwa Sayegh and aims to interrogate the role of the body in strategies of resistance from below. Taking Palestine as a starting point, the ongoing genocide committed by Israel and other colonial powers and the people’s continued struggle for liberation inform the issue’s thinking and praxis. From this political standpoint, it explores the ways in which bodies – that are sexualized, criminalized, racialized, crip – have been able to divert and subvert in order to fight back. To resist from the body is what crip theory tells us is a matter of need. It is a body that no longer fears deviation, specifically because of how cheap our lives are considered and how dangerous our futures are treated. It is about finding community and kinship when we are told we are alone.

Contributors:
Myriam Amri, Lama Abou Kharroub, yasamin ghalehnoie, Keto Gorgadze, Johanna Hedva, Samia Henni, MaxX • ماكس, Ada Maricia Patterson, Ghiwa Sayegh, Nikita Sena, Mridula Sharma

Sahar Khraibani’s ONE THOUSAND GHOSTS IN THIS FEAST contends with desire, grief, and language as sites of injury and release. Written over a period of three days—amid ongoing genocide, land seizure, and displacement—the long poem counters logics of possession with those of relation. Khraibani’s all-caps, first-person address impels the poem forward, centering intertextuality as a force through which spectral presences shine.

Sahar Khraibani is a writer and artist whose work has been presented with Montez Press, The Brooklyn Rail, Magnum Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, the Poetry Project, and Hyperallergic among others. Sahar is a recipient of the Creative Capital / Arts Writers Grant, a fellowship at The Poetry Project, a MacDowell Fellowship, a 2024 residency at Mass MoCA, and is an alumni of the Whitney Independent Study Program. Sahar teaches at Pratt Institute and is the author of Anatomy of A Refusal (1080PRESS, 2025). 

ONE THOUSAND GHOSTS IN THIS FEAST lays bare the “SENSELESS DECAY” potentiated by empire’s relentless categorization, containment, and calculated death delivery. Khraibani’s debut chapbook collapses the imposed and perceived distance written by borders, disrupts anticipated colonial language logics, and bursts “INTO THE MADNESS OF THE ORGY” with queer interference reverberating in all directions. From the soil, from the graveyard, from the dancefloor, from their favorite spot on the eroding waterfront, Sahar broadcasts, IN ALL CAPS, “THE UNNAMEABLE TRUTH.”
— Andrea Abi-Karam

From its situation in Ancient Greece through the various rewritings and commentaries and interventions of the last 2500 years, there is certainly no book being transmitted in the anything-but-unbroken and often comic transmission of The Phaenomena, a long didactic poem enumerating the constellations and their movement through the skies. There is certainly no origin apparent in such a transmission, even as the layers of compaction that this text attempts to unfold are themselves arguments about origin, plaintive debates about the irresolvable contradiction of a “first copier.” But what does it mean to give up the constellation, the relation, the durability that relation promises to guarantee, without being able to retreat into the security of origin or determinate meaning? What do you do then? This is to rephrase the question: what do we – “we,” obstinately – fail to see when we see the shapes of the stars so well?

Thee Display is a collection of poems written during an engagement with this ongoing transmission. It is a book about this, and a book about the horizon of communism, and a book about transition, and a book about a companionship characterized by a weird and sad kind of cheer.

Nora Collen Fulton lives in Montreal, where she is currently pursuing a doctorate focused on philosophy, trans theory and poetics. Thee Display is her third book of poetry - she is also the author of Presence Detection System, from Hiding Press (2019), and Life Experience Coolant, from Bookthug (2013). Nora's poems have been published in Social Text, Homintern, Some Magazine and elsewhere. Her critical and theoretical work can be found in Radical Philosophy, The Poetry Project, Music and Literature and more.

To want to reveal; to want to reveal enough; to desire; to desire in the right way, the right amount: in her debut book, Rachel James narrates the desiring subject’s nuanced and entangled intimacies with histories of power. How, in other words, under patriarchy, against misogyny, within capitalist strictures, is knowledge shaped, contained, and transferred? Tracing traditions of theater, pedagogy, and faith, An Eros Encyclopedia offers up desire and the attunement to its many objects as the atmosphere of a life—a method to navigate, perceive, and relate against the illusion of separation.