MsHeresies 6 publishes an edited chapter from Caren Beilin’s forthcoming novel Sea, Poison (New Directions, 2025). It is typeset together with reworked material from the archive of the Neapolitan feminist artist collective Le Nemesiache, active between 1969 and 1995.
Elisabeth Rafstedt, Johanna Ehde
This fourth issue of MsHeresies republishes the chapter *Daffodils* — a warped monologue about a domestic poisoning — from Rosalind Belben’s book Is Beauty Good (1989).
It is typeset alongside a collage of material from two medieval manuscripts: Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae and De natura rerum (circa 1130–74), which was illuminated and transcribed by a group of eight nuns at the Benedictine abbey of Munsterbilzen in Maastricht; and the so called Claricia Psalter (late 12th–early 13th century) from the abbey of saints Ulrich and Afra in Augsberg, also made by a group of nuns and named after the novice Claricia who is believed to have drawn herself hanging like the tail of a drop-cap Q in the psalter section of the book.
Raphaëlle Milone's first novel, a dive into the heart of desires, acclaimed by Simon Liberati as well as by Jean-Luc Nancy.
Raphaëlle Milone (born 1991 in Riom) is a French writer.
Má dreams of wealth and grandeur, Hieu dreams of Finnish girls. The younger brother, always on the periphery, always an observer, gradually disappears into his schoolwork, mesmerised by his own intellect
The three of them form a solitary world in a small Ostrobothnian town on the west coast of Finland. Má and Hieu, constantly on a collision course with each other and the community’s suffocating social codes. They live among people who want to talk openly about everything, who don’t understand the necessity of sometimes remaining in the shade.
In sensitive and transfixing prose that has the effect of a series of tableaux, and with chapter headings reminiscent of the intertitles in a silent film, Tran’s multi-award-winning debut is a moving story about love, the compulsion to create, and the meaning of family.
Winner of the Runeberg Prize 2022
Winner of the Borås Tidning’s Debutant Prize 2022
Winner of the Svenska Yle Literature Prize 2021
Shortlisted for the Katapult Prize 2022
An unnamed, female narrator travels through school, then art school, then art school teaching jobs, finding or fashioning “the selves of herself” via encounters with PJ Harvey, the ghosts of Ann Quin, Susan Sontag, and a mansplaining Analyst that she first encounters in her grandparents’ garden. Both a love letter to creative life, and a requiem for all that is lost in its pursuit, UH HUH HER asks is it possible to record—and retain—our experiences of being on the outside? Or can such stories only exist within the institutions that both literally and metaphorically shape them?
Arthur’s Whims is the tale of “a modern saint,” a love story born of a childhood dream of being “alone on a boat with a boy, a friend.” Arthur and his beloved Bichon—a young man who, after drinking Arthur’s tears, becomes pregnant with his child—drift through a stream of identities and circumstances: birdcatchers for a French taxidermist; sailors shipwrecked in an ice fortress; explorers of the Isles of Traitors, Babies, and Sadness; famous magicians in Oklahoma; religious and medical marvels. It is an anarchic, outrageous novel, in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Comte de Lautréamont, now available in English for the first time in translation by Dana Lupo. This edition includes Hervé Guibert’s essay “The Bear,” in which he compares his books to rooms in a house, writing: “Arthur’s Whims would be the library of the house, and the bedroom of a child who will never be.” It is “a true adventure novel in the tradition of the genre, or what I believed to be its tradition, with great journeys, disasters, shipwrecks, cataclysms.”
“This short novel, offered here along with an essay by Guibert, reads like a madcap picaresque—one in which bodies can transform, the pace is constantly accelerating, and geography proves to be malleable. A gloriously surreal account of an unexpected voyage.” — Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders
Hervé Guibert was a French photographer, critic, and author. Born in 1955, he published works of autofiction, novels, short stories, and essays, including many on photography. His writing was often deeply personal, ironic, and centered on illness and the body. Guibert died from complications of AIDS in 1991, at the age of thirty-six.
Dana Lupo is a writer and translator based in New York. Their work has appeared in Entropy, Bone & Ink Press, Arcturus (Chicago Review of Books), Apricity Press, and elsewhere. Arthur’s Whims is their first published translation.
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