Mudun – Short stories from the Arab world

The cultural and political legacies of the the 1933 and 1934 Arab Exhibitions in Jerusalem.

Resurgent Nahda examines the 1933 and 1934 Arab Exhibitions in Mandate Jerusalem, highlighting the city's role in asserting a regional Arab Nahda and fostering economic, cultural, and artistic exchange amid post-WWI geopolitical fragmentation.

The book emerges from Nadi Abusaada's seven years of research, including an award-winning 2019 essay in the Jerusalem Quarterly and two exhibitions he curated at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah (2022–2023) and Darat al-Funun in Amman (2024). Featuring six essays, an interview, and primary materials—archival documents, crafts, and artworks—the book explores Jerusalem's connections with Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut, tracing the journeys of artists, craftspeople, architects, and journalists who shaped this pivotal chapter in modern Arab history.

Nadi Abusaada is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut. His work focuses on the material histories and visual cultures of the modern Arab world. He holds a PhD in architecture from the University of Cambridge. He has also held various academic fellowships including the ETH Zürich Postdoctoral Fellowship at ETH Zürich and the Aga Khan Postdoctoral Fellowship in Islamic Architecture at MIT. Besides his writings, Nadi Abusaada has also been involved in research-based curatorial work. He has curated and participated in a number of exhibitions around the world including in Ramallah, Amman, Zurich, Venice, Dubai, and Montreal.

Edited by Nadi Abusaada.
Texts by Nadi Abusaada, Nisa Ari, Wesam Al Asali, Samira Badran, Nadine Nour el Din, Kirsten Scheid, Sary Zananiri.

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.

Written with lyrical fire in a chorus of vividly rendered voices, Dionne Brand's second novel is an epic of the African diaspora across the globe.

It begins in 1824 on Trinidad, where Marie-Ursule, queen of a secret slave society called the Sans Peur Regiment, plots a mass suicide. The end of the Sans Peur is also the beginning of a new world, for Marie-Ursule cannot kill her young daughter, Bola, who escapes to live free and bear a dynasty of descendants who spill out across the Caribbean, North America, and Europe.

Haunted by a legacy of passion and oppression, the children of Bola pass through two world wars and into the confusion, estrangement, and violence of the late twentieth century.

"[Brand has] a lush and exuberant style that may put some readers in mind of Toni Morrison or Edwidge Danticat." — William Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review

Licorice Candies collects short stories and poems written during the author’s most experimental and frenzied phase. The backdrop shifts from barren plazas in Buenos Aires to basement parties in Berlin. “I wished that, by continually moving horizontally, in a straight line, my body would touch Germany…that you could reach Berlin from Buenos Aires in a second without any planes that all the coolest cities in the world were each a continuation of the next: Lima, Buenos Aires, Berlin.” The medium through which these desires manifest is the Internet. The Internet—a ubiquitous force that becomes the notebook for the author’s poetry: typo-ridden love letters the grammarless confessions of a polyglot a geography that bends to the author’s will, making everything closer, more intimate.

Translated from Spanish by Jacob Steinberg

A new epic novel about a teenage queer runaway from cult classic author of Black Wave and Valencia Michelle Tea. A Literary Hub Notable Small Press Book of 2025.

In Spencer's fantasies, the breezy, queer streets of Provincetown, MA, are utopia, a place where he can be free. Yet when a violent attack in his suburban Arizona schoolyard sends him to the hospital, he decides queer utopia can't wait. And one night, with the help of his best friend, the teenage witch Joy, he hitches a ride to find it.

The cross-country road odyssey that follows brings Spencer from new moon rituals in Arizona canyons to Texas bus stations, from the luxe drag stages of Houston's Montrose district to the jazz-soaked streets of the French Quarter and beyond. This new novel from Michelle Tea tells the story, by turns raw, romantic, and sweet, of a sheltered boy taking his first leap into queer life, among all the complicated queers who live it.

"Tea's conversational tone and her way of writing deeply personal experience . . . presents a very necessary counter-narrative to mainstream histories of American punk, feminism, and sexual identity." – The Brooklyn Rail

Michelle Tea is the author of over twenty books of fiction, memoir, poetry and children's literature. Her autofiction Valencia, a cult classic, won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Fiction. Her essay collection Against Memoir was awarded the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for The Art of the Essay. Tea is also the recipient of awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. The founder of Drag Queen Story Hour, she has received honors from the American Library Association and Logo Television. Tea curated the Sister Spit Books series at City Lights Publishers and founded the ongoing imprint Amethyst Edition at the Feminist Press.

Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, among others.

A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, "I," and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters, Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language.

Sphinx is a landmark text in the feminist and LGBT literary canon appearing in English for the first time.

Anne Garréta (b. 1962) is a lecturer at the University of Rennes II and research professor of literature and Romance studies at Duke University. She joined the Oulipo in 2000, becoming the first member to join born after the Oulipo was founded. Garréta won France's prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002, awarded each year to an author whose "fame does not yet match their talent," for her novel Pas un jour.

Emma Ramadan is a graduate of Brown University and received her master's in literary translation from the American University of Paris. Her translation of Anne Parian's Monospace is forthcoming from La Presse. She is currently on a Fulbright Fellowship for literary translation in Morocco.