My Life and My Life in the Nineties

The first bilingual edition of this radically original work.

Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.

The Unfollowing is a sequence of elegies, mourning public as well as personal loss. The grief is not coherent. Though the poems are each fourteen lines long, they are not sonnets but anti-sonnets. They are composed entirely of non-sequiturs, with the intention of demonstrating, if not achieving, a refusal to follow aesthetic proprieties, and a rejection of the logic of mortality and of capitalism. As the author sees it, outrage, hilarity, anxiety, and ribaldry are not easily separated in the play of human emotions. And they are all, and sometimes equally, the proper, anarchic medium for staying alive.

A weird, wild ride across non-narrative vignettes and dryly funny aphorisms exploring the shared intensity of violence and the erotic.

As if hauled up squirming from the bowels of the internet, Sex Goblin metabolizes sex writing, popular culture, and autofiction to present the real and the imagined as equally surreal possibilities. In the narrator’s childlike voice, all things become both mundane and strange—a child and their dog fused after a car accident, moments of tenderness amidst frat hazing, witches, and hiking accidents. At turns charming and bizarre, Cook’s work channels sexual violence through the lens of the absurd to alchemize shame and abuse into something that registers differently than trauma. Sex Goblin is a barely factual but deeply felt field guide to relationships and relatability.

Lauren Cook is a transsexual naturalist and the author of I Love Shopping (Glo Worm Press, 2019). He is from upstate New York.

“Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge is the third volume of Renee Gladman’s magnificent, melancholy series about the city-state of Ravicka, or about the architectures of its absence. It is tempting to read the Ravickian books as an extended allegory—of architecture itself, perhaps, except that architecture is already half-allegorical, its every element raised to prefigure whatever meanings can make their way to them. If any can. In Ravicka, meanings—indeed most contact of any kind—remain in abeyance, building, in absentia, the constitutive negative spaces of the narrative. There is a plot; it lays out zones of sheer ambience. Experiences, of which there are many, unfold as a redolent lingering in the structures of immateriality, the radical realities of the insubstantial. Gladman is a philosopher of architecture, though not that of buildings. Rather, she thinks (and writes) the drifts, partitions, and immobilities of identity, affect, communication, the very possibility of being human. Profound, compelling—haunting, even—the story of Ravicka is astonishingly ours.” - Lyn Hejinian

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.

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.

A dreamy and experimental portrait of young Black artists in the 1990s London underground scene, whose existence is threatened by the rise of state surveillance.

Twentysomething and restless, Skye flits between cities and stagnant relationships until she meets Scottie, a disarming and disheveled British traveler, and Pieces, an enigmatic artist living in New York. The three recognize each other as kindred spirits—Black, punk, whimsical, revolutionary—and fall in together, leading Skye on an unlikely adventure across the Atlantic. They live a glorious, subterranean existence in 1990s London: making multimedia art, throwing drug-fueled parties, and eking out a living by busking in Tube stations, until their existence is jeopardized by the rise of CCTV and policing.

In fluid and unrelenting prose, Jamika Ajalon's debut novel explores youth, poetry, and what it means to come terms with queerness. Skye Papers is an imaginative, episodic group portrait of a transatlantic art scene spearheaded by people of color—and of the fraught, dystopian reality of increasing state surveillance.