Skip to main content
rile*books

Search books

Search books by title, author, publisher, keywords...

Cover of Night

Nightboat Books

Night

Etel Adnan

€13.00

Born in 1925 in Beirut, ETEL ADNAN has written more than a dozen books of poetry, fiction, and essays. A two-volume collection, To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader, was published in 2014. She is a recipient of a PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award, the California Book Award, a Lambda Book Award, and a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. She lives in Paris and Sausalito, California.

"Trained in philosophy, Beirut-born author/activist Adnan blends a meditation on the meaning of memory with memories themselves, dredged up from a long life. And surely night, her setting here, is the time for such dredging. Adnan rigorously asserts that "reason and memory move together." But she argues that "a remembered event is a return to a mystery," and her writing is eye-openingly lush, gorgeous, even surreal ("waves of roses are blanketing memory"), showing us the mind at work on its unstructured, uncertain edges. The epigrammatic ending, "Conversations with my soul" ("Why are we lonelier when/ together"), will feed even those who don't typically read poetry. VERDICT A good way for sophisticated readers to recall why they first loved verse." — Library Journal

Language: English

recommendations

Cover of We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Transpoetics

Nightboat Books

We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Transpoetics

Kay Gabriel, Andrea Abi-Karam

Poetry €23.00

An anthology of formally inventive writing by trans poets against capital and empire.

With texts by: Andrea Abi-Karam, New York City Sam Ace, South Hadley, MA Bahaar Ahsan, Berkeley, CA jasper avery, Philadelphia, PA Ari Banias, Berkeley, CA Jo Barchi, Chicago, IL Joss Barton, St. Louis, MO Levi Bentley, Philadelphia, PA Jessica Bet, Baltimore, MA Rocket Caleshu, Los Angeles, CA Ching-in Chen, Seattle, WA listen chen, Vancouver, BC Faye Chevalier, Philadelphia, PA Cody-Rose Clevidence, Arkansas Miles Collins-Sibley, Easthampton, MA Valentine Conaty, New York City CA Conrad, Philadelphia, PA Jimmy Cooper, Rochester, MI Maxe Crandall, Oakland, CA José Díaz, Boston, MA Aaron El Sabrout, New Mexico Ian Khara Ellasante, Lewiston, ME Caelan Ernest, New York City, NY NM Esc, San Diego, CA joshua jennifer espinoza, Los Angeles, CA Logan February, Ibadan, Nigeria Ray Filar, Brighton, UK Nora Collen Fulton, Montreal, Canada Kay Gabriel, New York City Callie Gardner, Cardiff, Wales Jesi Gaston, Chicago, IL Harry Josephine Giles, Edinburgh, Scotland Aeon Ginsberg, Baltimore, MD Caspar Heinemann, Berlin, Germany Kamden Hilliard, Greenville, SC Stephen Ira, New York City Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, New York City Peach Kander, New York City Jayson Keery, Western, MA Evan Kleekamp, Los Angeles, CA Noah LeBien, New York City Ty Little, Richmond, VA Zavé Martohardjono, New York City Amy Marvin, Philadelphia, PA Natalie Mesnard, New York City Bianca Rae Messinger, Iowa City, IA Liam O'Brien, New York City Xandria Phillips, Madison, WI Rowan Powell, Santa Cruz, CA Nat Raha, Edinburgh, Scotland Holly Raymond, Philadelphia, PA Jackie S, New York City Trish Salah, Toronto, Canada Raquel Salas Rivera, Philadelphia, PA Mai Schwartz, New York City Kashif Sharma-Patel, London, UK Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Oakland, CA Charles Theonia, New York City Jamie Townsend, Oakland, CA Nora Treatbaby Laurel Uziell, London, UK Rachel Franklin Wood, Boulder, CO Clara Zornado Akasha-Mitra xtian w. and Anaïs Duplan, NYC.

Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. She's the author of Elegy Department Spring / Candy Sonnets 1 (BOAAT Press, 2017), the recipient of fellowships from Lambda Literary and the Poetry Project, and recently completed her PhD at Princeton University.

Andrea Abi-Karam is an arab-american genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg, writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma & delayed healing. Their chapbook, THE AFTERMATH (Commune Editions), attempts to queer Fanon's vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Andrea's first book, EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), is a poetic critique of the U.S. military's role in the War on Terror.

Cover of Toxicon and Arachne

Nightboat Books

Toxicon and Arachne

Joyelle McSweeney

Poetry €18.00

In Toxicon & Arachne, McSweeney allows the lyric to course through her like a toxin, producing a quiver of lyrics like poisoned arrows. Toxicon was written in anticipation of the birth of McSweeney's daughter, Arachne. But when Arachne was born sick, lived briefly, and then died, McSweeney unexpectedly endured a second inundation of lyricism, which would become the poems in Arachne, this time spun with grief. Toxicon & Arachne is the culmination of eight years of engagement with lyric under a regime of global and personal catastrophes.

Cover of Ponk!

Nightboat Books

Ponk!

Marcus Clayton

Fiction €20.00

A punk rock anti-memoir told through the eyes of a biracial Afrolatino punk academic. 

¡PÓNK! follows Moose, an alienated academic and lead guitarist for Pipebomb!, as he navigates through spaces in and out of South East Los Angeles: punk clubs, college classrooms, family gatherings, street protests, and euphoric backyard shows.Oscillating between autofiction, memoir, and lyric, Clayton blurs genres while articulating the layered effects of racism, trauma, immigration, policing, Black hair, performance, and toxic academic language to uncover how one truly becomes an "ally." Borrowing from the spatial lyricism of Claudia Rankine, the genre-bending storytelling of Alexander Chee, and the racial musings of James Baldwin, ¡PÓNK!'s narrative takes back punk rock and finds safe space in the mosh pit.

Cover of I Love Shopping

Nightboat Books

I Love Shopping

Lauren Cook

Fiction €16.00

Chickens have a collective soul. Heaven is full of the skateboarders you kissed in middle school. If the algorithm is its own hell, Lauren Cook, author of the critically (and uncritically) acclaimed Sex Goblin, stands in front of it fully armored. I Love Shopping invites its readers to inhabit a world just like ours, reflected through a big, benevolent funhouse mirror.

First published in a limited edition, this is the first trade edition of the cult classic.

Cover of We Both Laughed in Pleasure

Nightboat Books

We Both Laughed in Pleasure

Lou Sullivan

Fiction €22.00

Drawn from Lou Sullivan’s meticulously kept journals, this landmark book records the life of arguably the first publicly gay trans man to medically transition.

We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan narrates the inner life of a gay trans man moving through the shifting social, political, and medical mores of the second half of the 20th century. Sullivan kept comprehensive journals from age eleven until his AIDS-related death at thirty-nine. Sensual, lascivious, challenging, quotidian and poetic, the diaries complicate and disrupt normative trans narratives. Entries from twenty-four diaries reveal Sullivan’s self-articulation and the complexity of a fascinating and courageous figure.

Edited by: Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma
Introduction by: Susan Stryker

Cover of A breeze over the Mediterranean

Mousse Publishing

A breeze over the Mediterranean

Simone Fattal

Sculpture €25.00

The catalogue of the Lebanese-American artist's first exhibition in Italy.

Over fifty years, Simone Fattal's multifaceted work has explored the impact of displacement as well as the episteme of archeology and mythology, drawing from a range of sources including war narratives, landscape painting, ancient history, and poetry. The artist imagery blends history with memory, grappling with the losses of time while revealing its repetitions. 

This book documents Fattal's first solo show in Italy titled A breeze over the Mediterranean at the Fondazione ICA, Milan, in collaboration with Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters.

Texts by Alberto Salvadori, Andrea Viliani, Etel Adnan, Simone Fattal.

Simone Fattal (born 1942 in Damascus) is a Lebanese-American painter, sculptor and ceramist. After studying philosophy, first in Beirut and then Paris, Fattal returned to Beirut in 1969 and began life as a painter—creating sensuous abstract works that diverged from the predominantly figurative paintings commonly exhibited in Lebanon at the time. In 1980, after a decade spent in Lebanon as a painter, Fattal fled the civil war, abandoned her painting practice, and settled in Sausalito, California, where she founded the revolutionary publishing house Post-Apollo Press. In 1988, after studying sculpture in San Francisco, Fattal was consumed by another wave of creativity that led her to pursue ceramic sculptures—a medium in which she continues to work to this day from her studio in Paris.

Cover of Sitt Marie Rose

Litmus Press

Sitt Marie Rose

Etel Adnan

Fiction €17.00

Sitt Marie Rose is the story of a woman abducted by militiamen during the civil war in Lebanon. Already a classic of war literature, this extraordinary novel won the France-Pays Arabes award in Paris and has been translated into six languages. Sitt Marie Rose is part of Comparative Literature, World Literature, Women’s Studies and Middle East Studies curricula at more than thirty universities and colleges in the U.S.

Translated by Georgina Kleege.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She is a celebrated writer, essayist, and playwright, and is the author of more than twenty books in all these disciplines. Her work as a whole is a faithful record of the times and places she has lived in Beirut, Paris, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. At least eighteen works by Adnan have been published in English. They include Sitt Marie Rose (Post-Apollo Press, 1982); The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; Premonition (Kelsey Street Press, 2014); Surge (Nightboat Books, 2018); Time (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award; and Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020). In 2021, Litmus Press published a second edition of Journey to Mount Tamalpais (originally published by The Post-Apollo Press), which included nine new ink drawings by Adnan. Her paintings, described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as "stubbornly radiant abstractions," have been widely exhibited. Spanning media and genres, Adnan's writings have led to numerous collaborations with artists and musicians, including the French part of CIVIL warS, a multi-language opera by American stage director Robert Wilson, performed in Lyon and Bobigny in 1985. In 2014 she was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France's highest cultural honor, by the French Government. She died in Paris, in 2021.

Georgina Kleege is an internationally known writer and disability studies scholar. Her collection of personal essays, Sight Unseen (1999) is a classic in the field of disability studies. Kleege’s latest book, More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art (2018) is concerned with blindness and visual art. Kleege joined the English department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 where in addition to teaching creative writing classes she teaches courses on representations of disability in literature, and disability memoir. Kleege is also the author of Home for the Summer (The Post-Apollo Press, 1989).

Cover of The Beauty of Light: An Interview

Nightboat Books

The Beauty of Light: An Interview

Etel Adnan, Laure Adler

Poetry €18.00

A lively and spontaneous interview with Etel Adnan about her absolute belief in the beauty of the world, the beauty of art.

In these interviews conducted by journalist Laure Adler, poet and painter Etel Adnan recounts the foundational experiences of her artistic approach shortly before her death in Autumn of 2021. From her youth in Lebanon, through her years in New York and California, and her late-in-life discovery at Documenta in 2013, this intimate conversation revisits and questions the sometimes difficult destiny of women.