Nymph: A Novel

Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world. 

Around the globe, people are faced with a spiralling succession of crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable.  

Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid.  

This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout.  

Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.

The reception of art and performance is changing.

Smartphones and social media have troubled the old model of individual appreciation and close looking, giving rise to new forms of mediated perception, such as sampling, skimming and scrolling.

Charting recent trends in contemporary practice - research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture - leading art critic Claire Bishop challenges the assumption that fully focused attention is automatically good and distraction necessarily bad.

In this influential lecture, Edward Said explores Freud’s foundational work Moses and Monotheism to rethink the relationship between identity, politics and psychoanalysis. The result is a study illuminating both Freud’s thinking and that of Said, on whom the great psychoanalyst was a formative influence.

Was Moses Jewish or an Egyptian? The question undermines any simple ascription of identity, highlighting the limits of these categories. Said suggests that such an unresolved, nuanced sense of identity might, if embodied in political reality, form the basis for a new understanding between Jews and Palestinians. In contrast, Israel's relentless march towards an exclusively Jewish state denies any sense of a more complex, inclusive past.

With an introduction by Christopher Bollas and a response by Jacqueline Rose. 

One of America's most historic political trials is undoubtedly that of Angela Davis. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis's incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United State.  

Since the book was written, the carceral system in the US has seen unprecedented growth, with more of America's black population behind bars than ever before. The scathing analysis of the role of prison and the policing of black populations offered by Davis and her comrades in this astonishing volume remains as pertinent today as the day it was first published.  

Featuring contributions from George Jackson, Bettina Aptheker, Bobby Seale, James Baldwin, Ruchell Magee, Julian Bond, Huey P. Newton, Erika Huggins, Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette, and others.

How most Western governments and elites have supported the destruction of Gaza and silenced voices calling for the rights of Palestinians. 

Providing a record of the first six months of the war waged by the Israeli army after the 7 October attacks and drawing on a rich range of international sources, Didier Fassin examines how most Western governments have acquiesced in and often contributed to the destruction, by the Israeli army, of Gaza, its homes, infrastructures, hospitals, institutions of education, and civilian population. To justify their support and prevent criticism, they have provided an official version of the events, adopting the Israeli narrative. It was largely taken up by mainstream media, which ignored the experiences and perspectives of Palestinians. Dissenting voices were silenced. A policing of language and thought was imposed. Censorship and self-censorship became normalized. 

To call for a ceasefire or to demand the respect of humanitarian law was enough to prompt the ever-ready accusation of antisemitism. Exploring the multiple dimensions of the extreme inequality of lives between the two sides of the conflict and analyzing the complex geopolitical, economic and ideological stakes that underlie it, Fassin intends to constitute an archive of this moral abdication. In his view, the abandonment of the values and principles proclaimed by Western elites to be foundational will leave a deep scar in the history of the world.

Poems presents four unpublished poems by American writer and actress Zoë Lund (1962–1999), written in the 1980s. An incandescent voice emerges, revealing the might, sincerity, and precision of her expression, as well as her vulnerability and defiance in the face of death. This is the first publication dedicated to her work.

Translated into French by Stephanie LaCava and Manon Lutanie, and presented in a bilingual volume (English, French), the poems are introduced by Stephanie LaCava, who retraces their genesis and examines the personality of their author:

"She is unsure of her identity, but hints at certain proclivities: action as the only true form of activism (sustained readiness to strike); a taste for contradictory characters (strength exists where there is also cowardice); romance. [...] Uninterested in mute beauty, Lund wanted to write and produce her own projects. In a news clipping from 1983, titled 'Young Political Filmmaker Shooting at Mount Holyoke,' there is a striking picture of Lund 'working on a film about the radicalization of a young woman,' per the caption. The article talks of her 'uncompromising idealism' and feelings about the naïveté of both American liberals and leftists.

Three years later, in 1986, 'Touchstone Levity' was written, and [...], the same year, "Opium Wars." The latter speaks to Lund's interest in drugs (she had a taste for heroin and would die of heart failure at thirty-seven)."

Printed offset in Italy on a matte, natural paper, stapled, the book also features black-and-white pictures of Lund taken in Paris by the filmmaker, critic, and activist Édouard de Laurot, then the author's partner, in the early 1980s. It's striking to see her in Paris on these images, smoking and posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, disheveled in a nightclub, caught on camera at a shooting range, at such a young age—when we know she would die in Paris fifteen years later. It seemed right to choose these images to accompany the poems, which were written in the same decade, and in the context of this French-American publication.

Isabelle Graw reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus.

By focusing on her own social milieu—the art world—Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity—if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe—with it, we are able to fully live.

"On the Benefits of Friendship strangely calls to mind the fictional schoolboy-diary format Robert Walser staged to deliver his first novel. Aware of its own performance while successfully assuming its desired voice, Graw's diaristic story is a clever vehicle for social critique of utility friendships." 
— Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You

"Isabelle Graw has written the Elective Affinities for the twenty-first century, as a feminist novel and a dysfunctional family portrait set in the contemporary art world."
— Violaine Huisman, author of The Book of Mother

Isabelle Graw is Professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule), Frankfurt am Main, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism. She is an art critic and co-founder ofTexte zur Kunst in Berlin.

This book is built of stories and provocations—like the birth of a pearl, it transforms that which irritates, layer by layer.

Through speculative fiction and critical essays, Pear Nuallak explores what happens when messy, desiring bodies collide with the hard edge of power. The world’s neat categories are unmade and rewritten, revealing that racial capitalism’s myths are just as much fantasies as Thai bird princesses and transgender magic.

Moving playfully across folktale, horror, satire and critique, Nuallak examines how different beings are formed politically, bodily and emotionally. We discover interdimensional fungi resisting colonisation, queer monsters living on Hampstead Heath, and a mysterious canal running through the ruins of capitalism into interstitial realms. We test the borders of queer diasporic nationalism and take apart the racially melancholic memoir. In this fiery yet delicate collection, we aren’t bound by truth, but flow with it into new worlds.

Pear Nuallak is a visual artist and writer from London. They run community art workshops and co-organise a queer social hub with the Black Cap Community Benefit Society. Their writing has been published in The Dark and Interfictions. Pearls from Their Mouth is their first book.

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

A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond.

The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history — the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities. In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.

A masterpiece of surrealist fiction, steeped in controversy upon its first publication in 1984, Blood and Guts in High School is the book that established Kathy Acker as the preeminent voice of post-punk feminism. With 2017 marking the 70th anniversary of her birth, as well as the 10th year since her death this transgressive work of philosophical, political, and sexual insight—with a new introduction by Chris Kraus—continues to become more relevant than ever before.

In the Mexican city of Merida, ten-year-old Janey lives with Johnny—her "boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father"—until he leaves her for another woman. Bereft, Janey travels to New York City, plunging into an underworld of gangs and prostitution. After escaping imprisonment, she flees to Tangiers where she meets Jean Genet, and they begin a torrid affair that will lead Janey to her demise. Fantastical, sensual, and fearlessly radical, this hallucinatory collage is both a comic and tragic portrait of erotic awakening.

D’eux, il ne reste que les mots de celle qui a croisé leur route. Le crissement de pneus qui sifflent avant un malheur qui tarde à se produire. Sanctification plus que célébration, Oraison funèbre pour Zelda1990 est une tentative de communication au-delà de la matière physique de l’énonciation, un dialogue interne qui convoque « par moment le frère, par moment l’ami parti », toujours la ruine, la consommation de la séparation avec le tout. À travers quatre parties qui font écho à la structure des éloges funèbres de la Grèce antique, Romane Constant réouvre la poésie des plaies larges et profondes que les vers lapidaires d’Hélène Bessette – sur qui l’autrice mène un travail de recherche – ont laissé dans l’histoire moderne de la littérature, et signe un texte bouleversant sur la difficulté des choses qui ne (se) passent pas, la force de celles que l’on voit suspendues par le cou au bord d’une paix impossible à trouver. Oraison funèbre pour Zelda1990 est une douleur croissante, avec écoulement et rougeur.

Romane Constant vit et travaille à Paris. Elle explore à travers différents supports les questions relationnelles, d’intimité, du corps et du genre. Attachée aux Ardennes où elle a grandi, elle s’intéresse également à l’héritage de la classe ouvrière et aux traumatismes intergénérationnels.