O Fortuna

This collection of poetry, prose, and other texts is the first publication dedicated to the writing of the late performance, video, and visual artist Stuart Sherman.

The Stuart Sherman Papers presents a selection of facsimile reproductions from his archive at New York University's Fales Library. This collection of entries is not exhaustive but conveys the diversity in Sherman’s writing, which used the ever-expanding vocabulary of the English language as a plastic material to study the abundance of meaning that can be derived through playing with combinations, order, and proximity of words. The texts reproduced here leave his edits, scribbles, and notes to self intact, presenting the page as Sherman last engaged with it.

With text contributions by Sally Banes, Mark Bradford, Michiel Huijben, and Nicholas Martin. Photographs by Nathaniel Tileston and Paolo Rapalino.

Editor: Michiel Huijben
Graphic design: Loes Verstappen
Copy editing: Harriet Foyster
Lithography: Marc Gijzen

Stuart Sherman (1945–2001) was a New York-based artist best known for his performances and video, but working in a variety of visual and literary media. He performed, exhibited, and lectured throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Sherman died of AIDS in San Francisco in September 2001.

A young woman from a long line of assassins, lives her life with the ardent mission to avoid the trappings of any enduring romantic love, while keeping one on the pursuit of an untimely death for herself. 

Not yet thirty, Bathory, or 'Bat' to those near to her, has assembled a peculiar Model, sex worker, linguist and scholar of Latin. But nothing in her lively job history employs the singular traits she inherited from her strange family, chief among them an uncanny ability to sidestep seemingly certain death(s). An appropriate atavistic instinct, for someone from a long line of assassins and spies. Her clan are assassins of a romantic bent, her parents issuing theories on love galore. However Bat is set on swerving any enduring romantic loves, and she's set on dying young. Now, if she could only avoid that one alluring figure from her father's past.

A thriller, a love story, and a dynamic examination of class, violence and connection. The images we make to share and those we strive to conceal, alienation and salvation, magic and technology, LaCava's bold new novel is propelled by the compelling violence one can seed in contradiction.

Oh oh this is the first issue of Tongue Ring, a journal of experimental writing in English & French, with original contributions and translations of texts* by Ariana Reines*, CAConrad*, Camille Kingué, Kaur Alia Ahmed*, Rafael Moreno, Taos Bertrand, and Théo Robine-Langlois*. 

Vous voyez, c’est ça mon genre. Je ne sais pas ce que c’est. 
Mais c’est mon genre. J’ai cet esprit en moi—qui est très ému
par la féminité. Je pourrais me mettre à pleurer. Je veux poser
mon manteau par terre pour la laisser marcher dessus
—Ariana Reines

Premier numéro de la nouvelle revue fantastique et bilingue (FR + EN) d’écriture expérimentale Tongue Ring, avec des contributions originales ainsi que des traductions* de textes de Ariana Reines*, CAConrad*, Camille Kingué, Kaur Alia Ahmed*, Rafael Moreno, Taos Bertrand, and Théo Robine-Langlois*. 

Twenty years after she first chanted in Tahrir, Hanan’s son is living under military rule in Egypt. Though he is both a disciple of the national Sufi institute and a swimmer representing the Armed Forces, proximity to power cannot undo his revolutionary birthright: like his mother and grandmother before him, Shahed is an undercover rebel.

When a general arrives at the Sufi institute looking for help with a military assignment, Shahed accepts, all while concealing his own plans for resistance. The mission takes him behind the walls of a prison town, inside a secret army barracks in the Sinai desert, and deep into the murky waters of the past.

As he wades through his mother’s repressed memories and the state’s repressed histories, Shahed grapples with the traumas of the revolution and the weight of authoritarian rule, searching for new ways to revolt for freedom.

Mohamed Tonsy is a queer Egyptian writer and ceramicist. Formerly an architect and a triathlete representing the Egyptian Triathlon Federation, he completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. His writing has appeared in Mizna and Epoch Press and was shortlisted in MFest’s 2021 Short Story Competition. You Must Believe in Spring is his first book.

A collection of portraits by original riot grrrl, filmmaker, and zine queen, G.B. Jones. All of them witches – from the silverscreen, woodlands, and the streets.

Featuring provocative essays by Caroline Azar, Paul P., Leafshimmer, Jenna Danchuk, Blake Baron Ray, and Scott Treleaven – each exploring how witches have been perceived, presented, and portrayed in popular culture. “Realer than real, stranger than fiction.” 

PRAISE FOR G.B. JONES WITCHES

Witches by G.B. Jones is a summoning spell posing as a book, a paper potion like the potion Nicky gives Gillian in Bell, Book and Candle. It draws me to it and to what’s in it, Jones’ divine drawings of the witches we both worship, the witches of TV and film and true life. I go to it gladly. I go to it gayly. I pore over it and prize it and purr like Pyewacket.

— Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot

G.B. Jones is the original Foxy Genius. Her zines, drawings, music, and Super 8 films inspired both the Queer zine explosion and the Riot Grrrl movement of the 90s. Witches sees G.B. once again crafting her magic.

— Kathleen Hanna, singer, writer, artist, and front-woman of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre

With her illustrated procession of witches, post-punk icon G.B. Jones acts as medium to a dazzling diversity of disrupters from across screen history, as well as a pantheon of real-life hellraisers, from Sybil Leek and Rosaleen Norton to Vali Myers and beyond – all woven through with astute commentary by a host of countercultural collaborators. A captivating book; I was certainly under its spell.

— Kier-La Janisse, author of House of Psychotic Women

Oscar Tamai and Elvio Miranda, the patriarchs of two families of brickmakers, have for years nursed a mutual hatred, but their teenage sons, Pájaro and Ángelito, somehow fell in love. Brickmakers begins as Pájaro and Marciano, Ángelito's older brother, lie dying in the mud at the base of a Ferris wheel. Inhabiting a dreamlike state between life and death, they recall the events that forced them to pay the price of their fathers' petty feud. 

The Tamai and Miranda f-amilies are caught, like the Capulets and the Montagues, in an almost mythic conflict, one that emerges from stubborn pride and intractable machismo. Like her heralded debut, The Wind That Lays Waste, Selva Almada's fierce and tender second novel is an unforgettable portrayal of characters who initially seem to stand in opposition, but are ultimately revealed to be bound by their similarities. 

Almada enlarges the tradition of some of the most distinctive prose stylists of our time. In Brickmakers, she furthers her extraordinary exploration of masculinity and the realities of working-class rural life. This is another exquisitely written and powerfully told story by a major international voice.