October

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.

This is a book of failure and mistakes; it begins with what is stolen from us and proposes only an invitation to imagine.

In these playful written experiments, Lola Olufemi navigates the space between what is and what could be. Weaving together fragmentary reflections in prose and poetry, this is an exploration of the possibility of living differently, grounded in black feminist scholarship and political organising.

Olufemi shows that the horizon is not an immaterial state we gesture toward. Instead, propelled by the motion of thinking against and beyond, we must invent the future now and never let go of the otherwise.

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and CREAM/Stuart Hall Foundation researcher from London. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to futurity, political demands and imaginative-revolutionary potential. She is the author of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise and Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power, the co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University, and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.

A vivid, haunting tale of intergenerational trauma and survival under Israeli occupation. 

A New Arab Book of the Year 2021.

The year is 1968. The recent Arab defeat in the Naksa has led to the loss of all of historic Palestine. In the midst of violent political upheaval, Mahmoud, a young Palestinian boy living in the Galilee, embarks on a school trip to visit the West Bank for the first time.

For Mahmoud, his mother and his grandmother, the journey sets off a flood of memories, tracing moments that bond three generations together. How do these personal experiences become collective history? Why do some feel guilty for surviving war? Is it strange to long for a time never lived?

In this groundbreaking novella, Yara Hawari harnesses the enduring power of memory in defiance of the constrictions on Palestinian life. Against a system bent on the erasure of their people, the family’s perseverance is unbroken in the decades-long struggle for their stone house.

Yara Hawari is a Palestinian writer and political commentator. She completed her PhD in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, where her research focused on oral history and Indigenous Studies. She currently works as a senior analyst at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank. The Stone House is her first book.

Through an Addict’s Looking-Glass is an exercise in meaning-making, a thinking-out-loud. Waithera Sebatindira unravels how it feels to live as an addict under capitalism, pondering how engaging with these experiences could bring the horizon of liberation towards us.

Through embodied explorations of addiction and recovery, Sebatindira invites us to inhabit crip time, a concept that describes different temporal realities in the lives of disabled people. In this collection, the addict’s crip time is distorted, mutable and non-linear, hopping backwards and forwards through memory loops and memory loss. Blackout is time travel; sobriety is failure; finitude, freedom.

An uncompromising rejection of the objectification of addicts across the political spectrum, this powerful meditation on illness, disability, solidarity and spirituality illuminates their indispensable contributions to the building of a new world.

Waithera Sebatindira is a Kenyan writer based in London. Their previous writing and research interests have included food imperialism, drag kings and gender transformation. They are a co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University.

East Pakistan, 1971. On their way to visit their mother, two sisters, Lucky and Jamila, are captured by Pakistani soldiers and thrown into a world of horror.

Locked in a room in an unknown village-turned-camp by the river, the women look through a lone barred window onto white jasmines blooming day and night. Meanwhile, around the camp, deadly guerrilla fighters from the Bengali Mukti Bahini gather to take back territory from the Pakistan Army.

As Bangladesh crowns painfully into the world, Lucky and Jamila must choose between heartbreak and secrecy to return from an unspoken violence.

Saima Begum is a British-Bangladeshi writer based in North London. She won the MFest Short Story Competition in 2021. The First Jasmines is her first novel.

Somewhere between fact and fiction, 
memoir and novelisation ... 
a tidal thread of correspondences. 

A novel-in-correspondence, a neither/nor publication defying easy category—a book that rests somewhere between fiction and memoir—Envois is a collection of letters sent to Sharon Kivland by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan during the course of their long and stormy love affair from 1953 until his death in 1981.

A publication assembled chronologically—following the yearly seminars of Lacan and structured per their delivery—and in which love emerges as a form of appropriation; a litmus for authenticity; a look book for learning; an atlas for forms of yearning; a map for multimodal thinking; a log book for passing hours; a calendar to keep track of the quickening of time; an itinerary of preoccupations; a discipline; a vocation; a dressing up and dressing down of language; a lens; an aperture; a tool shed; a window; a corridor; and/or an arena of investigation. Kivland was not listening for psychoanalytic theory and she is faithful to the words of her beloved, attuned to his speech towards her and her alone... And yet, well, and yet, all that remains as her master breaks the silence.

Midwinter Day, as Alice Notley noted, is an epic poem about a daily routine. A poem in six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day-morning, afternoon, evening, night-to dreams again:...

a plain introduction to modes of love and reason/ Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season/ Now I've said this love it's all I can remember/ Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December// Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light/ That takes the bite from winter weather/ And weaves the random cloth of life together/ And drives away the long black night!

David J. Melnick published the first book of Men in Aida, a homophonic, but also homoeroticized translation of Homer's epic Iliad, in December 1983 in an edition of 450 at Tuumba Press. After appearing in many guises and fragments, Book Two was published online in 2002 as part of the Eclipse Archive. Book Three appears for the first time in the present publication, which brings together all three books of one of the most important American avant-garde poems. 

According to Sean Gurd, who wrote the introduction to this unified edition: "The labor of more than 20 years, Men in Aïda filters the sound of Homer's Iliad through the words and phraseology of English. Far more than an exercise in homophonic translation, David J. Melnick's epoch-marking poem packs thousands of years of linguistic history into three riotous books."

Narrative/Prose issue, featuring a special section: I was writing, but it was drawing: a Renee Gladman mini-feature with work by Renee Gladman * Earl Jackson, Jr. * Bruna Mori * Alexis Almeida on Renee Gladman & Julie Carr * Lewis Freedman & Vanessa Thill on Renee Gladman & Mirtha Dermisache. as well as work by Isabel Waidner * sissi tax (translated by Joel Scott & Charlotte Theißen) * Susan Hefuna * Mira Mattar * Lital Khaikin * Maryam Madjidi (translated by Ruth Diver) * Omer Wasim & Saira Sheikh * Ilse Aichinger (translated by Christian Hawkey & Uljana Wolf) * Bronka Nowicka (translated by Katarzyna Szuster) * Maude Pilon (translated by Simon Brown) * Mehmet Dere * Syd Staiti * Jena Osman * Germán Sierra * Natani Notah * Julia Bloch on Bernadette Mayer * Robert Glück on Clarice Lispector * Rob Halpern on Bruce Boone & Dennis Cooper *Dylan Byron on/after Bruce Boone * Linda Bakke on Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today * Anna Fidler * Corey Zielinski on Bob Glück & Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-97 * Jackie Kirby on From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice * David W. Pritchard on Kevin Killian * Dale Enggass on Simone White * Allison Cardon on Anne Boyer * Robert Balun on Leslie Kaplan * Marco Antonio Huerta on Omar Pimienta * Allison Grimaldi Donahue on Josué Guébo * Sara Florian on Lasana Sekou * Louis Bury on Allison Cobb * Hugo Gibson on Annie Ernaux.

New edition of this long out of-print classic of diasporic literature, featuring a forward by Eunsong Kim, an afterword by Emgee Dufresne, and new endnotes by Bhanu Kapil.

Incubation: a space for monsters is a formally innovative, hybrid-genre book that incorporates poetry and prose. Set in a shifting narrative environment, where human bodies, characters, and text are neither one thing nor another, this fragmentary-diaristic text journeys through the spaces in-between. Originally published in America in 2006 by Leon Works, and out of print for the last seven years, this is the first time this seminal text has been available in the UK.

Following protagonist Laloo – Cyborg, girl, mother, child, immigrant, settler – on a roadtrip through American landscapes, genre styles, and form, Incubation creates radical space for what is ‘monstrous’. Appropriating iconic American tropes, and the structure of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Incubation explores the challenges faced by immigrants in attaining such notions of freedom in so hostile an environment. In this fragmentary document there is a celebration in the cobbling together of lives; global in scope, with an intimate focus on interior voice, this landmark text evidences the early innovations and talents of this T.S. Eliot prizewinning author.