On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe

With echoes of Shirley Hazzard and Virginia Woolf, a new novel of startling intelligence from prize–winning author Michelle de Kretser, following a woman looking back on her young adulthood, and grappling with the collision of her emotions and her values.

In the late 1980s, the narrator of Theory & Practice—a first generation immigrant from Sri Lanka who moved to Sydney in her childhood—sets up a life in Melbourne for graduate school. Jilted by a lover who cheats on her with another self-described "feminist," she is thrown into deeper confusion about her identity and the people around her.

The narrator begins to fall for a man named Kit, who is in a “deconstructed relationship” with a woman named Olivia. She struggles to square her feminism against her jealousy toward Olivia—and her anti-colonialism against her feelings about Virginia Woolf, whose work she is called to despite her racism.

What happens when our desires run contrary to our beliefs? What should we do when the failings of revered figures come to light? Who is shamed when the truth is told? In Theory & Practice, Michelle de Kretser offers a spellbinding meditation on the moral complexities that arise in this gap. Peopled with brilliantly drawn characters, the novel also stitches together fiction and essay, taking up Woolf’s quest for adventurous literary form.

In 1911, Sigmund Freud addressed his followers gathered at Nuremberg, where he restated the import of his practice: “the task of psychoanalysis lies not at all in the discovering of complexes, but in the dissolving of resistances.” A formal antipode to political resistance, psychoanalytic resistance dams up desire and obstructs traumatic knowledge. It is conservative, allergic to change, and aims for the kind of frictionless normativity against which the unconscious drives rail. Meanwhile, we associate political resistance with change itself, with a blockade that pushes for revolution—rather than a blockage that censors its very possibility. If we read Freud as urging his followers to help their patients move through their resistance, psychoanalysis is a project on the side of material and political reality by bringing patients out of isolation and into social struggles. However, psychoanalysis is often glossed in reverse: as a project of isolated relief for the stubborn individual.

Should psychoanalysis only succeed at rendering patients compliant in their cure? Is psychoanalysis a tool for nullifying political resistance? If so, Freud’s edict for the aim of psychoanalysis is now but an epitaph. It would be easy, then, to give up the ghost, to let psychoanalysis go. But why should psychoanalysis retreat from collective symptoms back into the consulting room for individual treatment—away from strikes, riots, and uprisings, and toward complacency and normativity, if not quite literally marriage and babies? Why should the clinic not dare to be in and of the world?

Feeling restless. Hunger tactics. Laughing in the face of fascism. Breaking through. Diagnosing revolution. Madness in the Maghreb. Essays by Fady Joudah, Jamieson Webster, Dylan Saba, Yasmin El-Rifae, Ussama Makdisi, Mary Turfah, Hannah Proctor, and more.

In Memory of Joshua Clover (1962-2025).

"Dolto’s Dominique is the only case I’ve found that rivals Freud, and brings us up to date, replete with questions of incestuous trauma, repressed sexualities, autism and cognitive disability, and a profound sense for the contradictions of polite society and histories of colonial and racist violence. I love this child and encountering Dolto’s otherworldly voice as an analyst." — Jamieson Webster

While the child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto stands alongside Jacques Lacan as a leading light of the Other French School, she has been little translated and remains curiously unknown in the English-speaking world. First published in 1971, Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent is frank and close to the clinical experience. A masterpiece of the genre, it is at once a granular psychological portrait of a troubled adolescent and his familial inheritance, and a historical case study, set in the France of the 1960s, of the of the relationship between subjectivity, nationality, and time and space.

With a foreword by Michael Ryzner-Basiewicz

Translated by Ivan Kats, revised by Lionel and Sharmini Bailly

Cover image by Mike Kelley, Untitled 1975

Françoise Dolto (born 6 November 1908, Paris) was a psychoanalyst and paediatrician. Alongside private practice at her home, where she saw adults and children, Dolto practised in four institutions where she saw only children patients: the Polyclinique Ney, the Centre Claude Bernard, the Hôpital Trousseau and the Centre Etienne Marcel. From 1967 to 1969, Dolto answered adult and child listeners of the French radio station Europe No. 1, live and anonymously under the name ‘Docteur X’. The programme enjoyed excellent ratings, but Dolto found dialogue to be hindered by the demands of live broadcasting and advertising. In 1976, she agreed to return to radio with Lorsque l’enfant paraît on France Inter, on the condition that she replied to listeners’ letters, which enabled her to go into depth. The programme was a huge success, and would make her a household name. In 1978 Dolto retired as an adult psychoanalyst: her fame had become such that it distorted the therapeutic relationship with patients. She now devoted herself to prevention, training of young analysts, group and individual supervision, publications, conferences and radio and television broadcasts. She also continued her work with children in the care of the Aide Sociale à l’Enfance, some of whom she received at her home until the end of her life. In 1979, along with a small team, she founded the Maison Verte, a place for early-years socialisation welcoming children from ages zero to four along with their caregivers, for sessions of play and talk. This model spread throughout France and Europe, to Russia, Armenia and Latin America. Dolto is the author of more than a dozen books, and several essays, interviews and seminars. In English, her books have been translated as Psychoanalysis and Pediatrics (Routeledge, 2013) and The Unconscious Body Image (Routledge, 2022). Françoise Dolto died on 25 August 1988 in Paris.

Never does the patient seem more ill than when they try to order associations into a logical tale. Classical analysis sees this in terms of a repudiation of sexuality: an attempt to avoid speaking from a place of desire. But why should psychoanalysis reduce everything to sex? If sex only ever achieves partial satisfactions, fragments of pleasure, its pursuit creates our subjectivity and our world.

Disorganisation & Sex argues that the sexuality of psychoanalysis is not a reductive biologism, but an archaic remainder that cannot be colonised, endlessly disorienting meaning in our everyday lives. It is our proximity to this terrain that undoes our most tedious habits, and opens onto something revelatory.

La nouvelle catastrophe subie par le peuple palestinien est pire que la Nakba de 1948. C'est le premier génocide perpétré par un État industriel avancé depuis 1945, avec la participation des États-Unis et la soutien de l'Occident, France incluse. Chercheur franco-libanais spécialiste du Moyen-Orient, auteur de nombreux ouvrages traduit en vingt langues et contributeur régulier au Monde diplomatique, Gilbert Achcar dévoile le processus historique qui a mené à ce génocide et mène une réflexion rigoureuse et documentée sur ses conséquences pour le peuple palestinien, les peuples de la région et pour l'ensemble des relations internationales.

Born in Korea, raised in the American South, and trying her best to survive British academia, SJ Kim probes her experiences as a writer, scholar, and daughter to confront the silences she finds in the world. With curiosity and sensitivity, she writes letters to the institutions that simultaneously support and fail her, intimate accounts of immigration, and interrogations of rising anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. She considers the silences between generations―especially within the Asian diaspora in the West―as she finds her way back to her own family during the pandemic lockdown. Embracing the possibilities and impossibilities of language, Kim rejoices in the similes of Korean, her mother tongue, and draws inspiration from K-dramas and writers who sustain her, including Yusef Komunyakaa, Don Mee Choi, Toni Morrison, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

The first complete translation of Egon Erwin Kisch's Karl Marx in Karlsbad. Originally written in 1946, this book recounts Marx's visits to the spa town of Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary in Czechia) in 1874, 1875 and 1876.

Karl Marx spent three consecutive summers in the spa town of Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic) in 1874, 1875 and 1876. Egon Erwin Kisch's 1946 text Karl Marx in Karlsbad reconstructs these three stays.

When Marx arrived in Karlsbad to take the waters for the first time, he was suffering, tired, tense, overworked and overly nervous, in other words, he was burnout. Years of political and theoretical work under agonising hardship and constant oppression had left Marx with pleurisy, inflammation of the lungs, inflammation of the nerves in his head, a carbuncle, a lung abscess and sciatica. Marx's recovery in Karlsbad, surrounded by princes, ministers, aristocrats, chamber singers, adventurers, spies, and courtesans, is a story full of amusing anecdotes and surprises. 

E.E. Kisch, described by Anna Seghers as a "detective," investigated this lesser known period of Marx's life and resolved some mysteries of international importance.

For the first time fully translated, the essay is introduced by its editor, Sezgin Boynik, presenting Kisch within the context of interwar leftist avant-garde internationalism. The afterword by Sam Dolbear and Hannah Proctor revisits the emotional life of Marx and his daughter Eleonor during their visits to Karlsbad, without insulating them from the forces of history. Dolbear and Proctor are both writers and researchers, who have previously worked together on an essay on revolutionary childhood, as co-editors of a series of pamphlets on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, and on dreams, sleep, work, puppets, play, and proletarian children's theatre.

Designed by Ott Kagovere, the book features etchings and photographs of Karlsbad from the 19th century, as well as a colour reproduction of Christian Schad's portrait of Kisch with tattoos.

Egon Erwin Kisch (1885-1948) was an Austro-Hungarian and Czechoslovak writer and journalist, who wrote in German.

Foreword by Sezgin Boynik; afterword by Sam Dolbear and Hannah Proctor.

The cultural and political legacies of the the 1933 and 1934 Arab Exhibitions in Jerusalem.

Resurgent Nahda examines the 1933 and 1934 Arab Exhibitions in Mandate Jerusalem, highlighting the city's role in asserting a regional Arab Nahda and fostering economic, cultural, and artistic exchange amid post-WWI geopolitical fragmentation.

The book emerges from Nadi Abusaada's seven years of research, including an award-winning 2019 essay in the Jerusalem Quarterly and two exhibitions he curated at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah (2022–2023) and Darat al-Funun in Amman (2024). Featuring six essays, an interview, and primary materials—archival documents, crafts, and artworks—the book explores Jerusalem's connections with Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut, tracing the journeys of artists, craftspeople, architects, and journalists who shaped this pivotal chapter in modern Arab history.

Nadi Abusaada is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut. His work focuses on the material histories and visual cultures of the modern Arab world. He holds a PhD in architecture from the University of Cambridge. He has also held various academic fellowships including the ETH Zürich Postdoctoral Fellowship at ETH Zürich and the Aga Khan Postdoctoral Fellowship in Islamic Architecture at MIT. Besides his writings, Nadi Abusaada has also been involved in research-based curatorial work. He has curated and participated in a number of exhibitions around the world including in Ramallah, Amman, Zurich, Venice, Dubai, and Montreal.

Edited by Nadi Abusaada.
Texts by Nadi Abusaada, Nisa Ari, Wesam Al Asali, Samira Badran, Nadine Nour el Din, Kirsten Scheid, Sary Zananiri.