On Figure/s. Drawing After Bellmer

I travel far across the city, cut it knowingly, concealing behind me the entrances to tunnels, altering the signage. I traverse the grimiest bowels, skirt the farthest wettest edges like a silverfish active only in the hallucinatory hours, to avoid becoming known, to avoid any collusion between my body and theirs, its. 

Under the neon sky of a sick city, which might be London, a nameless governess oscillates between lucidity and dissociation, solitude and communication, wage labour and escape attempts. A wild and unreliable narrator-without-character—ardent, delirious, complicit, vengeful, and paranoid—she embodies a perverse and chaotic resistance. Simultaneously demonic and angelic, both maniacal and generous in her fury, accidentally elegant, tongue tied and barbed, she veers towards defiance as devotion. An anti-Bildungsroman in the collapsing first person, Yes, I Am A Destroyer is an unbecoming record of memory and forgetting, of a relentless undoing. 

‘Any girl who learns how to read is already a lost girl, wrote the infamous confessionalist Rousseau. But if that lost girl, with insatiable pronoun, bastard spawn perhaps of the exiled Genevan, palmed a pen and confessed—how would that read? What can she know? With relentless intelligence and urgent prosody, Mira Mattar shows us. She invents a narrator in the raging anti-tradition of Violette Leduc and Albertine Sarrazin, leaps beyond the cloying contract of capital with the feminine, of intimacy with violence, to animate a lush document of the refusal of subjection. Much like the young Jean-Jacques, she’s a tutor underpaid for her sensitivity. She is, like him, a thief of small things, a sponge for the edifying comportments of the employing class. What she makes of her servitude—a fabulously grotesque encyclopedia of sensing—is dedicated to female anger. Scrubbing, washing, chewing, frigging, barfing, stealing, moisturising, shitting: every surface, every gesture, is appropriated to her bodily resistance.  ‘Live anyway’ is her stoic motto. This glorious tract ends with a call for the anarchical vigour of the animal body we share. Read it and flourish. You will perhaps be invoiced.’ 
–> Lisa Robertson 

Mira Mattar writes fiction and poetry. She is an independent researcher, editor, and tutor. A Palestinian/Jordanian born in the suburbs of London, she continues to live and work there. She has read and published her work widely. Yes, I Am A Destroyer is her first book.

Sore is a serial anthology that brings together authors whose writing practices oscillate between the genres of diary keeping and fiction. For the second issue of Sore, ten contributors – both authors and visual artists – were invited to collectively develop their work through a series of informal critiques over the course of five months.

With contributions by Adriana Lasheras Mabanta, Billy Morgan, Damien Troadec, Kate Tyndall, Kea Bolenz, Inka Hilsenbek, Milo Christie, Louis Mason

A collection of twenty-six abécédaire missives by Sharon Kivland, written and sent daily to the editors (MS & AWL) between Friday 7 February and Tuesday 4 March 2025. Interjected with melancholic ‘Mes horizons’ postcard erasures and an insert of abcedminded replies by Matthew Stuart titled ‘A Letter Always Suggests a Word’, this publication is both a standalone edition and precursor to BFTK#8, which focuses on letters (alphabets) and letters (correspondence). 

‘These are Addressed to You’ addresses what it means to be addressed and to address, to write with love and scorn, to seal with a kiss and conceal impressions and hair within a letter’s folds, to inscribe with ink and thread, to speak with and to those we admire. Drawing on / from Freud and Lacan, Joyce and Carringdon, Camille Corot and many more, these letters are about writing and reading, about language falling and bumping you on the head.

The straplines of a number of advertisements drawn from magazines of the 1950s are turned into drawings, as though a particularly vain and narcissistic woman speaks (as of course she does), She is ‘en pleine forme’ of her beauty. (2016).

Composé à la fois de récits personnels, de citations et de collages provenant notamment du New York Times, New York Temps suggère une discontinuité des états intérieurs, accentuée par la multiplicité des orateur.ices : les voix se succèdent à elles-mêmes, sont à chaque moment ce qu’elles n’étaient pas celui d’avant, apprenantes et à l’écoute de tout ce qui n’est pas elles. À travers des questions d’intertextualité et de sampling en poésie, le texte porte en lui une violence immanente – rendue plus intérieure, faite sienne –, une gêne, non seulement ressentie, mais aussi imposée, comme une protestation.

Titre original : NYT. Publié pour la première fois chez Gauss PDF en 2018. Traduit de l’anglais par Salomé Burstein.

Aurelia Guo est écrivaine et chercheuse à Londres. Elle est également l’autrice de World of Interiors (Divided Publishing, 2022).

This light, pocketbook format publication by After 8 Books gathers works by French artist Julie Beaufils, and three short stories commissioned for the occasion, dealing altogether with social tensions and emotional explosions.

The ink drawings by Julie Beaufils that form the core of the book, follow a logic of editing, accumulation and narrative incompleteness: the figures come from memories of films or TV series, as sediments of mass culture, or sometimes from personal observations and experiences crystallized in images. Shapes and figures develop as an ambivalent collection, informed by the weight and the vibration of lines and strokes.

This book aims at triggering the interpretation of these works, and at making their “reading” more complex, more playful too. Graphic designer Scott Ponik composed a visual story close to a manga, part abstraction, part emotion. The narrative and affective potential of the drawings is further activated by their free association with three short stories by Michael Van den Abeele, Buck Ellison, and Reba Maybury. Van den Abeele tells about the inner thoughts of a donor at the sperm bank; Buck Ellison’s story follows a few hours in the life of some girls in the San Francisco area, dealing with the cruelty and the naïvety of their relationships; while Reba Maybury proposes an erotic analysis of the connection between desire and capitalism.

The book Taalbarrière brings together reproductions of a drawing's series linked to an audio creation about the border and the language barrier in Belgium through the eyes of secondary school pupils who are learning the language of the other community, French or Dutch.

An exploration of the Witch, as radical archetype, in ancient and contemporary life. 

An adult woman haunted by her childhood muses on the foster system, institutions, and the medieval tale of a girl given to a witch. A genderqueer Brooklynite learns of their past life as a murdered sorceress. An uptight participant at a Northern California witch camp finds community in the kitchen. A professor uses magic to help students under attack by right-wing politicians.

In this collection of manifesto, poetry, playscripts, and prose, the archetype of the Witch is honored and unpacked, poked and prodded, owned and othered. From work centered in antiquity to writing which illustrates how primordial occult energies continue to enliven our world today, WITCH: Anthology lays bare a wilderness of myth, magic, trickery, and power swarming beneath the surface of contemporary life.

With work from CAConrad, Edgar Fabián Frías, Amanda Yates Garcia, Ashley Ray, Brooke Palmieri, Yumi Sakugawa, Kai Cheng Thom, Ariel Gore, Myriam Gurba, Fariha Róisín, and many others.