One Thing I Know

Pati Hill's cult novel, available for the first time since 1976.

Impossible Dreams was Pati Hill's last published novel, released in 1976 after it was partially published two years earlier in the Carolina Quarterly under the title "An Angry French Housewife." Hill tells the story of Geneviève, a middle-aged woman whose life is turned upside down when she unexpectedly falls in love with her neighbor, Dolly. Mixing anecdotes with existential thoughts, the novel describes the gradual disruption of the heroine's daily life. Almost every chapter (the length of which varies from a single sentence to no more than three pages) is accompanied by a xerograph of a photograph, selected by Hill with permission from its maker. The resulting combination of text and image constitutes her most ambitious attempt to produce a work in which "the two elements fuse to become something other than either."

This novel is also one of the most incisive examples of Hill's writing—dry and impartial, yet managing to capture the contradictory feelings of her characters. In a letter addressed to the photographer Eva Rubinstein asking for reproduction rights, she writes: "My book is about a woman with a little girl and a husband who falls in love with a woman and a little girl and a husband and loses them all, just like in your mirror. It doesn't sound very cheerful but it is mainly funny."

Daisy, an independent publishing house, releases a facsimile of the out-of-print work that, after almost 50 years since its initial publication, has become a coveted collector's item.

"Impossible Dreams charmed me with its droll and irreverent tone when it was first published. Hill's use of embedded photographs was unexpected and transgressive for its me. Brilliant!"
Anne Turyn, photographer, educator and founding editor, Top Stories

Pati Hill (1921, Ashland, Kentucky – 2014, Sens, France) left behind a litterary and artistic output spanning roughly 60 years . After a short but dazzling career as a model, between 1951 and 1962 she wrote a dozen short stories—several of which were published in George Plimpton's prestigious literary journal, The Paris Review—and five books which earned her real critical recognition. Hill published One Thing I Know in 1962 after giving birth to her first and only daughter. She was then forty-one years old, and would later claim to have decided at that time to "stop writing in favour of housekeeping.''

Edited by Ana Baliza and Baptiste Pinteaux.

The prequel to Love Me Tender, narrating Debré's transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian and writer.

I see all her beauty, I see the beauty of women. I see my own body, new. I tell myself there are so many things that are possible.

First published in France in 2018, Playboy is the first volume of Constance Debré's renowned autobiographical trilogy that describes her decision, at age forty-three, to abandon her marriage, her legal career, and her bourgeois Parisian life to become a lesbian and a writer.

The novel unfolds in a series of short, sharp vignettes. The narrator's descriptions of her first female lovers—a married woman fifteen years older than her, a model ten years her junior—are punctuated by encounters with her ex-husband, her father, and her son.

As Debré recently told Granta: “It was a bit like Saint Augustine and his conversion. In the same week, I had sex with a girl and I had the feeling that I could write. I had this incredible feeling that I could catch things, that life was there to be caught.”

Looking at the world through fresh eyes, the narrator of Playboy questions everything that once lay beneath the surface of her well-managed life. Laconic, aggressive, and radically truthful, she examines gender and marriage, selfishness and sacrifice, money and family, even the privilege inherent in her downward mobility.

Writing her way toward her own liberation, Debré chronicles the process that made her one of the most brilliant, important French writers today.

Variations is the debut short story collection from one of Britain’s most compelling voices, Juliet Jacques. Using fiction inspired by found material and real-life events, Variations explores the history of transgender Britain with lyrical, acerbic wit. 

Variations travels from Oscar Wilde’s London to austerity-era Belfast via inter-war Cardiff, a drag bar in Liverpool just after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, Manchester’s protests against Clause 28, and Brighton in the 2000s. Through diary entries of an illicit love affair, an oral history of a contemporary political collective; a 1920s academic paper to a 1990s film script; a 1950s memoir to a series of 2014 blog posts, Jacques rewrites and reinvigorates a history so often relegated to stale police records and sensationalist news headlines.

Innovative and fresh, Variations is a bold and beautiful book of stories unheard; until now.

By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world's governments. In the 2050s, the insurrections reached the nerve center of global capitalism—New York City. This book, a collection of interviews with the people who made the revolution, was published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune, a radically new social order forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse.

Here is the insurrection in the words of the people who made it, a cast as diverse as the city itself. Nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes recall the collapse of life as they knew it and the emergence of a collective alternative. Their stories, delivered in deeply human fashion, together outline how ordinary people's efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world.

Part prose poem, part reflection on the relations between writing and place, Lagoon tells the story of the slow undoing of an idyll. In it the narrator walks for hours during long summer nights, gazing through the windows that line the streets. In between, she reflects on how she might write about the shifting space of the lagoon, where she spent summer holidays with her family years ago. In adolescence, the narrator watches quietly as her mother, father and sister go about building their holiday home. But she can sense something is awry, she just does not fully understand what.

Lagoon is the first novella by McCulloch.

Lagoon by Samantha McCulloch is the first title in Kunstverein Amsterdam's new imprint called First Drafts, which, inspired by artist and publisher Anne Turyn, celebrates experimental and commercially unviable work by publishing completed manuscripts that haven’t yet found a home in their first draft form. Importantly, each title is also the first attempt by the author to write in that particular form, or, to write at all.

The devastating final work by Brazil’s greatest modern writer, The Hour of the Star tells the haunting tale of Macabéa—a typist who lives in the slums of Rio—underfed, sickly, and unloved, yet inwardly free.

Translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser. With a contribution by Paulo Gurgel and Valente Colm Tóibín.

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.