Paris, When It's Naked

Translated from the French by the author.

“From time to time, there occurs what suspends time, revelation—at least for certain people, martyrs. But then the apocalypse, revelation, is withdrawn, occulted by the ‘apocalypse,’ the surpassing disaster, so that symptomatically apocalypse’s primary sense (from Greek apokalypsis, from apokalyptein to uncover, from apo- + kalyptein to cover) is occulted by its secondary meaning, and martyr’s primary sense, witness, is occulted by its secondary, vulgar meaning: ‘a person who suffers greatly or is killed because of their political or religious beliefs’… While the Arab ‘apocalypse’ as surpassing disaster leads to a withdrawal of Arabic tradition, the apocalypse as revelation leads to Arabic tradition’s vertiginous extension.” — from the Foreword by Jalal Toufic

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She is a celebrated writer, essayist, and playwright, and is the author of more than twenty books in all these disciplines. Her work as a whole is a faithful record of the times and places she has lived in Beirut, Paris, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. At least eighteen works by Adnan have been published in English. They include Sitt Marie Rose (Post-Apollo Press, 1982); The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; Premonition (Kelsey Street Press, 2014); Surge (Nightboat Books, 2018); Time (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award; and Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020). In 2021, Litmus Press published a second edition of Journey to Mount Tamalpais (originally published by The Post-Apollo Press), which included nine new ink drawings by Adnan. Her paintings, described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as "stubbornly radiant abstractions," have been widely exhibited. Spanning media and genres, Adnan's writings have led to numerous collaborations with artists and musicians, including the French part of CIVIL warS, a multi-language opera by American stage director Robert Wilson, performed in Lyon and Bobigny in 1985.

Black Bedouin, by Mohammed Zenia and Tenaya Nasser is a book of the IMMEDIATE — written immediately (in the span of five days, very literally at the printing press at 1080PRESS) in response to the current genocide against, and in solidarity with, the people of Sudan and in the context of immediate echoes in Palestine, Congo, Pakistan, and more — and throughout it all imbued with the immediacy that the global situation demands of us and our moral consciences. Black Bedouin rings in the creative immediacy of New York School all-night-writing-to-mimeograph-next-day with the political immediacy of a this-is-happening-right-now Crass single or Etel Adnan's incomparable (but here spiritually correlated) The Arab Apocalypse. In other words, Black Bedouin hits every star in a very cool and specific constellation. — Dave Morse

Searing in its energies and mysterious in its icy depths, Love is Colder than the Lake is a tour-de-force of the experimental French poet Liliane Giraudon's power and range. 

Love is Colder than the Lake weaves together stories dreamed and experienced, fragments of autobiographical trauma, and scraps of political and sexual violence to create an alchemical and incantatory texture that is all Giraudon's own. In its feminist attention and allusive stylistic registers, Love is Colder than The Lake claims a unique position among contemporary French literature. The heroes (or anti-heroes) in this collection include Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lorine Niedecker, Emma Goldman, Chantal Akerman, the Marquis de Sade, and the unnamed lake itself. Giraudon's writing, editing, and visual work have been influential in France for decades, and English-speaking readers will thrill to this challenging, important voice.

Liliane Giraudon was born in Marseille in 1946. She continues to live and work in Marseille, and her writing is inseparable from the place, shaped by the vibrant community of poets and writers and artists Giraudon has herself shaped, as well as by the city's gritty and diverse cosmopolitanism. Giraudon's many books have, since 1982, been primarily published by France's P.O.L. editions. Giraudon has also been instrumental as an editor for influential reviews such as Banana Split, Action Poétique, and If. She performs and collaborates widely, including with Nanni Balastrini, Henri Delui, Jean-Jacques Viton, and many others. Two of her books ( Fur and Pallaksh, Pallaksh) were published in English by Sun & Moon Press in 1992 and 1994, respectively. She lives in Marseille, France.

Lindsay Turner is the author of the poetry collections Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018) and The Upstate (University of Chicago Press, 2023). She has twice received French Voices awards for her translations from the French, which include books of poetry and philosophy by Stéphane Bouquet, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Duforumantelle, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and others. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Sarah Riggs is a poet and multivalent artist. Her most recent book The Nerve Epistle appeared in 2021. Translation is one of her arts, for which she received a Griffin prize with Etel Adnan, and Best Translated Book Award, also for Adnan's Time (Nightboat, 2019). Riggs lives in Brooklyn, after many years in Paris. Author residence: Marseille, France.

Sitt Marie Rose is the story of a woman abducted by militiamen during the civil war in Lebanon. Already a classic of war literature, this extraordinary novel won the France-Pays Arabes award in Paris and has been translated into six languages. Sitt Marie Rose is part of Comparative Literature, World Literature, Women’s Studies and Middle East Studies curricula at more than thirty universities and colleges in the U.S.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She is a celebrated writer, essayist, and playwright, and is the author of more than twenty books in all these disciplines. Her work as a whole is a faithful record of the times and places she has lived in Beirut, Paris, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. At least eighteen works by Adnan have been published in English. They include Sitt Marie Rose (Post-Apollo Press, 1982); The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; Premonition (Kelsey Street Press, 2014); Surge (Nightboat Books, 2018); Time (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award; and Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020). In 2021, Litmus Press published a second edition of Journey to Mount Tamalpais (originally published by The Post-Apollo Press), which included nine new ink drawings by Adnan. Her paintings, described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as "stubbornly radiant abstractions," have been widely exhibited. Spanning media and genres, Adnan's writings have led to numerous collaborations with artists and musicians, including the French part of CIVIL warS, a multi-language opera by American stage director Robert Wilson, performed in Lyon and Bobigny in 1985. In 2014 she was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France's highest cultural honor, by the French Government. She died in Paris, in 2021.

Georgina Kleege is an internationally known writer and disability studies scholar. Her collection of personal essays, Sight Unseen (1999) is a classic in the field of disability studies. Kleege’s latest book, More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art (2018) is concerned with blindness and visual art. Kleege joined the English department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 where in addition to teaching creative writing classes she teaches courses on representations of disability in literature, and disability memoir. Kleege is also the author of Home for the Summer (The Post-Apollo Press, 1989).

Oracular Transmissions weaves together three of the most recent collaborative projects Etel Adnan and Lynn Marie Kirby have completed through processes of exchange and translation: Back, Back Again to Paris (2013), The Alhambra (2016), and Transmissions (2017). 

The book also includes poems by Denise Newman, a friend to both Adnan and Kirby, and an introduction by Kadist Foundation curator Jordan Stein presenting their works and performances.

Utterly magnetic, Summer Farah’s debut poetry collection The Hungering Years is a rush of breathless song, voicing confessions so often left unsung amidst personal and collective crisis. “I am afraid of asking the right questions,” Farah admits. But through intimate conversations with fellow Arab-American writer and literary ancestor Etel Adnan, this work finds the courage to ask: What is art? An escape? A reflection? Another unhealthy attachment? Though the answers are elusive, what steps into the light is a collective of friends whose genuine care and companionship anchor these poems through their spiraling search. 

“I am always looking for Palestine, and yes, I am always looking for love,” these poems croon, holding so much of the world even as they trace an inheritance of displacement. The Hungering Years conjures startling landscapes where we may also experience what it is to be consumed by obsession, echoing with songs by Mitski, iconic scenes from Supernatural, and the sound of the Mediterranean Sea. But as Lena Khalaf Tuffaha writes in her introduction, Farah’s repetitions “are more than echo. They are a vernacular of this unspeakable era,” anchored in “questions that keep us reaching toward life,” and questions toward each other.

Building glass structures from her questions, Farah pushes their architecture almost to breaking. Then breaking, the spirit—luminous, actualized—reveals itself through the cracks. Through the landscapes of California, Palestine, and all of the distances in between, there emerges a new sense of devotion to what is possible which might thrust us, together, “off the edge, / in love, towards God.”

With an introduction by poet, essayist, and translator Lena Khalaf Tuffaha.

Summer Farah’s debut collection The Hungering Years bubbles with language, is desirous, sensitive, and hysterically (ferociously) human. “I” is I, is mother, is the guiding wisdom of Etel Adnan, is Palestine, is the work that writes Palestine into the future, is the epistolary thread of love that holds this daring young poet’s work together. “i am an enemy of dust i am an amalgamation of everyone i have ever loved …” writes Farah, enlisting us in this vital poetry against the death cult, lush with solidarity, teeming with the futurity we need. — Wendy Xu, author of The Past

What I most adore about Summer Farah's work, and what most comes alive in The Hungering Years is that there is no such thing as an unworthy affection, nothing unworthy of close and careful attention, nothing unworthy of being pressed up against the undeserving world and becoming something greater. This is a gift and a delight, and through that gift, these poems are richly and generously populated, and teeming with beauty. — Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year

Summer Farah's words ease me, compel me, motivate me. Her work is agile and brilliant, her mind potent and illustrious—like air, a song, rhythmic and concise. These poems move me to my core, rupturing something deep inside of me about place, Palestine and Etel Adnan. "I memorize no language/but their voices," she writes as I memorize her words again and again, uttering gratitude that I get to be alive and read Summer's words. This book is both a spell and an oracle. — Fariha Róisín, author of Survival Takes a Wild Imagination

My Dead Book is a novel composed of nonlinear vignettes and fragments about a queer man approaching his fiftieth birthday who is haunted by insomnia and his past. In the dead of night, he remembers his friends who died in the late 1980s and 1990s, his years as a teenage throwaway and sex worker, and ruminates on working class survival, queer aging, AIDS, and whether he has outlived his place in the world.

“What a blistering book—with My Dead Book, Nate Lippens has created something truly fucking great. It's as if the storied stars of Lou Reed's 'Walk on the Wild Side' overshot Manhattan and wound up in Wisconsin, broke and blue with cold and depressed beyond belief by the thought that this nowhere is now home. It's a bitter pill, but I love bitterness, and who doesn't love pills?”— Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot

“There’s no doubt to this book. You’d think that was a flaw but it’s been burned away. My Dead Book is not short though it is brief. It’s loving, bittersweet, and actually courageous because it tells a story that is slightly unbearable because it’s all secret, awful hard bad secrets and funny as hell. Nate’s balancing act works because the heart of it (this novel) is true even though it’s often heartless. It’s simple. He knows what things are worth. When you need the sea or a bird they’re there like they never were before.”
— Eileen Myles, author of Afterglow

On work and words, and how they contort the world.

Lena is a part-time bookseller in a bougie design studio in Oxford Circus. In between minimum-wage work under a politically hostile boss and strained communications with her parents, her days are shaped by a fraught relationship with food, ambiguous experiments in creative writing, and mounting pressure to find a ‘proper’ postgraduate job.

In taut, pocket-sized vignettes, COOP reveals a suffocating lattice of language that makes up a precarious London life. But as each word of her story unravels, Lena discovers interstices between them—to find autonomy and escape.

A novel about escape and connection, class, sex, and queer intimacy in the American Midwest. 

The oldest story: an insider pretends to be an outsider and receives praise for his empathy and imagination and intelligence. Maybe some asshole even says bravery. An outsider pretends to be an insider, is exposed as a fraud, a liar, and burned to the ground. 

In Ripcord, Nate Lippens continues his meditations on escape and connection, class, sex, and intimacy. Stuck in Milwaukee, the narrator cobbles together a living by bartending and catering weddings, enmeshed in a semiaffair with a younger, married man. Cruising apps while tallying his youthful romantic failures, he fantasizes about disappearance but finds both solace and frustration in his friendships with Charlie, an aging punk who was prominent in the 1990s Chicago queercore scene, and Greer, a painter who never broke through but continues making work.

A twisty thriller about the fate of a sprawling family in Lagos, Lakiriboto is a queer, feminist revenge thriller like no other, in which murder, betrayal, and witchcraft collide – with explosive results. 

When her grandmother dies in the night, Moremi’s fate falls to her uncle, the grasping family chief who sends her off to work as a housemaid in Lagos. On arriving there, Moremi finds that the big city is not all she thought it would be. But she’s not alone. After another family death, Kudirat, accused of bringing misfortune to her close family, has also been sent to live as a maid in the same house, scrubbing floors and folding laundry for long-suffering Tola, whose abusive doctor husband refuses to treat. Together, with the help of her queer aunt Morieba, the four women must wrestle back control of their lives as the patriarchal traditions that govern the family push back against their freedoms. When Tola’s condition worsens, someone new emerges, someone with revenge and redemption in mind. 

Mixing family saga, mobster pulp, and queer coming-of age, Lakiriboto is a staggeringly original and surprising novel about Nigeria’s queer and feminist communities, the struggles they face, and the lengths they will go to to overcome them. 

A raw and profound novel in verse about mental health, addiction, queerness and shame that explores ideas of hybridity and identity. 

Following their discharge from hospital, Mirrorstage follows its narrator on a road trip through the grey, liminal landscapes of modern Britain. As they pass graffitied bus shelters, construction sites and flooded motorways, factories and high-rises, the narrator’s internal and external journeys begin to converge, leading them down paths they have been trying to avoid: the mental illness and substance use that led them to the inpatient ward, the uneasy balance of their own gender identity, their troubled relationship with their estranged father, the perils and pleasures of the queer scene, and the shame that has haunted them throughout their life.

Woven around the psychoanalytic concept of its title, Mirrorstage is an experimental fable exploring the boundaries of selfhood and literary forms, told in fragments of prose and verse that are equal parts heartbreaking, sexy, and witty.