Pearls from Their Mouth

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.

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.

Across multiple worlds in upheaval, a curious cast of Black queer characters must choose between what they already know themselves to be and what they might yet become in the cataclysm. A shapeshifter learns to embrace their body as it changes through a lunar cycle. A stranger’s visit disturbs three sisters sheltering from monsters that stalk the land. An archivist hears an irresistible call to the rising ocean as she uncovers a surprising history. A mysterious fire sparks whispers of revolution in the mind of a vampire’s captive consort.

At once tender and audacious, Nathan Alexander Moore’s debut collection tells the stories of extraordinary creatures making impossible but human decisions. Traversing apocalypses both big and small, these captivating tales vibrate with the tensions between loss and growth; self and community; precarity and possibility.

Nathan Alexander Moore is a Black transfemme writer. She is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder whose research explores Black transfemininity, speculative fictions and temporality. Their debut chapbook, small colossus, was published in 2021, and their fiction was shortlisted for the 2022 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. She was a 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow in poetry.

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.

Twenty years after she first chanted in Tahrir, Hanan’s son is living under military rule in Egypt. Though he is both a disciple of the national Sufi institute and a swimmer representing the Armed Forces, proximity to power cannot undo his revolutionary birthright: like his mother and grandmother before him, Shahed is an undercover rebel.

When a general arrives at the Sufi institute looking for help with a military assignment, Shahed accepts, all while concealing his own plans for resistance. The mission takes him behind the walls of a prison town, inside a secret army barracks in the Sinai desert, and deep into the murky waters of the past.

As he wades through his mother’s repressed memories and the state’s repressed histories, Shahed grapples with the traumas of the revolution and the weight of authoritarian rule, searching for new ways to revolt for freedom.

Mohamed Tonsy is a queer Egyptian writer and ceramicist. Formerly an architect and a triathlete representing the Egyptian Triathlon Federation, he completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. His writing has appeared in Mizna and Epoch Press and was shortlisted in MFest’s 2021 Short Story Competition. You Must Believe in Spring is his first book.

Religion, love and revolution collide in this swashbuckling saga of Risorgimento Italy. 

Set in Italy during the Risorgimento, The Gadfly is a thrilling tale of betrayal and revolution. It follows the adventures and misadventures of a mysterious satirist, a hardworking lady radical and a Catholic cardinal with a dark secret. Published in 1897 by Irish writer Ethel Lilian Voynich (or ELV, as she preferred to be known), The Gadfly sold millions of copies in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, though it has been largely forgotten in the English-speaking world—until now. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll smuggle guns over the border and, if you're anything like the Gadfly, you'll do it all with incomparable style. Mandylion Press' second run of The Gadfly includes a new preface by Mandylion cofounder Madeline Porsella and a visual glossary illustrating the world of the novel.

Ethel Lilian (Boole) Voynich (1864–1960) was born in Cork, Ireland, and raised in Lancashire, England. Her peripatetic adult life was defined by passions for music and leftist politics. In 1902, she married Wilifrid Michael Voynich, a Polish revolutionary and antiquarian book dealer. She spent her final decades in New York City, where she worked in a music school and as a translator of Russian, Polish and French texts.

Edited by Mabel Capability Taylor, Madeline Porsella. Introduction by Madeline Porsella.

Sarahland est un ouvrage de fiction américain contemporain qui se découpe en dix nouvelles, toutes reliées par les personnages de Sarahs et leurs parcours initiatiques à la fin de l’adolescence. Sam Cohen, autrice queer et juive, déploie un univers drôle et piquant autour des notions d’identité, de transition, de transformation, d’émancipation et d’apprentissage. Au fil d’histoires inventives, l’autrice explore la manière dont les narratifs qui nous sont assignés, les récits traditionnels, les identités qui nous pré-existent, sont dépassables. Elle construit alors avec ses personnages — presque toutes prénommées Sarah — de nouvelles histoires pour leurs passés ou leurs futurs, de nouvelles façon d’aimer la terre et ceux qui la peuplent, de nouvelles possibilités de vie en soi. Dans le refus pour chaque Sarah d’adhérer à un récit unique et uniformisant, l’autrice propose un lieu potentiellement meilleur pour nous toustes, un espace narratif qui n’exige aucune fixation de soi, aucune injonction consumériste, aucun compromis corporel: un lieu appelé Sarahland.

Née à Detroit aux États-unis, Sam Cohen vit et travaille actuellement à Los Angeles. Elle est une autrice de fiction dont les romans explorent des thèmes à l’intersection du féminisme, des études queers, et des pensées juives. Après avoir publié dans différentes anthologies et revues littéraires (Queer Flora, Fauna, and Funga, Weird Sister Collection, etc.), elle publie en 2021 Sarahland, un recueil de nouvelles. Elle enseigne l’écriture à l’université en tant que professeur d’écriture créative. Elle a été nommée et à gagné à de nombreux prix littéraires, notamment le ALMA Award (Best Jewish Story Collection of 2021), le Jewish Women’s Archive Book List, le Golden Poppy Award in Fiction (finaliste) ou encore le Chautauqua Janus Prize. Elle est en cours d’écriture de son prochain livre.

Featuring Zoe Leonard, Eileen Myles, Jimmy DeSana, Princess Julia, Olivia Laing, Simon Costin, Timothy Thornton, Mary Manning and many more. Published 2020.