Querelle

Written with lyrical fire in a chorus of vividly rendered voices, Dionne Brand's second novel is an epic of the African diaspora across the globe.

It begins in 1824 on Trinidad, where Marie-Ursule, queen of a secret slave society called the Sans Peur Regiment, plots a mass suicide. The end of the Sans Peur is also the beginning of a new world, for Marie-Ursule cannot kill her young daughter, Bola, who escapes to live free and bear a dynasty of descendants who spill out across the Caribbean, North America, and Europe.

Haunted by a legacy of passion and oppression, the children of Bola pass through two world wars and into the confusion, estrangement, and violence of the late twentieth century.

"[Brand has] a lush and exuberant style that may put some readers in mind of Toni Morrison or Edwidge Danticat." — William Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review

Originally published in 1988, Empire of the Senseless marked a turning point in Acker's wild, inimitable style. Considered one of her more accessible works, here Acker candidly addresses her lifelong obsessions: childhood and trauma, language and sexuality, criminality and corruption, oppression and rebellion.

Abhor (part human, part robot) and her lover Thivai (a pirate) traverse Paris in a dystopian future, in search of a mysterious drug that Thivai needs in order to maintain his ability to love. Navigating the chaotic city, they encounter mad doctors, prisoners, bikers, sailors, tattooists, terrorists, and prostitutes, while a band of Algerian revolutionaries take over, and the C.I.A. plots to thwart them all.

Sexually explicit, graphically violent, Empire of the Senseless resists the desensitizing of cultural consciousness and the disintegration of interpersonal communication. A timeless, prescient parable, it speaks profoundly to our social and political history as well as our present reality.

In this characteristically sexy, daring, and hyperliterate novel, Kathy Acker interweaves the stories of three characters who share the same tragic flaw: a predilection for doomed, obsessive love. Rimbaud, the delinquent symbolist prodigy, is deserted by his lover Verlaine time and time again. Airplane takes a job dancing at Fun City, the seventh tier of the sex industry, in order to support her good-for-nothing boyfriend. And Capitol feels alive only when she's having sex with her brother, Quentin. In Memoriam to Identity is at once a revelatory addition to, and an irreverent critique of, the literature of decadence and self-destruction.

A masterpiece of surrealist fiction, steeped in controversy upon its first publication in 1984, Blood and Guts in High School is the book that established Kathy Acker as the preeminent voice of post-punk feminism. With 2017 marking the 70th anniversary of her birth, as well as the 10th year since her death this transgressive work of philosophical, political, and sexual insight—with a new introduction by Chris Kraus—continues to become more relevant than ever before.

In the Mexican city of Merida, ten-year-old Janey lives with Johnny—her "boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father"—until he leaves her for another woman. Bereft, Janey travels to New York City, plunging into an underworld of gangs and prostitution. After escaping imprisonment, she flees to Tangiers where she meets Jean Genet, and they begin a torrid affair that will lead Janey to her demise. Fantastical, sensual, and fearlessly radical, this hallucinatory collage is both a comic and tragic portrait of erotic awakening.

Starting in 1970, Jean Genet—petty thief, prostitute, modernist master—spent two years in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Always an outcast himself, Genet was drawn to this displaced people, an attraction that was to prove as complicated for him as it was enduring. Prisoner of Love, written some ten years later, when many of the men Genet had known had been killed, and he himself was dying, is a beautifully observed description of that time and those men as well as a reaffirmation of the author’s commitment not only to the Palestinian revolution but to rebellion itself. For Genet’s most overtly political book is also his most personal—the last step in the unrepentantly sacrilegious pilgrimage first recorded in The Thief’s Journal, and a searching meditation, packed with visions, ruses, and contradictions, on such life-and-death issues as the politics of the image and the seductive and treacherous character of identity. Genet’s final masterpiece is a lyrical and philosophical voyage to the bloody intersection of oppression, terror, and desire at the heart of the contemporary world.

Contributors to Starship № 20:

Rosa Aiello, Terry Atkinson, Tenzing Barshee, Gerry Bibby, Mercedes Bunz, David Bussel, Jay Chung, Eric D. Clark, Caleb Considine, Hans-Christian Dany, Albert Dichy, Nikola Dietrich, Martin Ebner, Ruth Angel Edwards, Stephanie Fezer, Jean Genet, Simone Gilges, Julian Göthe, Michèle Graf, Selina Grüter, Ulrich Heinke, Toni Hildebrandt, Beatrice Hilke, Karl Holmqvist, Stephan Janitzky, G. Peter Jemison, Charlotte Johannesson, Julia Jost, Julia Jung, Jakob Kolding, Nina Könnemann, Lars Bang Larsen, Anita Leisz, Norman Lewis, Elisa R. Linn, Sebastian Lütgert, Vera Lutz, Chloée Maugile, Robert McKenzie, Ariane Müller, Christopher Müller, Robert M. Ochshorn, Henrik Olesen, Kari Rittenbach, Nina Rhode, Ulla Rossek, Cameron Rowland, Mark von Schlegell, Ryan Siegan Smith, Philipp Simon, Valerie Stahl Stromberg, Josef Strau, Vera Tollmann, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Camilla Wills, Amelie von Wulffen and Florian Zeyfang.

"This is the 20th issue of Starship and we are proud and very happy to present it, and mainly want to thank all the artists, the contributors, the columnists, and the people who helped us gather images of exhibitions past, and gave us texts from books not yet published. Starship never starts with a clear concept about its future content, or what could be called a theme, but always with a sort of attentive interest. The theme may develop through its columnists—we now think it is easy to distinguish lines of thoughts, images, and texts answering each other. But it surely does so out of this editorial interest that wanders, and finds, and collects, is enthusiastic about artworks, and texts, and people, and then, well, brings this all together in a magazine. This was our working mode during the past year, and the responsiveness of those who regularly write for Starship (the columnists) has shown us that out there others are involved in thoughts that run very much in parallel. It is a strange form, a magazine like this, not getting funded, appearing irregularly, but still following a sort of conventional form that shows its consistency. It is at its core an excess of producing something that might prove itself valuable and liberating in the future."
—Ariane Müller, Henrik Olesen

A reclusive graduate student is forced into a friendship that destabilizes her life in this surreal, allegorical romance. 

In a famed but crumbling university city overrun by nature, where power is held in a fragile balance between academics and a contingent of rogue gardeners, the reclusive narrator of The Vivisectors spends her days propping up the career of her needy and fraudulent professor boss. Then a controversy ruptures her careful routine: Adam, a contrarian student and an obsession of the boss, comes into heated conflict with a young professor, with both men claiming discrimination. The crisis subsumes the university, though the narrator is unmoved—not even the attempted suicide of her estranged mother has been enough to dispel her lack of engagement with the world. But when her boss commands her to befriend Adam, the narrator finds herself both caught up in the events threatening to tear the city apart and increasingly drawn to the alluring student at the heart of it all. 

Coursing with icy suspense and told with violent precision, The Vivisectors is a new kind of love story for an age of deteriorated communication. With the unsparing style and intellectual ambition that made her award-winning debut The Doloriad a celebrated provocation, Missouri Williams holds a mirror up to humanity’s most intimate contradictions and reflects them back through a novel of profound, spiky spiritual reckoning.

The story of a meeting between a woman and a man linked by music for one night, in a nuptial dance of bodies and words doomed to failure: an ode to desire by the Franco-Moroccan poetess.

Rim Battal (born 1987 in Casablanca, lives and works between Paris and Rabat since 2012) is a French artist and poet.

Edited by Yasmina Naji.
Translated into Arabic by Abdelilah Khattabi.

D’eux, il ne reste que les mots de celle qui a croisé leur route. Le crissement de pneus qui sifflent avant un malheur qui tarde à se produire. Sanctification plus que célébration, Oraison funèbre pour Zelda1990 est une tentative de communication au-delà de la matière physique de l’énonciation, un dialogue interne qui convoque « par moment le frère, par moment l’ami parti », toujours la ruine, la consommation de la séparation avec le tout. À travers quatre parties qui font écho à la structure des éloges funèbres de la Grèce antique, Romane Constant réouvre la poésie des plaies larges et profondes que les vers lapidaires d’Hélène Bessette – sur qui l’autrice mène un travail de recherche – ont laissé dans l’histoire moderne de la littérature, et signe un texte bouleversant sur la difficulté des choses qui ne (se) passent pas, la force de celles que l’on voit suspendues par le cou au bord d’une paix impossible à trouver. Oraison funèbre pour Zelda1990 est une douleur croissante, avec écoulement et rougeur.

Romane Constant vit et travaille à Paris. Elle explore à travers différents supports les questions relationnelles, d’intimité, du corps et du genre. Attachée aux Ardennes où elle a grandi, elle s’intéresse également à l’héritage de la classe ouvrière et aux traumatismes intergénérationnels.

The Sense of Brown is José Esteban Muñoz's treatise on brownness and being as well as his most direct address to queer Latinx studies. In this book, which he was completing at the time of his death, Muñoz examines the work of playwrights Ricardo Bracho and Nilo Cruz, artists Nao Bustamante, Isaac Julien, and Tania Bruguera, and singer José Feliciano, among others, arguing for a sense of brownness that is not fixed within the racial and national contours of Latinidad.

This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what Muñoz calls the brown commons—a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, Muñoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being in the world.

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.