Revolutionary Letters

With a preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge and an introduction by Sara Ahmed.
Audre Lorde (1934-92) described herself as ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’. Born in New York, she had her first poem published while still at school and her last the year she died of cancer. Her extraordinary belief in the power of language – of speaking – to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent. This edition brings Lorde’s essential poetry, speeches and essays, including ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, together in one volume for the first time.

A woman replays her abandonment by her mother, who is sometimes addressed as a male mother-god. She is also abandoned by her lover, to whom she is in thrall. She tries repeatedly to make or receive phone calls with the beloved figures, without success. She waits for their letters and imagines their contents. In a dream-like, torrid sequence, suffering, fear, fatigue and imperfection are apostrophised. Forgetting is examined and toyed with from every angle. Mythical hybrid creatures are invoked: a snake-headed lion, wolf-snakes, a wolf-peacock. How did this come to be? In a cunningly, wittily wrought rush, the unique, unpredictable voice of the narrator speaks from multiple perspectives to express powerful anguish and, ultimately, catharsis.

‘Cixous reminds us that women have long spoken from a wound… To be is already to be abandoned, already to have lost, and still to love. To read Cixous is to tarry with this open wound, to hear how writing becomes testimony to its own possibility.’  Jamieson Webster

‘Language in Cixous’s hands is molten, constantly opening onto fresh possibilities.’  Maggie Nelson

‘With Hélène Cixous you must close your eyes and open your mouth. Wider. So open your throat opens. Your esophagus. Your lungs. Wider. So open your spine unclatters. Your hips swim loose. Your womb worlds itself. Wider. Open the well of your sex. Now speak your body from your other mouth. Yell corporeal prayer. This is writing.’  Lidia Yuknavitch

Foreword by Jamieson Webster

When Ursula K. Le Guin started writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map. The Word for World presents a selection of these images by the celebrated author, many of which have never been published before, to consider how her imaginary worlds enable us to re-envision our own.  

Le Guin’s maps offer journeys of consciousness beyond conventional cartography, from the Rorschach-like archipelagos of Earthsea to the talismanic maps of Always Coming Home. Rather than remaining within known terrain, they open up paradigms of knowledge, exemplified by the map’s edges and how a map is read, made and re-made, together. The Word for World brings her maps together with poems, stories, interviews, recipes and essays by contributors from a variety of perspectives to enquire into the relationship between worlds and how they are represented and imagined. 

Contributors: Federico Campagna, Theo Downes-Le Guin, Daniel Heath Justice, Bhanu Kapil, Canisia Lubrin, Una McCormack, David Naimon, Nisha Ramayya, Shoshone Collective, Standard Deviation, Marilyn Strathern. 

Co-published by Spiral House and AA Publications to coincide with an exhibition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s maps at the Architectural Association, London, opening on 10 October 2025.

”One of the literary greats of the 20th century.” Margaret Atwood

Human history is filled with unacceptable sounds: high-pitched voices, gossip, talkativeness, hysteria, wailing and ritual shouts. Who makes them? Those deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control: women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes all fall into this category. 

From the myths of antiquity to Margaret Thatcher via Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein, The Gender of Sound charts the gendering of sound in Western culture. Carson invites us to listen again, and in doing so to reimagine our conceptions of human order, virtue and selfhood.

Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.

Spells are poems; poetry is spelling.

Spell-poems take us into a realm where words can influence the universe.

Spells brings together over forty contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew.

Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Anthony V. Capildeo, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Paige Emery, Livia Franchini, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Precious Okoyomon, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Sarah Shin, Himali Singh Soin, Tai Shani, Rebecca Tamás, Bones Tan Jones, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh, Flora Yin Wong

Introduced by So Mayer
Afterword by Sarah Shin

First published in 1994, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe is one of the most provocative, poignant, and inventive American novels of the last quarter century.

The book tells two stories of romantic obsession. One, based on the first autobiography in English, the medieval Book of Margery Kempe, is about a fifteenth-century woman from East Anglia, a visionary, a troublemaker, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and an aspiring saint, and her love affair with Jesus. It is complicated. The other is about the author’s own love for an alluring and elusive young American, L. It is complicated. Between these two Margery Kempe, the novel, emerges as an unprecedented exploration of desire, devotion, abjection, and sexual obsession in the form of a novel like no other novel.

Robert Glück’s masterpiece bears comparison with the finest work of such writers as Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. This edition includes an essay by Glück about the creation of the book titled "My Margery, Margery's Bob."

Night Philosophy is collected around the figure of the child, the figure of the child not just as a little person under the tutelage of adults, but also the submerged one, who knows, who is without power, who doesn’t matter. The book proposes a minor politics that disperses all concentrations of power. Fanny Howe chronicles the weak and persistent, those who never assimilate at the cost of having another group to dominate. She explores the dynamics of the child as victim in a desensitized era, when transgression is the zeitgeist and the victim–perpetrator model controls citizens. 

With an afterword by Chris Kraus.

In moderate physical decline, and with an immoderate weed habit, the novelist Dunja Anko returns home to the Adriatic coast to play detective and solve the mystery of her brother’s death. The going is arduous, the people inscrutable; her old friends have had years to forget – or to convince themselves they don’t remember. Dunja must contend with desire and disgust, curiosity and fear, as she begins to doubt her reasons for returning. Elegantly plotted, funny and self-reflexive, Flood Tide is a psychologically deft exploration of the trauma wrought by human limitation and indecision.

"A dazzling mix of narrative styles (even genres), a linguistic rollercoaster, and a book that demands both close attention and literary sensibility . . . The reader is hooked." — Boštjan Videmšek

"Mysterious, precise and haunting, Flood Tide suggests that every homecoming is a return to a crime scene." — Chris Kraus

Ana Schnabl (b. 1985) is a Slovenian writer and editor. She writes for several Slovenian media outlets and is a monthly columnist for the Guardian. Her collection of short stories Razvezani (Beletrina, 2017) met with critical acclaim and won the Best Debut Award at the Slovenian Book Fair, followed by the Edo Budiša Award in Croatia; the collection has been translated into German and Serbian. Three years later Schnabl published her first novel Masterpiece (Mojstrovina, Beletrina, 2020). She toured Europe with the English, German and Serbian translations of the book, which included a residence in the Museumsquartier in Vienna, the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, and the first European Writer’s Festival in London. The novel was given favourable reviews and mentions in numerous Austrian, German and English media, and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel Flood Tide (Plima, Beletrina, 2022) was nominated for the Slovenian Kresnik Award. Her third novel September (Beletrina, 2024) won the Kresnik Award in 2025.

Rawley Grau has been translating literary works from Slovenian for over twenty years, including by such first-rate novelists as Dušan Šarotar, Mojca Kumerdej, Sebastijan Pregelj, Gabriela Babnik and Vlado Žabot. Six of his translations have been longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, while his translations of Šarotar’s Panorama and Billiards at the Hotel Dobray were shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. He has also translated poetry by Miljana Cunta, Miklavž Komelj, Janez Ramoveš and Tomaž Šalamun, among others. In 2021, he received the prestigious Lavrin Diploma from the Association of Slovenian Literary Translators. Translations from other languages include A Science Not for the Earth: Selected Poems and Letters by the Russian poet Yevgeny Baratynsky, which received the AATSEEL prize for best scholarly translation, and, co-translated with Christina E. Kramer, The Long Coming of the Fire: Selected Poems by the modernist poet Aco Šopov, which won the 2025 International Dragi Award for best translation from Macedonian. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, he has lived in Ljubljana since the early 2000s.