Skye Papers

Thirteen stories explore domestic horrors and everyday violence, providing an intimate and unflinching portrait of twenty-first-century Latin America.

Named one of the ten best fiction books of 2018 by the New York Times en Español, Cockfight is the debut work by Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero.

In lucid and compelling prose, Ampuero sheds light on the hidden aspects of the home: the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and class struggle. A family’s maids witness a horrible cycle of abuse, a girl is auctioned off by a gang of criminals, and two sisters find themselves at the mercy of their spiteful brother. With violence masquerading as love, characters spend their lives trapped reenacting their past traumas.

Working at the nexus of performance, art writing, and fiction, Tyler Coburn creates monologues that explore how the “I” is marked in speech. His myriad topics—alternate history, legal personhood, digital labor, and resonant frequency, to name a few—defy straightforward modes of presentation, often insisting on site-specificity and social intimacy at the expense of conventional documentation. 

Some Monologues collects, for the first time, the scripts of Coburn’s work from the past fifteen years, many of which have not previously been published. Accompanying them are texts by eleven artists, writers, curators, and scholars who experienced these performances firsthand, collaborated in their making, conversed with the artist about them, or share an interest in the subjects they engage. Written in theoretical, poetic, and autobiographical registers, these contributions offer new perspectives on the monologue as an expansive and relational form.

Introduction by Elvia Wilk. Contributions by Yu Araki, A.E. Benenson, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Sven Lütticken, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Spyros Papapetros, Camille Richert, Théo Robine-Langlois, Ian Wallace, and Michelle Wun Ting Wong.

Tyler’s scripts refuse to fix an authorial voice; instead, they make the conditions of authorship itself their subject. Blurring the boundaries between fiction and document, the human and the bureaucratic, the self and its doubles, his work thinks through systems from the inside, often using language as both architecture and trap. In their precision and porousness, I recognize a shared pursuit: how to locate agency within constraint, and how to turn the administrative or the technological into a site of intimacy. — Jill Magid

In Tyler Coburn’s Some Monologues, a binary that remains constitutive for the ideological continuity of modern life, in all its colonial and capital forms, is undone: digital vs. physical. In troubling that chasm, Coburn plays out the repercussions of these ideologies of anthropomorphic naturalism, guiding us through their resonances, doubles, codings, and relays. But he also renders himself as the relay of these transferences, in the process expanding art’s premodern calling: to exist as an invocation. Reification suddenly appears as what is situated between embodiment and disembodiment, with both potentially destabilized. Some Monologues, the book, is this destabilization’s ideal format: as much documentation, an echo, of Coburn’s works through their scripts, as it is an instruction manual for denaturalizing our sense/s. — Kerstin Stakemeier

Tyler Coburn is an artist, writer, and professor based in New York. He received a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and his writing has appeared in ArtReview, BOMB, C Magazine, Dis, e-flux journal, frieze, LEAP, Metropolis M, Mousse, and Rhizome. Coburn is the author of four books: I’m that angel (self-published, 2012), Robots Building Robots (CCA Glasgow, 2013), Richard Roe (Sternberg, 2019), and Solitary (Sternberg and Art Sonje Center, 2022). He has presented artwork at such venues as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Bergen Kunsthall; Hayward Gallery, London; Para Site, Hong Kong; and Kunstverein Munich. 

'You don't need dysphoria to be trans. You don't need a body at all.’

When Sean Hastings, (the first) transgender private detective, is asked to investigate the disappearance of Character, he enters the First Trans Commune in Sim World, a virtual reality community imagineered by transfluencer Kevin and bankrolled by VSI, a mysterious tech company.

At VSI, representation matters, which is why Taylor, the token QTPOC face, runs their latest project. Haunted by the death of his cis gayguy college bestie and their shared diasporic dilemmas, Taylor sees potential in Kevin’s ability to Release trauma into the virtual world, while Casey, Sean’s ex, seeks Releasing as the latest Long Plague miracle cure. Then femme fatale Mitchelle reappears, and the plot thickens.

A pulpy neo-noir romp through the anxiously assimilated transmasculine id, Jaw Filler asks: who is VSI, and what do they really want? Can you be your own dad? And if Character’s mind is trapped in Sim World, then where is his body?

Recognized as a poet, less so as a visual artist […] Mina Loy also wrote in the style of Crystal Pantomime, a text from one hundred years ago [c. 1915] describing a ballet in prose. The writing evokes images with which actual theater effects can only interfere. It projects in the mind as onto a screen. But this restless writing does more than that, shifting registers and unfolded in equal parts fairy tale description, precise impossible stage directions, notes for impossible costumes and sets, guidelines for impossible choreography, and a glancing archeology of personal association, opinion, art historical commentary, and psychoanalysis, all floating in suspension, all shading into poetry, and with this manner of overflowing every frame defining its poetics. — Matthew Goulish

This first standalone edition of Crystal Pantomime opens with a biographical introduction by Mina Loy’s literary executor—poet Roger Conover—originally published in Eliot Weinberger’s journal Montemora in 1981, as well as a dramaturgical introduction by Matthew Goulish of Chicago performance group Every house has a door, originally prepared as opening remarks to Every house’s reading of Loy’s Pantomime at the Arts Club of Chicago in spring of 2024. In tandem these supplementary texts begin to frame what is a rather strange and singular sketch for a work never realized.

Rebecca Rowland is one of the sharpest writers that I know. This little book combines elements of life in the publishing industry, #MeToo, and a literal boogeyman. It’s long been my desire to do more “social horror.” And Shagging the Boss is the stick I use to measure other submissions in that vein. (Back Cover Text) “Lesson number one: don’t get attached to anyone. Being a cannibal is the only way to truly succeed in this business.” He placed one hand on the door handle, then thought a moment and smiled to himself. “The problem is, once you take a bite, it will never be enough.” After a fortuitous encounter at a local book convention, a liberal arts graduate accepts a position at a flashy publishing company under the tutelage of its charismatic owner only to learn that the press is led, and fed, by a literal boogeyman.

“Rowland tells an exceptionally tight and fast-paced tale about a unique legendary creature stalking the modern publishing industry” — Michael Arnzen, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Licker and 100 Jolts

“Rowland’s tale is a transgressive mindf*ck that will leave you irreparably unnerved” — L. Stephenson, author of The Goners

“Rowland has a narrative mastery that makes you feel as if a good friend is pulling you in close to tell you some special secret…You’ll be left shook” —Tim Murr, Stranger With Friction