Speed Glum Hero

This Masturbatory Reader asks three main questions.
1. What power and pleasure can we access through attending to the erotics of knowledge production?
2. How are the sites, systems and tools of knowledge-making designed to reiterate violent norms (and in turn, erase deviant practices)?
3. What could the making (and unmaking) of these systems allow us to imagine?

To unpack these questions the edition gathers 16 contributors across 136 pages, conjuring the thinking (wondering, studying, lusting, sweating, ranting) of an expanding chorus of references that sit distances apart, folded here between facing pages. A chorus calling to action, calling to theory, calling to bed.

Featuring D Mortimer, Wes Knowler, Biogal, Tallulah Griffith, Brooke Palmieri, Carl Gent, Sophie Mak-Schram, Alice Butler, Jessa Mockridge, Nat Pyper, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Sammy Paloma, Donna Marcus Duke, and Ryan Boultbee, with a forward by Emily Pope.

“In this anthology, reading is cruising, and cruising is reading.” – Sam Moore, ‘The (Bad) Taste Test: Radical Acts of Queer (Self) Pleasure in The Masturbatory Reader’, Polyester Zine

Sticky Fingers' Fortune Teller features wisdom from McKenzie Wark, Octavia E. Butler, Kate Zambreno, bell hooks, Clarice Lispector, Eileen Myles, Kathy Acker, Johanna Hedva, Lou Sullivan, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Anne Boyer.⁣

A3, single colour risograph

Orbiting around the saddest house in the history of Grand Designs, Sam Moore’s Chesil Cliff House and other failures takes us to North Devon where, standing at the cliff’s edge, we meet Edward Short: a man with a Fred Perry shirt and a dream. Amongst a chorus of characters including Kevin Mcloud as Father Time, Moore by means of Short leads us into a study of creative failure, gender, and, ultimately, the desire to keep writing.

"I struggle to see anyone living here. It feels like a distorted wonder of the world, a cautionary tale. Something that could never have been lived in, but that had to be made."

About the author:
Sam is a writer, artist, and editor. They are the author of All my teachers died of AIDS (Pilot Press), Long live the new flesh (Polari Press), and Search history (Queer Street Press). They are one of the co-curators of TISSUE, a trans reading and publishing initiative based in London.

About A Series of Attempts:
This new series published by Sticky Fingers Publishing explores the essay form through the etymological root of essay: to try, trial or attempt. In 1508, French theorist Michel de Montaigne published a collection of 107 texts called Essais, described by his contemporaries as ‘self-indulgent and embarrassingly confessional.’ It is through these roots we find the attitude and intentions at the heart of this series; that through thinking together, through trying to figure it out on the page, we can reach new and increasingly nuanced ways to understand each other and the worlds we inhabit.

HONEY is a zine meditating on the experiences of friendship. 

Volume 2 was edited by Mars Dietz, Opashona Ghosh and Dylan Spencer-Davidson—each inviting contributions from friends. 

Following vol. 1’s optimism about the underappreciated potentials of friendship, vol. 2 marks a noticeable turn towards friendship's messier sides. Letters to deceased friends, childhood social complexities, unrealised sexual desire, pushback against the overfetishisation of queer kinship, and more. 

Contributions from Azul De Monte, Ana Božičević, D Mortimer, Adriana Disman, Pelumi Adejumo, Iggy Robinson, Clay AD, To Doan, Edward Herring, marum, Lou Drago, Aisha Mirza, Iga Świeściak, Roya Amirsoleymani, George Lynch, Emily Pope and Kari Rosenfeld. 

Original artworks by Opashona Ghosh and Iga Świeściak, and featuring artworks by Azul De Monte and Emily Pope. 

Riso printed on recycled paper with Pagemasters (London).

Featuring the photography of BENJAMIN FREDRICKSON 👅 

This issue of SISSY ANARCHY brings together an incredible cohort of sissies; who give up their environment, their daily encoded stances, to define with me here — in what has become such a tender edition of SISSY ANARCHY — a world where boundaries are stretched and obliterated.

Contributions featuring Imogen Cleverley, Joel Dixon, Donna Marcus Duke, Benjamin Fredrickson, Jordan Hearns, Misha Honcharenko, Ian Ivey, Hesse K, Mayah Monet Lovell, Sam Moore, D Mortimer, Barney Pau, L Scully, Pissed Off Trannies, Ailo Villan, Lee Rae Walsh

Founding Editor: Pierce Eldridge
Design: Caitlin Mcloughlin

A generative, genre-bending collection of nineteen intertwined stories by legendary writer, theorist, and activist Gloria E. Anzaldúa.

Best known for Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Gloria E. Anzaldúa was also a prolific fiction writer. Prieta Is Dreaming, a speculative novel-in-stories, follows the precocious Prieta from her childhood in South Texas to college and beyond as she tries to find her way in the world. Imbued with supernatural powers, Prieta traverses time, changes form, explores her desires, and defies convention. Started in the 1970s and revised up until Anzaldúa's death in 2004, Prieta Is Dreaming comes as a revelation, affirming Anzaldúa's place at the forefront of contemporary feminist, queer, and border theory, while transforming what we think about both her writing and ourselves. In these nineteen intertwined stories, we find some of Anzaldúa's most adventurous, inspired ideas about gender, sexuality, and the very nature of existence—as well as a character, la Prieta, as bold and memorable as the book itself.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1942–2004) was a poet, metaphysical philosopher, and scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. Her books include Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. She was coeditor, with Cherríe Moraga, of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, the 40th anniversary edition of which was also published by SUNY Press. Kelli D. Zaytoun is Professor of English Language and Literatures at Wright State University. She is the author of Shapeshifting Subjects: Gloria Anzaldúa's Naguala and Border Arte. AnaLouise Keating is Professor of Multicultural Women's and Gender Studies at Texas Woman's University. She is the author, editor, or coeditor of many books, including most recently The Anzaldúan Theory Handbook. Suzanne Bost is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Loyola University, Chicago. She is the author of four monographs, the most recent being Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities.

In Noah Ross's new book THE DOGS, Ross opens the question of authority and possession in what he deems an illicit act of translation. THE DOGS may begin with Herve Guibert's Les Chiens, but through multiple reiterations of translation, Guibert's text ultimately meets Ross to celebrate, among other sources, Marie de France, Teen Wolf, Auden, and Dom Orejudos in establishing a unique pack of hungry werewolves. You know what happens when werewolves get together: the play can get a little rough. THE DOGS empowers these snarls and yips, growls and howls, on the level of the sentence in translation as much as the embodied erotogenic zones of the body.

Bringing together poetry, essay, and letters to “lovers, friends and in-betweens,” Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch confronts the ways capitalism, fatphobia, ableism, transness, and racializations affect people with chronic pain, illness, and disability. knot body explores what it means to discover the limits of your body, and contends with what those limitations bring up in the world we live in.

knot body was shortlisted for the QWF First Book Prize. Their second collection of poetry, The Good Arabs (Metonymy Press), won the 2022 Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal.

“For me, the power of knot body stems from its courage and unique voice in writing the ache, the ache of chronic pain, the ache of faulty diagnoses and bodily misreadings, and, equally, the ache for honest answers on how to love each other in all our dignity. Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is an artist and philosopher of talent, generosity, and heart.” – David Chariandy, author of Brother (Penguin Random House)

“In this moment, when trans, racialized and disabled bodies are met with violent and polarizing commentary within the public sphere, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch offers us the uninterrupted intimacy of knot body. As self-communional as Kiese Laymon’s Heavy and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, they amplify and queer the epistolary memoir genre. Each letter is emotionally and thematically complete and, too, each letter decidedly speaks to the next. Readers may ruminate on the sharp and sensual inquiry offered by each individual letter, or read cover-to-cover and be present to the gorgeously-engaged, call-and-response quality of knot body as a whole.” – Amber Dawn, author of My Art is Killing Me (Arsenal Pulp Press)

“knot body is such a generous tapestry of tenderness—a collection that brilliantly utilizes the direct address in a way that is not universal, but still beautifully communal. I reached the end of this collection and breathed in a newer, better world.” – Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune for Your Disaster (Tin House)

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a queer Arab poet living in Tio’tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory (Montreal). Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, GUTS, carte blanche, the Shade Journal, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, Room Magazine, and elsewhere. They participated in the Banff Centre’s ‘Centering Ourselves’ BIPOC residency, and they were longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2019. Their second collection of poetry, The Good Arabs, was published by Metonymy Press in 2021.