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Cover of Sphinx

Deep Vellum

Sphinx

Anne Garréta

€16.00

Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, among others.

A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, "I," and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters, Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language.

Sphinx is a landmark text in the feminist and LGBT literary canon appearing in English for the first time.

Anne Garréta (b. 1962) is a lecturer at the University of Rennes II and research professor of literature and Romance studies at Duke University. She joined the Oulipo in 2000, becoming the first member to join born after the Oulipo was founded. Garréta won France's prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002, awarded each year to an author whose "fame does not yet match their talent," for her novel Pas un jour.

Emma Ramadan is a graduate of Brown University and received her master's in literary translation from the American University of Paris. Her translation of Anne Parian's Monospace is forthcoming from La Presse. She is currently on a Fulbright Fellowship for literary translation in Morocco.

Published in 2015 ┊ 152 pages ┊ Language: English

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Cover of Not One Day

Deep Vellum

Not One Day

Anne Garréta, Emma Ramadan

Fiction €16.00

A tour de force of experimental queer feminist writing, Not One Day is renowned Oulipo member Anne Garréta's intimate exploration of the delicate connection between memory, fantasy, love, and desire. Garréta, author of the acclaimed genderless love story Sphinx and experimental novel In Concrete, vows to write every day about a woman from her past. With exquisite elegance, she revisits bygone loves and lusts, capturing memories of her past relationships in a captivating, erotic composition of momentary interactions and lasting impressions, of longing and of loss. 

Anne Garréta, author of the groundbreaking novel Sphinx (Deep Vellum, 2015), is a member of the renowned Oulipo literary group. Not One Day won the Prix Médicis in 2002, recognizing Garréta as an author “whose fame does not yet match their talent.” Garréta is also the author of In Concrete, translated by Emma Ramadan (Deep Vellum, 2021).

Emma Ramadan is a literary translator of poetry and prose from France, the Middle East, and North Africa. She is the recipient of a Fulbright, an NEA Translation Fellowship, a PEN/Heim grant, and the 2018 Albertine Prize. Her translations for Deep Vellum include Anne Garréta’s Sphinx and In Concrete, Fouad Laroui's The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers, and Brice Matthieussent's Revenge of the Translator.

Cover of Vanus

cry mimi cry

Vanus

Sophie Couderc

Fiction €7.50

Vanus übermann des villes, le roi de la ville, le roi du monde, se fait des odes à lui-même et met ses chaussettes dans la pâte à pain. Sophie Couderc raconte quelques-unes de ses péripéties.

Vanus übermann of the cities, the king of the city, the king of the world, writes odes to himself and puts his socks in bread dough. Sophie Couderc recounts some of his adventures.

Je jette le matelas dehors, il rebondit sur trois cons et tombe dans une grosse flaque de jus de rue. Ok, pas mal mais il m’en faut plus. (Vanus)

Carie, comme le trou qu’on bouche au plomb, est une collection de textes courts et moyens qui se glissent dans la poche. Chaque livre (la dent) de la collection (la bouche) est troué (la carie) et cerclé d’un œillet métallique (le plombage).

Carie, like the hole filled with lead, is a collection of short and medium-length texts that slip into the pocket. Each book (the tooth) in the collection (the mouth) is holed (the cavity) and circled with a metal eyelet (the filling).

Cover of Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love

Far West Press

Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love

Jack Skelley

Fiction €13.00

Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love is a genre-defiant sex-trip to post-human dimensions. If C.G Jung, magic-mushroom shaman Terence McKenna and Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae) had a three-way while binging on George Bataille and undergoing Hormone Replacement Therapy, their baby might be the erotic cocktail of Myth Lab. Its extreme theme is nothing less than the fate of the species.

“Brilliant and wild, Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab is a manifesto of exuberance disguised as a sci-fi sex test-center for the invention of communal futures. Skelley’s a mad scientist, scholar and poet.” - Chris Kraus, author of After Kathy Acker
 
“In Myth Lab, Jack Skelley adroitly molds an “Einsteinian elasticity between objects and ether” to the “clitoverse.”  If this formulation seems too vast, just think about a) the last time you felt good about power and b) all the ways to say yes to pleasure as a source of liberation. In conducting a “cosmologic psychoanalysis,” Myth Lab thrillingly hot wires our neurons to an endless mirror stage reflective of our own instinctual nature.” - Kim Rosenfield, author of Phantom Captain
 
"An explosion of clit-cock-and-pop-culture worship. Skelley’s eroto-celestial universe fights back not only against the denial of desire – “also known as fuckheadocracy and market forces” – but against death itself."  - Francesca Lia Block, author of Weetzie Bat
 
"A hallucinatory book that straddles gender studies, science-fiction, and cultural criticism (to name but three of many genres). Ever eager to use a newfound Skelley-ism, I urge everyone to read Myth Lab and be “Kardashian'd” with love (i.e buy it now, it's great)." - Susan Finlay, author of The Jacques Lacan Foundation
 
"In Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab, something weird and beautiful is forged in the crucible of infinite horny grief. It’s an epic, delirious descent into the inferno, navigating the concentric circles of romance and desire as literary malady, TikTok psyop, benevolent cosmological principle, and more. Simultaneously a quest, a physics experiment and an elegy. I loved following its narrator - a tender, erotomanic, Blakean particle - seeking and finding visionary head." - Daisy Lafarge, author of Love Bug

Cover of Some Monologues

Wendy's Subway

Some Monologues

Tyler Coburn

Fiction €25.00

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. 

Cover of Playboy

Semiotext(e)

Playboy

Constance Debré

The prequel to Love Me Tender, narrating Debré's transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian and writer.

I see all her beauty, I see the beauty of women. I see my own body, new. I tell myself there are so many things that are possible.

First published in France in 2018, Playboy is the first volume of Constance Debré's renowned autobiographical trilogy that describes her decision, at age forty-three, to abandon her marriage, her legal career, and her bourgeois Parisian life to become a lesbian and a writer.

The novel unfolds in a series of short, sharp vignettes. The narrator's descriptions of her first female lovers—a married woman fifteen years older than her, a model ten years her junior—are punctuated by encounters with her ex-husband, her father, and her son.

As Debré recently told Granta: “It was a bit like Saint Augustine and his conversion. In the same week, I had sex with a girl and I had the feeling that I could write. I had this incredible feeling that I could catch things, that life was there to be caught.”

Looking at the world through fresh eyes, the narrator of Playboy questions everything that once lay beneath the surface of her well-managed life. Laconic, aggressive, and radically truthful, she examines gender and marriage, selfishness and sacrifice, money and family, even the privilege inherent in her downward mobility.

Writing her way toward her own liberation, Debré chronicles the process that made her one of the most brilliant, important French writers today.

Cover of You Can Vibe Me On My Femmephone

CO-Conspirator Press

You Can Vibe Me On My Femmephone

Kamala Puligandla

Fiction €20.00

You Can Vibe Me On My FemmePhone follows three friends, in a near-future Los Angeles, who are trying to improve themselves using a phone with a feminist operating system. Join Veronica, Phoebe, and Remy on their absurd adventures to seduce artists, entrap local Proud Boys, and enter a kinky queer horse-play scene. Their FemmePhones, programmed with their personal values, guide them toward the transformative love and professional passions they seek. But what choices will they make when they disagree with their phones and what does this mean about their feminist values? Kamala Puligandla’s heartfelt, humorous novella takes you on a wild ride about queer love, self-knowledge and growth.

Size: 4.5" x 7", 108 pages, perfect bound

Self-published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Feminist Center for Creative Work. Copy edited by Pratishtha Kohli. Illustrations by Phoebe Unter. Designed by MJ Balvanera, Riso-printed by Neko Natalia.