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Cover of Stuck Rubber Baby

First Second Books

Stuck Rubber Baby

Howard Cruse

€22.00

As a young gay man leading a closeted life in the 1960s American South, Toland Polk tries his best to keep a low profile, until he finds himself unexpectedly drawn to a lively community of civil rights activists, folk singers, and night club performers. Emboldened by his new friends, he joins local protests and even finds the courage to venture into a gay bar. No longer content to stay on the sidelines, Toland takes a stand against bigotry. But in Clayfield, Alabama, that can be dangerous—even deadly. Painstakingly researched and exquisitely illustrated, Stuck Rubber Baby is a groundbreaking graphic novel that draws on Howard Cruse's experience coming of age and coming out in 1960s Birmingham, Alabama. Just in time for its 25th anniversary, this rich and moving tale of identity and resistance is back in print—complete with unpublished archival material and a behind-the-scenes look at the author's creative process.

Howard Cruse's career as an underground cartoonist was launched during the 1970s, and in 1980 he served as the founding editor of the groundbreaking Gay Comix series. His comic strip Wendel was serialized in the Advocate through much of the 1980s. Stuck Rubber Baby, his most widely known work, was the winner of Eisner and Harvey Awards in the U.S. and (in translation) a Comics Critics Award in Spain, a Luchs Award in Germany, and a Prix de la critique at the International Comics Festival in Angoulême, France.

Published 2020. 

Language: English

recommendations

Cover of Fort Beau

Kunstencentrum KAAP

Fort Beau

Pieter Van Bogaert

Fiction €15.00

Fort Beau – verhalen van beginnen en eindes, een nieuw boek van kunstcriticus en curator Pieter Van Bogaert ontstaan aan zee, is het eerste in de Bibliotheek van de Noordzee: een nieuwe reeks van Kunstencentrum KAAP over kunst en samenleving.

Fort Beau heeft twee beginnen en eindes: één van elk op de linkerpagina’s en nog eens hetzelfde maar anders – als een vage kopie – rechts. Van de kunst van het lopen gaat het naar lopen als kunst. Van het strand in Oostende gaat het naar het Kaaitheater in Brussel. Van de huiskamer naar de wereld. Van de Palestijnen naar de sans-papiers. Twee boeken naast elkaar die zich in een gedurfde vormgeving van Maaike Beuten ontwikkelen en besmetten tot één verhaal.

Cover of The Spiritual Hunt

Inpatient Press

The Spiritual Hunt

Arthur Rimbaud, Emine Ersoy

Poetry €20.00

A long lost poem purportedly by Rimbaud is finally made available in English.

Referenced only in a few letters of Paul Verlaine, The Spiritual Hunt is Arthur Rimbaud's forgotten masterwork, a poem in five parts that explored the mystic philosophy that guided the young poet's heart and hand. Considered lost for years, a typewritten manuscript appeared in Paris in the late 1920s, circulating around a close-knit group of booksellers, poets, and playwrights. Yet it wasn't until 1949 that Mercure de France took the initiative to publish the unauthenticated galley and unleashed a literary controversy that shook France. Sides were drawn, with Andre Breton leading the charge of forgery, calling the work an utter hoax, and others defending it as legitimate and an essential key to understanding Rimbaud and his work. Bookstores were raided for copies, critics were skewered in journals, and tempers flared on radio and in print, but no conclusive judgement could be drawn and Mercure de France withdrew the work from publication and pulped all the copies they could find.

Now, seventy-five years after its initial imbroglio, The Spiritual Hunt is available in English for the first time with a facsimile letterpress edition of the original. Featuring Pascal Pia's original introduction along with an edifying afterword by translator Emine Ersoy.

Cover of Nymph: A Novel

Verso Books

Nymph: A Novel

Stephanie LaCava

Fiction €20.00

A young woman from a long line of assassins, lives her life with the ardent mission to avoid the trappings of any enduring romantic love, while keeping one on the pursuit of an untimely death for herself. 

Not yet thirty, Bathory, or 'Bat' to those near to her, has assembled a peculiar Model, sex worker, linguist and scholar of Latin. But nothing in her lively job history employs the singular traits she inherited from her strange family, chief among them an uncanny ability to sidestep seemingly certain death(s). An appropriate atavistic instinct, for someone from a long line of assassins and spies. Her clan are assassins of a romantic bent, her parents issuing theories on love galore. However Bat is set on swerving any enduring romantic loves, and she's set on dying young. Now, if she could only avoid that one alluring figure from her father's past.

A thriller, a love story, and a dynamic examination of class, violence and connection. The images we make to share and those we strive to conceal, alienation and salvation, magic and technology, LaCava's bold new novel is propelled by the compelling violence one can seed in contradiction.

Cover of Thora

Worms Magazine

Thora

Tilly Lawless

Fiction €18.00

It’s 2009 and summer is encroaching on the town of Bellingen when Rhiannon is forced to move from her local high school to one in Coffs Harbour. Initially reluctant to leave behind her best friend Ellie, she quickly finds herself infatuated with the enigmatic Vanora. It’s only on befriending her, does she discover that like her, Vanora is a girl whose home life is shrouded in a web of secrets. Secrets that relate to her mother.

Set in the verdant Mid North Coast of New South Wales, Australia, Thora deals with family dysfunction, emancipation through friendship, and how girlhood is affected by the isolation of the country and the solace of nature.

Tilly Lawless is a queer, Sydney-based sex worker and writer. Her debut title Nothing But My Body was published in 2021.

Cover art by Rufus Shakespeare

Cover of Pommes Girl / أحتفل بالحياة التي تحتفل بي

Kulte Editions

Pommes Girl / أحتفل بالحياة التي تحتفل بي

Rim Battal

Fiction €16.00

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.