The Arab Apocalypse

The catalogue of the Lebanese-American artist's first exhibition in Italy.

Over fifty years, Simone Fattal's multifaceted work has explored the impact of displacement as well as the episteme of archeology and mythology, drawing from a range of sources including war narratives, landscape painting, ancient history, and poetry. The artist imagery blends history with memory, grappling with the losses of time while revealing its repetitions. 

This book documents Fattal's first solo show in Italy titled A breeze over the Mediterranean at the Fondazione ICA, Milan, in collaboration with Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters.

Texts by Alberto Salvadori, Andrea Viliani, Etel Adnan, Simone Fattal.

Simone Fattal (born 1942 in Damascus) is a Lebanese-American painter, sculptor and ceramist. After studying philosophy, first in Beirut and then Paris, Fattal returned to Beirut in 1969 and began life as a painter—creating sensuous abstract works that diverged from the predominantly figurative paintings commonly exhibited in Lebanon at the time. In 1980, after a decade spent in Lebanon as a painter, Fattal fled the civil war, abandoned her painting practice, and settled in Sausalito, California, where she founded the revolutionary publishing house Post-Apollo Press. In 1988, after studying sculpture in San Francisco, Fattal was consumed by another wave of creativity that led her to pursue ceramic sculptures—a medium in which she continues to work to this day from her studio in Paris.

A lively and spontaneous interview with Etel Adnan about her absolute belief in the beauty of the world, the beauty of art.

In these interviews conducted by journalist Laure Adler, poet and painter Etel Adnan recounts the foundational experiences of her artistic approach shortly before her death in Autumn of 2021. From her youth in Lebanon, through her years in New York and California, and her late-in-life discovery at Documenta in 2013, this intimate conversation revisits and questions the sometimes difficult destiny of women.

Sitt Marie Rose is the story of a woman abducted by militiamen during the civil war in Lebanon. Already a classic of war literature, this extraordinary novel won the France-Pays Arabes award in Paris and has been translated into six languages. Sitt Marie Rose is part of Comparative Literature, World Literature, Women’s Studies and Middle East Studies curricula at more than thirty universities and colleges in the U.S.

Translated by Georgina Kleege.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She is a celebrated writer, essayist, and playwright, and is the author of more than twenty books in all these disciplines. Her work as a whole is a faithful record of the times and places she has lived in Beirut, Paris, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. At least eighteen works by Adnan have been published in English. They include Sitt Marie Rose (Post-Apollo Press, 1982); The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; Premonition (Kelsey Street Press, 2014); Surge (Nightboat Books, 2018); Time (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award; and Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020). In 2021, Litmus Press published a second edition of Journey to Mount Tamalpais (originally published by The Post-Apollo Press), which included nine new ink drawings by Adnan. Her paintings, described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as "stubbornly radiant abstractions," have been widely exhibited. Spanning media and genres, Adnan's writings have led to numerous collaborations with artists and musicians, including the French part of CIVIL warS, a multi-language opera by American stage director Robert Wilson, performed in Lyon and Bobigny in 1985. In 2014 she was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France's highest cultural honor, by the French Government. She died in Paris, in 2021.

Georgina Kleege is an internationally known writer and disability studies scholar. Her collection of personal essays, Sight Unseen (1999) is a classic in the field of disability studies. Kleege’s latest book, More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art (2018) is concerned with blindness and visual art. Kleege joined the English department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 where in addition to teaching creative writing classes she teaches courses on representations of disability in literature, and disability memoir. Kleege is also the author of Home for the Summer (The Post-Apollo Press, 1989).

Black Bedouin, by Mohammed Zenia and Tenaya Nasser is a book of the IMMEDIATE — written immediately (in the span of five days, very literally at the printing press at 1080PRESS) in response to the current genocide against, and in solidarity with, the people of Sudan and in the context of immediate echoes in Palestine, Congo, Pakistan, and more — and throughout it all imbued with the immediacy that the global situation demands of us and our moral consciences. Black Bedouin rings in the creative immediacy of New York School all-night-writing-to-mimeograph-next-day with the political immediacy of a this-is-happening-right-now Crass single or Etel Adnan's incomparable (but here spiritually correlated) The Arab Apocalypse. In other words, Black Bedouin hits every star in a very cool and specific constellation. — Dave Morse

Searing in its energies and mysterious in its icy depths, Love is Colder than the Lake is a tour-de-force of the experimental French poet Liliane Giraudon's power and range. 

Love is Colder than the Lake weaves together stories dreamed and experienced, fragments of autobiographical trauma, and scraps of political and sexual violence to create an alchemical and incantatory texture that is all Giraudon's own. In its feminist attention and allusive stylistic registers, Love is Colder than The Lake claims a unique position among contemporary French literature. The heroes (or anti-heroes) in this collection include Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lorine Niedecker, Emma Goldman, Chantal Akerman, the Marquis de Sade, and the unnamed lake itself. Giraudon's writing, editing, and visual work have been influential in France for decades, and English-speaking readers will thrill to this challenging, important voice.

Liliane Giraudon was born in Marseille in 1946. She continues to live and work in Marseille, and her writing is inseparable from the place, shaped by the vibrant community of poets and writers and artists Giraudon has herself shaped, as well as by the city's gritty and diverse cosmopolitanism. Giraudon's many books have, since 1982, been primarily published by France's P.O.L. editions. Giraudon has also been instrumental as an editor for influential reviews such as Banana Split, Action Poétique, and If. She performs and collaborates widely, including with Nanni Balastrini, Henri Delui, Jean-Jacques Viton, and many others. Two of her books ( Fur and Pallaksh, Pallaksh) were published in English by Sun & Moon Press in 1992 and 1994, respectively. She lives in Marseille, France.

Lindsay Turner is the author of the poetry collections Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018) and The Upstate (University of Chicago Press, 2023). She has twice received French Voices awards for her translations from the French, which include books of poetry and philosophy by Stéphane Bouquet, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Duforumantelle, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and others. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Sarah Riggs is a poet and multivalent artist. Her most recent book The Nerve Epistle appeared in 2021. Translation is one of her arts, for which she received a Griffin prize with Etel Adnan, and Best Translated Book Award, also for Adnan's Time (Nightboat, 2019). Riggs lives in Brooklyn, after many years in Paris. Author residence: Marseille, France.

Written in La Ferme Arpoix (Ceaux-en-Loudun) and Paris, 1998. Dedicated to Guy.

Staple bound, ltd. to 200 copies. Riso-printed on Munken Pure Rough 120gsm by Risiko Press in Borgerhout, covers silkscreened on Eskaboard by Maarten de With, copy editing by Sis Matthé, design by Kaye & Matthé, typeface: Elementa.

[The title of this book is in Dutch, the text is in French]

"Met dank aan Eliane Van De Velde en Marie-Sophie Beinke."

An exploration of the Witch, as radical archetype, in ancient and contemporary life. 

An adult woman haunted by her childhood muses on the foster system, institutions, and the medieval tale of a girl given to a witch. A genderqueer Brooklynite learns of their past life as a murdered sorceress. An uptight participant at a Northern California witch camp finds community in the kitchen. A professor uses magic to help students under attack by right-wing politicians.

In this collection of manifesto, poetry, playscripts, and prose, the archetype of the Witch is honored and unpacked, poked and prodded, owned and othered. From work centered in antiquity to writing which illustrates how primordial occult energies continue to enliven our world today, WITCH: Anthology lays bare a wilderness of myth, magic, trickery, and power swarming beneath the surface of contemporary life.

With work from CAConrad, Edgar Fabián Frías, Amanda Yates Garcia, Ashley Ray, Brooke Palmieri, Yumi Sakugawa, Kai Cheng Thom, Ariel Gore, Myriam Gurba, Fariha Róisín, and many others.

A reissue of the instant cult-classic love poem, an investigation of poetic address.

Now that I am not addressing you
But the "you" of poetry
I am probably doing something horrible and destructive.
But this "I" is the I of poetry
And it should be able to do more than I can do.