The Crying Book

With echoes of Shirley Hazzard and Virginia Woolf, a new novel of startling intelligence from prize–winning author Michelle de Kretser, following a woman looking back on her young adulthood, and grappling with the collision of her emotions and her values.

In the late 1980s, the narrator of Theory & Practice—a first generation immigrant from Sri Lanka who moved to Sydney in her childhood—sets up a life in Melbourne for graduate school. Jilted by a lover who cheats on her with another self-described "feminist," she is thrown into deeper confusion about her identity and the people around her.

The narrator begins to fall for a man named Kit, who is in a “deconstructed relationship” with a woman named Olivia. She struggles to square her feminism against her jealousy toward Olivia—and her anti-colonialism against her feelings about Virginia Woolf, whose work she is called to despite her racism.

What happens when our desires run contrary to our beliefs? What should we do when the failings of revered figures come to light? Who is shamed when the truth is told? In Theory & Practice, Michelle de Kretser offers a spellbinding meditation on the moral complexities that arise in this gap. Peopled with brilliantly drawn characters, the novel also stitches together fiction and essay, taking up Woolf’s quest for adventurous literary form.

This book is built of stories and provocations—like the birth of a pearl, it transforms that which irritates, layer by layer.

Through speculative fiction and critical essays, Pear Nuallak explores what happens when messy, desiring bodies collide with the hard edge of power. The world’s neat categories are unmade and rewritten, revealing that racial capitalism’s myths are just as much fantasies as Thai bird princesses and transgender magic.

Moving playfully across folktale, horror, satire and critique, Nuallak examines how different beings are formed politically, bodily and emotionally. We discover interdimensional fungi resisting colonisation, queer monsters living on Hampstead Heath, and a mysterious canal running through the ruins of capitalism into interstitial realms. We test the borders of queer diasporic nationalism and take apart the racially melancholic memoir. In this fiery yet delicate collection, we aren’t bound by truth, but flow with it into new worlds.

Pear Nuallak is a visual artist and writer from London. They run community art workshops and co-organise a queer social hub with the Black Cap Community Benefit Society. Their writing has been published in The Dark and Interfictions. Pearls from Their Mouth is their first book.

Coming back to the body is rarely tranquil. Often it is turbulent, interrupting dominant narratives and entrenched meanings. It is the upset of being alive, and awake to it.

The fourteen texts in this new issue do not shy away from that turbulence. There is joy and there is pleasure, there is shame, pain, and liberation... Each text addresses this dense experience from a singular perspective, yet together they explore what emerges and becomes possible when sense-making and making sense(s) are re-anchored in the sensing practices of the body.

With texts by Valérie Hug, Marco Antonini, cassiane c. pfund, Elodie Olson-Coons, Ines Marita Schärer, Bernadette Kolonko, Jo Bahdo, Lotta Beckers, Melanie Jame Wolf, Samuel Brzeski, Madeleine Kaye, Nora Longatti, Rosanna Puyol Boralevi, Larissa Clement-Belhacel

editorial team: Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Nicole Bachmann, Robert Steinberger, and Shelby Lee Stuart as invited editor

David Wojnarowicz, one of the most provocative artists of his generation, explores memory, violence, and the erotism of public space—all under the specter of AIDS.

Here are David Wojnarowicz’s most intimate stories and sketches, from the full spectrum of his life as an artist and AIDS activist. Four sections—”Into the Drift and Sway,” “Doing Time in a Disposable Body,” “Spiral,” and “Memories that Smell like Gasoline”—are made of images and indictments of a precocious adolescence, and his later adventures in the streets of New York. Combining text and image, tenderness and rage, Wojnarowicz’s Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is a disavowal of the world that wanted him dead, and a radical insistence on life.

The new and revised edition features a foreword by Ocean Vuong and a note from the editor, Amy Scholder.

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.

A wickedly funny work of depraved genius by one of Brazil’s most radical twentieth-century writers; imagine the Marquis de Sade as written by Clarice Lispecter.

An electrifying masterpiece by one of modern Brazilian literature’s most significant and controversial writers, Hilda Hilst takes us into the disorder and beauty of a mind restlessly testing its own limits.

Every month I ingested the body of God, not in the way one swallows green peas or agrostis, or swallows swords, I ingested the body of God the way people do when they know they are swallowing the More, the All, the Incommensurable, for not believing in finitude I would lose myself in absolute infinity…

The Obscene Madame D tells the story of Hillé, a sixty-year-old woman who has decided to abandon conventional life and spend the rest of her days in contemplation in a recess under the stairs. There, she is haunted by the perplexity of her recently deceased lover, Ehud, who cannot understand her rejection of common sense, sex and a simple life in favour of metaphysical speculations that he considers delusional and vain. 

In a stream-of-consciousness monologue that’s part James Joyce, part Clarice Lispector, and part de Sade, Hillé speaks of her search for spiritual fulfilment from a space of dereliction, as she searches for answers to great questions of life, death and the relationship between body and soul.

Translated by Nathanaël and Rachel Gontijo Araujo