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Cover of The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity

Penguin Books

The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity

Sarah Schulman

€30.00

From award-winning writer Sarah Schulman, a longtime social activist and outspoken critic of the Israeli war on Gaza, comes a brilliant examination of the inherent psychological and social challenges to solidarity movements, and what that means for the future. 

For those who seek to combat injustice, solidarity with the oppressed is one of the highest ideals, yet it does not come without complication. In this searing yet uplifting book, award-winning writer and cultural critic Sarah Schulman delves into the intricate and often misunderstood concept of solidarity to provide a new vision for what it means to engage in this work—and why it matters. 

To grapple with solidarity, Schulman writes, we must recognize its inherent fantasies. Those being oppressed dream of relief, that a bystander will intervene though it may not seem to be in their immediate interest to do so, and that the oppressor will be called out and punished. Those standing in solidarity with the oppressed are occluded by a different fantasy: that their intervention is effective, that it will not cost them, and that they will be rewarded with friendship and thanks. Neither is always the case, and yet in order to realize our full potential as human beings in relation with others, we must continue to pursue action towards these shared goals. 

Within this framework, Schulman examines a range of case studies, from the fight for abortion rights in post-Franco Spain, to NYC’s AIDS activism in the 1990s, to the current wave of campus protest movements against Israel’s war on Gaza, and her own experience growing up as a queer female artist in male dominated culture industries. Drawing parallels between queer, Palestinian, feminist, and artistic struggles for justice, Schulman challenges the traditional notion of solidarity as a simple union of equals, arguing that in today’s world of globalized power structures, true solidarity requires the collaboration of bystanders and conflicted perpetrators with the excluded and oppressed. That action comes at a cost, and is not always effective. And yet without it we sentence ourselves to a world without progressive change towards visions of liberation. 

By turns challenging, inspiring, pragmatic, and poetic, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity provides a much-needed path for how we can work together to create a more just, more equitable present and future.

Published in 2025 ┊ 320 pages ┊ Language: English

recommendations

Cover of The Descent of Alette

Penguin Books

The Descent of Alette

Alice Notley

Poetry €20.00

The Decent Of Alette is a rich odyssey of transformation in the tradition of The Inferno. Alice Notley presents a feminist epic: a bold journey into the deeper realms. Alette, the narrator, finds herself underground, deep beneath the city, where spirits and people ride endlessly on subways, not allowed to live in the world above. Traveling deeper and deeper, she is on a journey of continual transformation, encountering a series of figures and undergoing fragmentations and metamorphoses as she seeks to confront the Tyrant and heal the world. Using a new measure, with rhythmic units indicated by quotations marks, Notley has created a spoken text, a rich and mesmerizing work of imagination, mystery, and power.

Alice Notley is a poet whose twenty previous titles include The Descent of Alette, Beginning with a Stain, Homer's Art, and Selected Poems. She wrote the introduction for her late first husband Ted Berrigan's Selected Poems. She lives in Paris.

Published 1996.

Cover of The Lesbian Avenger Handbook

Homocom

The Lesbian Avenger Handbook

Sarah Schulman

LGBTQI+ €10.00

Launched in New York City, in 1992, the Lesbian Avengers rejected the picket line and ordinary demo for media-savvy, nonviolent direct action.

They were superheroes arriving "to make the world safe for baby dykes everywhere;" warriors with capes and shields doing a line dance; dykes "Lusting for Power," pushing a giant bed float down Sixth Avenue in New York (with lesbians on it); nationally-ambitious Avengers eating fire in front of a hostile White House; lovers reuniting a statue of Alice B. Toklas with Gertrude Stein, then waltzing in the snow in Bryant Park. And homos who shamelessly chanted, "Ten percent is not enough, recruit, recruit, recruit."

Originally published in 1993, Homocom edition 2021

Cover of After Delores

Arsenal Pulp Press

After Delores

Sarah Schulman

A new edition of Sarah Schulman's acclaimed 1988 novel, a noirish tale about a no-nonsense coffee-shop waitress in New York who is nursing a broken heart after her girlfriend Dolores leaves her; her attempts to find love again are funny, sexy, and ultimately even violent. After Delores is a fast-paced, electrifying chronicle of the Lower East Side's lesbian subculture in the 1980s.

Sarah Schulman is the author of sixteen books, including the novels The Mere Future, The Child, Rat Bohemia, and Empathy (all from Arsenal Pulp Press) and the recent nonfiction works The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination and Israel/Palestine and the Queer International. She was also co-producer with Jim Hubbard of the feature documentary United in Anger: A History of ACT UP and is co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project. She lives in New York, where she is Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York (College of Staten Island) and a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.

Cover of Seeing for Ourselves

Hajar Press

Seeing for Ourselves

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

Poetry €18.00

Why do we yearn to be seen when we are already far too visible? How do we want to be perceived, and how are we exposed? Could we ever really see for ourselves?

In memoir, vignettes, poetry and essays, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan records her observations from the stands at the dizzying circus of being seen and unseen. She surveys the criminalising stadium of civic life, the open-air arenas of family, friendship and grief, the performative pageantry of the public eye and the unclad secrets of the self in solitude, paying attention to what’s on show and what goes undetected.

Perhaps the strangest, most exciting possibilities are opened when we surrender to another kind of sight. Submitting to the gaze of the Unseen and the All-Seeing, Manzoor-Khan invites us to close our eyes and discover what it would mean to look with our souls instead.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a poet and writer whose work disrupts assumptions about history, race, violence and knowledge. She is the author of Tangled in Terror and the poetry collection Postcolonial Banter; a co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University; and a contributor to the anthologies Cut from the Same Cloth? and I Refuse to Condemn. She is based in Leeds and is currently writing for theatre.

Cover of The Letters of Douglas Oliver and J. H. Prynne

The Last Books

The Letters of Douglas Oliver and J. H. Prynne

Joe Luna

Poetry €25.00

Douglas Oliver (1937–2000) and J. H. Prynne (b. 1936) are two of the most original and ambitious poets of the contemporary era. Eschewing the conservativism of mainstream postwar British verse and embracing influences from America and Europe, each developed their craft through continuous correspondence and exchange as part of the febrile scene of poetical community and contestation that emerged in Cambridge in the 1960s. Their works over the following decades exhibit frequent shifts in form and style, from Prynne’s radical transformation and dispersal of the lyric tradition to Oliver’s adaptation of dream visions and medieval-inspired verse satires.

Their letters are a record of both the high stakes and playful experiments that constitute the writing lives of two singular poets determined not just to engage with modern political and social life during decades of crisis and upheaval, but to contribute through the circulation and publication of poetry to what Oliver calls “a community of political ethic.” Over the course of more than thirty years of friendship and mutual appreciation, the motivations for, and consequences of, their poems are constantly worked through, tested out, evaluated, and contradicted, always with a view to what the poetry means for the other, for the poetical communities they inhabit, and for the life of poetry itself.

This volume collects for the first time the majority of Oliver and Prynne’s correspondence, allowing new insights into the literary, political, and historical contexts of their lives and writing. An introduction, notes, and appendices provide a scholarly apparatus to situate Oliver and Prynne among the poets and publishers with whom they worked and socialized, and to identify and expand upon their frequent references to an enormous range of source material and reading matter.

“The correspondence between J. H. Prynne and Douglas Oliver is gripping and illuminating, brilliantly edited and completely absorbing. Two great poetic intelligences respond to each other’s work and to the society around them, thinking through the issues at stake in their poetic practice, their differences in approach, the different worlds they inhabit, their shared commitment to writing poetry and their admiration of each other’s work. The letters, complex as their matter can be, repay repeated reading; taken together, over a period of 33 years, they chart the context and creation of some of the most significant work in late twentieth-century poetry. This is an utterly engaging volume, and should be read by anybody interested in poetry and its place in the contemporary world.”—Ian Patterson

“For writers who welcome each other as peers, the exchange of letters is the spontaneous moment of exposure, the drawing out of selves. It is thinking in mutuality. In this thoughtfully edited and carefully, even beautifully, presented correspondence between Douglas Oliver and J. H. Prynne, two of the preeminent poets of the ‘British Poetry Revival’ of the post-World War II generations, we witness two writers of immense gifts thinking with each other, coming alive to thought and, ultimately, a shared world or community of wish. There is life, there is death; there is grief, there is anger – and love – but always there is a seeking, an attempt to arrive at a language for our worlds. Henceforth, one cannot imagine reading the work of either Oliver or Prynne without this correspondence and all that it offers in openings onto what Oliver himself saw as ‘the poet’s full performance [which] is the whole life’s work.’ It is a glimpse into an athanor of poetic creation.”—Michael Stone-Richards

Cover of Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberationv

Verso Books

Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberationv

Juliana Gleeson

LGBTQI+ €20.00

How the intersex liberation movement exposed medical harms and became an inspiration to rethink sex and gender. 

Hermaphrodite Logic is a bold examination of intersex liberation. Juliana Gleeson reveals how a movement challenged systemic medical abuses to reshape our understanding of sex. Blending philosophical insights and personal testimonies, Gleeson argues that intersex people have been harmed not just for therapeutic reasons but to ease professional and parental anxieties.

Cover of After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025

Granary Books

After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025

Steve Clay, M.C. Kinniburgh

Poetry €50.00

This book offers a visual and thematic journey through avant-garde, concrete, visual, and experimental poetics as they appeared in ephemeral little magazines and small press publications from the 1960s onward. This book serves as an exhibition catalog for After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025 from April 23rd to July 26, 2025, at The Grolier Club exhibition in New York City.

Small presses include: 7 Flowers Press, Agentzia, Anabasis, Asylum’s Press, Ayizan Press, Beach Books Texts & Documents, Beau Geste Press, blewointmentpress, Burning Press, C Press, Chax Press, Coach House Press, Edition Hansjörg Mayer, Edizioni Geiger, Expanded Media Editions, Fleye Press, Goliard Press, Grabhorn-Hoyem, Granary Books, Druckwerk, Hawk’s Well Press, Heiner Friedrich, The Hermetic Press, Hermetic Gallery, John Martin, Joseph Melzer Verlag, Kickshaws, Kontexts Publications, Letter Edged in Black Press, Luna Bisonte Productions, Membrane Press, Milano: East 128, New Wilderness Foundation, Nietzsche’s Brolly, Nova News, Open Book, Openings Press, PANic Press, Phenomenon Press, Poltroon Press, Renegade Press, Roaring Fork Press, Scorribanda Productions, Seedorn Verlag, Seripress, Siglio Press, Station Hill, Tarasque Press, Tetrad Press, Visual Poetry Workshop National Poetry Society of London, Wild Hawthorn Press, and Xexoxial Editions.

Little magazines include: “before your very eyes!”, A: An Envelope Magazine of Visual Poetry, Abracadabra, Alcheringa, Anti-Isolation, Approches, AQ, Assembling, Blank Tape, Bulletin From Nothing, Cenizas, Diagonal Cero, E pod, Fruit Cup, Ganglia, Geiger, Gnaoua, Industrial Sabotage, Interstate, Journeyman, Kaldron, Klacto 23, Kontakte, Kontexts, Kroklok, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Libellus, Life Begins with Love, Lines, Lost and Found Times, Lost Paper, Mini, New Wilderness Letter, Pages, Poor.Old.Tired.Horse., Rawz, Revue OU, Rhinozeros, Sammelband Futura, Schmuck, Shi Shi: Concrete & Visual Poetry, Signal, Soft Need, Sondern, Spanish Fleye, Stereo Headphones, Taproot Reviews, The Acts: The Shelf Life, The Difficulties, The Improbable, The Insect Trust Gazette, The Marrahwanna Quarterly, The San Francisco Earthquake, The Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage, Toothpick Lisbon & the Orcas Islands, Unarmed: Adventurous Poetry Journal, UNI/vers(;), WhiteWalls, Xerolage, and xtant.

Cover of Letterpress Revolution

Duke University Press

Letterpress Revolution

Kathy E. Ferguson

Non-fiction €29.00

While the stock image of the anarchist as a masked bomber or brick thrower prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure should be a printer at a printing press. In Letterpress Revolution, Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of printers, whose materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Ferguson shows how printers—whether working at presses in homes, offices, or community centers—arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers, and blank space within the architecture of the page. Printers' extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and the radical ideas they published created dynamic and entangled networks that brought the decentralized anarchist movements together. Printers and presses did more than report on the movement; they were constitutive of it, and their vitality in anarchist communities helps explain anarchism’s remarkable persistence in the face of continuous harassment, arrest, assault, deportation, and exile. By inquiring into the political, material, and aesthetic practices of anarchist print culture, Ferguson points to possible methods for cultivating contemporary political resistance.