The First Jasmines

This is a book of failure and mistakes; it begins with what is stolen from us and proposes only an invitation to imagine.

In these playful written experiments, Lola Olufemi navigates the space between what is and what could be. Weaving together fragmentary reflections in prose and poetry, this is an exploration of the possibility of living differently, grounded in black feminist scholarship and political organising.

Olufemi shows that the horizon is not an immaterial state we gesture toward. Instead, propelled by the motion of thinking against and beyond, we must invent the future now and never let go of the otherwise.

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and CREAM/Stuart Hall Foundation researcher from London. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to futurity, political demands and imaginative-revolutionary potential. She is the author of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise and Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power, the co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University, and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.

What do we carry from one year to the next? What remains after devastation, and what, despite everything, takes root again?

October in Lebanon is heavy with memory. The euphoria of the 2019 revolution feels far away, its anniversaries marked by crisis, war and the genocide in Gaza.

Across multiple Octobers, Nur Turkmani meditates on rupture, transformation and the quiet undoing and remaking of relationships during collective catastrophe. Part archive, part love letter, her debut poetry collection holds the ordinary and the extraordinary in the same breath, spanning balconies and border towns, fig trees and songs for friends, autumn light and the instinct to flee.

Formally spare and emotionally saturated, October refuses both numbness and spectacle. These poems ask what it means to survive the world and still long for it; and how we hold what’s disappearing, or changing too quickly to make sense of.

Through an Addict’s Looking-Glass is an exercise in meaning-making, a thinking-out-loud. Waithera Sebatindira unravels how it feels to live as an addict under capitalism, pondering how engaging with these experiences could bring the horizon of liberation towards us.

Through embodied explorations of addiction and recovery, Sebatindira invites us to inhabit crip time, a concept that describes different temporal realities in the lives of disabled people. In this collection, the addict’s crip time is distorted, mutable and non-linear, hopping backwards and forwards through memory loops and memory loss. Blackout is time travel; sobriety is failure; finitude, freedom.

An uncompromising rejection of the objectification of addicts across the political spectrum, this powerful meditation on illness, disability, solidarity and spirituality illuminates their indispensable contributions to the building of a new world.

Waithera Sebatindira is a Kenyan writer based in London. Their previous writing and research interests have included food imperialism, drag kings and gender transformation. They are a co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University.

How much distance and difference can intimacy hold? How much proximity and likeness does it require? What can we learn from its capacities? And what could we salvage from its limits?

Curious Affinities unravels the risks and possibilities brought forth by unconventional styles of intimacy. Across kinship, friendship, romance and community, the threads of social relation are entangled by race, class and queerness in unexpected and generative ways, as we find ourselves rent to shreds and stitched back together in the name of common feelings.

In rousing poetry and incisive prose, Sophie Chauhan reflects on the bonds and boundaries that govern our collective ways of life and wonders how they might be reimagined.

Sophie Chauhan is a London-based writer and researcher, born in the UK and raised in Naarm (Melbourne). She is completing a PhD in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at University College London. Her academic, creative and organising work converge around her interest in anti-capitalist, queer and decolonial approaches to radical coalition-building.

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.

Why they said, “Your real name is Anon,” I’ll never know ... But now that I have a name, I know I must write ... I’m scared, but feel it is time to be really bad. 

Republished for the first time since its 1979 release, in a new revised edition, Holy Smoke is an account of the frenzy and paranoia of United States politics refracted through one individual’s psyche. With her theme of a child disappeared – and all that that phrase carries with it – Howe captures the chaos of reality in her salient mix of poetry and prose. Readers will find it hard to believe that this book, which gives fresh sense to the demand for universal human rights, was written in the last century. 

At once evocative and subtly incisive, Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. She has written some of the remarkable books of her time. —Adam Phillips 

A wonder of acid wit and Americana, Holy Smoke turns grief into a game and chaos into canticles. Bricolage at its best: incisive, inventive and intimate. It’s the exact work I needed in my life. —Navid Sinaki

The selected journals of trans, mixed-race artist and dyke erotica writer Red Jordan Arobateau.

Best known for his erotic lesbian fiction, Red Jordan Arobateau was also a prolific painter who maintained and self-published a journal for roughly twenty years, documenting his experiences at the “abject bottom” of life in the US. Edited and introduced by poet and scholar Cameron Awkward-Rich with a foreword by Michelle Tea and paintings by Arobateau, Time Also Will Make It Interesting captures Arobateau’s life as a young dyke in the criminalized cultures of 1950s-60s gay bars of Chicago and New York; his transition from dyke to trans man in late 1990s San Francisco; and his return to painting and an unfolding spirituality within that rapidly gentrifying city. 

Queerly messy, ornery, and stuffed with Arobateau’s wisdom, this volume is what he might have called, “a novel combined with a journal—da novel/journal! Taking all the liberty in the world! A domain where verse can be inserted, dreams recorded, my everyday political rants printed out, combined with my forté—fiction! All under one binding & title!”

Foreword by Michelle Tea.

Expect anger. Expect joy, joy interspersed with anger, anger with joy, anger and joy in equal proportions, till joy is eclipsed by anger, or anger by joy. Expect decline. Expect steady and sudden decline, in fortune and wellbeing, a decline in wellbeing in places as far afield as Corby and Inverness, London, Manchester, and Yorkshire. 

Massive Massive Oil Slick is a monologue written in sentences that begin with the verbs expect, suppose, and avoid, delivered in a seminar room of an unnamed institution. The audience is invited to participate in imagined scenarios: predicaments, thought-experiments, moral quandaries. Themes range from profound to mundane, serious to absurd: homelessness, drug trials, social exclusion, traffic, Brazil nuts, carveries, contact with extra-terrestrial life. The result is a prophecy, and the reader the central character through whom multiple futures are posited, dismissed, and revived. 

A meta-textual matryoshka doll of a novel from a renowned voice in Flemish literature. 

The twisting narrative of Louis Paul Boon's 1953 masterpiece follows a young girl named Ondine and her brother Valeer, born into poverty at the turn of the century in the industrial city of Aalst, Belgium. Ondine's coming of age is interwoven with a reworking of the medieval fable of Reynard the Fox, as well as a metanarrative in which an author named Louis Paul Boon and his colorful group of friends discuss the writing of a novel named Chapel Road, debating how best to present Ondine's story.

Groundbreaking among post-war Dutch literature for its postmodern structure and irreverent, dialect-studded use of language, Boon's allegory of the rise and fall of socialism in Flanders presents his theory of the novel as a type of "illegal writing" where digressions are far more important than a carefully constructed plot.

Introduction by Chad W. Post

Louis Paul Boon (1912-1979) started out as a house painter but went on to become the author of a large and rich oeuvre spanning several genres: from the compelling historical epics he composed later in life to his sharp, witty work as a newspaper columnist and his tongue-in-cheek, scabrous novels. Boon is one of the most important writers of Flemish literature in the twentieth century, a keen observer of society, the individual and the interplay between them.

Adrienne Dixon is a translator of Dutch and Flemish literature.

Chad W. Post is the founder and publisher of Open Letter Books. He is also the editorial director of Dalkey Archive Press, where he was formerly the associate director. Over the course of his career, he founded the Translation Database, the Best Translated Book Awards, multiple literary podcasts (Two Month Review, Three Percent), the Three Percent website, and currently writes two newsletters: The Three Percent Problem, and Mining the Dalkey Archive. He is also the author of The Three Percent Problem: Rants and Responses on Publishing, Translation, and the Future of Reading. His articles and book reviews have appeared in a range of publications. In 2018 he received the Words Without Borders Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature. 

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. 

Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison.