The Lesbian Avenger Handbook

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.

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

Human history is filled with unacceptable sounds: high-pitched voices, gossip, talkativeness, hysteria, wailing and ritual shouts. Who makes them? Those deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control: women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes all fall into this category. 

From the myths of antiquity to Margaret Thatcher via Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein, The Gender of Sound charts the gendering of sound in Western culture. Carson invites us to listen again, and in doing so to reimagine our conceptions of human order, virtue and selfhood.

Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.

18 July 1936, Bayonne. After hearing the news of the Fascist uprising, the Spanish dancer and bailaora Antonia Mercé y Luque, known as La Argentina, suffers a syncope and dies in fateful synchrony with the Second Republic. History, and the artist’s body, have been seized and broken by the event.

In close dialogue with images and historical documents, Isabel de Naverán pursues the reverberations of that shock and how it resonates with collective pain and artistic translations (by Federico García Lorca, Gertrude Stein, Kazuo Ohno and others). How does history affect and move through bodies? How do living bodies carry and pass on cultural legacy and collective memory? What do these complex movements reveal about the present? Wrap, History and Syncope is an affective journey that invites the reader into tracing and revisiting other bodies, to ultimately dance their difference and multiplicity for oneself.

Isabel de Naverán is a writer and researcher. Concern with the passage and use of time is the backbone of her work, which focuses on bodily transmission and the examination of the concept of historical time by way of ephemeral and fugitive practices. She holds a PhD in art from the University of the Basque Country.  

Translation from Spanish: Toni Crabb
Graphic design: Michaël Bussaer

In 1985, Judy Grahn boldly declared that lesbians have a poetic tradition and mapped it from Sappho to the present day in the groundbreaking book, The Highest Apple. In this new and updated edition of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition, Grahn revisits the original text with her characteristic ferocious intellect, passion for historical research, careful close readings, and dynamic storytelling. Grahn situates poetry by Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich Paula Gunn Allen, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and Olga Broumas as central to lesbian culture—and more radically as central to society as a whole.

This new edition of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition includes Grahn’s in depth analysis of poetic work by her friend and comrade Pat Parker and suggests a transactional approach to poetry as uncovering layers of the self. Grahn assembled this text in conversation with two younger lesbian poets, Alicia Mountain and Alyse Knorr, demonstrating the continued relevance and dynamism of The Highest Apple for contemporary readers. A new introduction by Grahn, a foreword by Alyse Knorr, and editor notes by Alicia Mountain along with six responses by contemporary poets Donika Kelly, Kim Shuck, Serena Chopra, Zoe Tuck, Saretta Morgan, and Khadijah Queen highlight the on-going significance of The Highest Apple to readers, writers, and thinkers.

Sarahland est un ouvrage de fiction américain contemporain qui se découpe en dix nouvelles, toutes reliées par les personnages de Sarahs et leurs parcours initiatiques à la fin de l’adolescence. Sam Cohen, autrice queer et juive, déploie un univers drôle et piquant autour des notions d’identité, de transition, de transformation, d’émancipation et d’apprentissage. Au fil d’histoires inventives, l’autrice explore la manière dont les narratifs qui nous sont assignés, les récits traditionnels, les identités qui nous pré-existent, sont dépassables. Elle construit alors avec ses personnages — presque toutes prénommées Sarah — de nouvelles histoires pour leurs passés ou leurs futurs, de nouvelles façon d’aimer la terre et ceux qui la peuplent, de nouvelles possibilités de vie en soi. Dans le refus pour chaque Sarah d’adhérer à un récit unique et uniformisant, l’autrice propose un lieu potentiellement meilleur pour nous toustes, un espace narratif qui n’exige aucune fixation de soi, aucune injonction consumériste, aucun compromis corporel: un lieu appelé Sarahland.

Née à Detroit aux États-unis, Sam Cohen vit et travaille actuellement à Los Angeles. Elle est une autrice de fiction dont les romans explorent des thèmes à l’intersection du féminisme, des études queers, et des pensées juives. Après avoir publié dans différentes anthologies et revues littéraires (Queer Flora, Fauna, and Funga, Weird Sister Collection, etc.), elle publie en 2021 Sarahland, un recueil de nouvelles. Elle enseigne l’écriture à l’université en tant que professeur d’écriture créative. Elle a été nommée et à gagné à de nombreux prix littéraires, notamment le ALMA Award (Best Jewish Story Collection of 2021), le Jewish Women’s Archive Book List, le Golden Poppy Award in Fiction (finaliste) ou encore le Chautauqua Janus Prize. Elle est en cours d’écriture de son prochain livre.

In this bold new work of cultural criticism, Ann Cvetkovich develops a queer approach to trauma. She argues for the importance of recognizing—and archiving—accounts of trauma that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. An Archive of Feelings contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the experiences of women and queers. Rejecting the pathologizing understandings of trauma that permeate medical and clinical discourses on the subject, Cvetkovich develops instead a sex-positive approach missing even from most feminist work on trauma. She challenges the field to engage more fully with sexual trauma and the wide range of feelings in its vicinity, including those associated with butch-femme sex and aids activism and caretaking.  

An Archive of Feelings brings together oral histories from lesbian activists involved in act up/New York; readings of literature by Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Cherríe Moraga, and Shani Mootoo; videos by Jean Carlomusto and Pratibha Parmar; and performances by Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, and the bands Le Tigre and Tribe 8. Cvetkovich reveals how activism, performance, and literature give rise to public cultures that work through trauma and transform the conditions producing it. By looking closely at connections between sexuality, trauma, and the creation of lesbian public cultures, Cvetkovich makes those experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of trauma culture the defining principles of a new construction of sexual trauma—one in which trauma catalyzes the creation of cultural archives and political communities.

The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award winning poet.

Adrienne Rich was the female face of American poetry for decades. Her forceful, uncompromising writing has more than stood the test of time, and the life of the woman behind the words is equally impressive. Motivated by personal revelations, Rich transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of prose as well as poetry. In doing so, she emerged as both architect and exemplar of the modern feminist movement, breaking ranks to denounce the male-dominated literary establishment and paving the way for the many queer women of letters to take their places in the cultural mainstream. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich's correspondence and in-depth interviews with numerous people who knew her, Hilary Holladay digs deep into never-before-accessed sources to portray Rich in full dimension and vivid, human detail.