Skip to main content
rile*books

Search books

Search books by title, author, publisher, keywords...

Cover of The seven most exciting hours of Mr. Trier's life in twenty-four chapters

Sternberg Press

The seven most exciting hours of Mr. Trier's life in twenty-four chapters

Keren Cytter

€19.00

An adventure novel based on a true story told in a televised interview by the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, describing seven hours in the life of Tibor Klaus Trier—Lars von Trier's father—from the moment that his wife goes into labor early in the morning until Lars is born.

The setting is Copenhagen, dominated by a hospital that recalls von Trier's television series “The Kingdom.” The plot is thick: Tibor arrives with his wife Margaret at the Maternity Ward of Mercy General Hospital, only to realize that he must return home to retrieve a forgotten mobile—his only link to a sister in distress. On the way, he stops to get gas and gets involved in a car robbery. A cancer takes root in his body. Back at home, he sneaks a peak at Margaret's e-mail and a great secret is revealed that makes him rush back to the hospital to kill her and her son. En route he crashes his new car and his body breaks into pieces and he loses his memory. Mercy General is haunted by a great ghost and the day is Armageddon when the ghost needs to challenge the living with an army of zombie children—all born within its walls. Who is this great ghost? What does Margaret hold in her body? Will Tibor survive his one day old cancer? All and more will be revealed…

Translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Roman.
Co-published with Witte de With. 

Keren Cytter (born 1977 in Tel Aviv, lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin) is an Israeli visual artist and filmaker.

Language: English

recommendations

Cover of Burn & Gloom! Glow & Moon!

Sternberg Press

Burn & Gloom! Glow & Moon!

Katrina Daschner

Monograph €19.00

Retrospective monograph: a journey through over two decades of intersectional and queering practices in film, performance, sculpture, community work, and textiles.

In Daschner's textile-based works, threads are minimal yet highly visible, akin to the pinch needed to wake up from a dream. These works—as well as her collages—merge with her confronting yet inviting image politics: she cuts and pastes stories of love and pleasure, violence and resilience, death and rebirth.
The written contributions reflect on Katrina Daschner as part of a hardworking generation of queer artists and makers who have been responding to the major conceptual shifts and gender upheavals happening in contemporary art since the 1990s, especially in New York and London. They highlight Katrina Daschner's longstanding line of intersectional queer interest that continues to undermine (neo-)liberal, heteropatriarchal conceptions of sexuality, gender, subjectivity, and relationships

Edited by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu.
Texts by Amelia Groom, Tim Stüttgen; foreword by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu; interviews by Rike Frank.

Cover of I Want

Sternberg Press

I Want

Pauline Boudry/ Renate Lorenz

I Want reviews the eponymous duo's double-projection film installation examining issues of gender, sexuality and performativity—and inspired by the words of punk poetess Kathy Acker and convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. This publication documents the major film installation I Want (2015) by collaborative artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, which was presented at their 2015 solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich and Nottingham Contemporary.

The double-projection film installation is based on a script that borrows texts from American punk-poet Kathy Acker (1947-1997), as well as chats and materials by convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning that speak of her reasons for revealing nearly one million secret military and diplomatic documents through WikiLeaks, at the same time exposing her transgender identity to her superiors.

Through poetic gestures of appropriation and recombination, Boudry and Lorenz examine issues around gender, sexuality, the performance of identity, and the nature of collaboration. Alongside generous color documentation, written contributions by Gregg Bordowitz, Laura Guy, Dean Spade, and Craig Willse unpack and reflect upon both the historical context and contemporary significance of this multivalent work.

Cover of On the Benefits of Friendship

Sternberg Press

On the Benefits of Friendship

Isabelle Graw

Essays €22.00

Isabelle Graw reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus.

By focusing on her own social milieu—the art world—Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity—if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe—with it, we are able to fully live.

"On the Benefits of Friendship strangely calls to mind the fictional schoolboy-diary format Robert Walser staged to deliver his first novel. Aware of its own performance while successfully assuming its desired voice, Graw's diaristic story is a clever vehicle for social critique of utility friendships." 
Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You

"Isabelle Graw has written the Elective Affinities for the twenty-first century, as a feminist novel and a dysfunctional family portrait set in the contemporary art world."
— Violaine Huisman, author of The Book of Mother

Isabelle Graw is Professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule), Frankfurt am Main, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism. She is an art critic and co-founder ofTexte zur Kunst in Berlin.

Cover of Vampires in Space

Sternberg Press

Vampires in Space

Pedro Neves Marques

Exhibition catalogue of filmmaker, visual artist, and writer Pedro Neves Marques's solo project "Vampires in Space" at the Portuguese Pavilion, 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2022.

"In space it's always night." A family of vampires travels through space, carrying life to a faraway planet. Alone, they recall their past, offering an open-ended narrative about the role of fiction in our lives, with a special care for transgender experiences.

This book includes an interview, film scripts and poetry by Neves Marques, curatorial texts by João Mourão, Luís Silva, alongside visual documentation and other contributions by Manuela Moscoso and Filipa Ramos.

The work of Pedro Neves Marques (born 1984 in Lisbon, Portugal) combines anthropological research, cinema, publishing, poetic and fictional writing. Their hybrid aesthetic, that blends science fiction and documentary realism is influenced by the history of feminist and queer sciences, and projects us into futures that question the control of our bodies, our desires and the world around us beyond the register of dystopia. In doing so, they explore how we might transform our imaginaries of gender, new technologies, ecology and postcolonial issues.

Cover of The German Library Pyongyang

Sternberg Press

The German Library Pyongyang

Sara Sejin Chang

From December 11, 2015, until April 10, 2016, the German Library in Guangzhou, China, became The German Library Pyongyang, a reimagining of an initiative of the Goethe-Institut that originally operated in North Korea between 2004 and 2009. This temporary intervention by Sara van der Heide is an imaginary transformation of the current geography of the German Library in Guangzhou. Van der Heide’s project is a contemporary version of the Goethe-Institut’s original library initiative in North Korea, devised as a vessel to discuss national cultural policy in a post-Cold War and postcolonial era that looks critically toward the parallel histories of Germany and the two Koreas. The German Library Pyongyang offers a space for critical questions, but it also functions as a context for transcending thinking that is prescribed by the lines of the nation-state, language, and geography. The several artistic, linguistic, and graphic interventions in the library merge with the continuing activities of the German learning center in Guangzhou, and all institutional printed matter in Chinese is replaced by Korean.

This publication brings together the four original exhibition booklets in German, Korean, English, and Chinese. An additional reader is included with critical reflections as well as documentation of the exhibition and the organized seminar.

Design by Dongyoung Lee
English/German/Korean/Chinese

Cover of Modern Love

Primary Information

Modern Love

Constance DeJong

Fiction €18.00

Constance DeJong’s long-neglected 1977 novel, Modern Love, is one thing made up of many: It is science fiction. It is a detective story. It is a historical episode in the time of the Armada and the dislocation of Sephardic Jews from Spain to an eventual location in New York’s Lower East Side. It is a first-person narrator’s story; Charlotte’s story; and Roderigo’s; and Fifi Corday’s. It is a 150-year-old story about Oregon and the story of a house in Oregon. Modern Love’s continuity is made of flow and motion; like an experience, it accumulates as you read, at that moment, through successive moments, right to the end.

An important figure of downtown New York’s performance art and burgeoning media art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, DeJong designed Modern Love herself and published it with help from Dorothea Tanning on the short-lived Standard Editions imprint. Critically acclaimed in its time, Modern Love is now back in print on the 40th anniversary of its original publication.

Constance DeJong is an artist and writer who has worked for thirty years on narrative form within the context of avant-garde music and contemporary art. Considered one of the progenitors of media art, or “time-based media,” DeJong shapes her intricate narrative form through performances, audio installations, print texts, electronic objects, and video works. Since the 1980s, DeJong has collaborated with Phillip Glass, Tony Oursler, and the Builders Association on performances and videos at Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; the Wexner Center, Columbus, OH; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in New York, at The Kitchen, Thread Waxing Space, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Dia Center for the Arts. Her books include I.T.I.L.O.E. and SpeakChamber, and her work is included in the anthologies Up is Up, But So is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974–1991 (NYU Press, 2006); Blasted Allegories (New Museum/MIT, 1987); and Wild History (Tanam Press, 1985).

Cover of Resentment: A Comedy

Semiotext(e)

Resentment: A Comedy

Gary Indiana

Fiction €18.00

In a novel capturing an era that seems at once familiar and grotesque, a New York writer lands in Los Angeles in 1994.

Originally published in 1997, Resentment was the first in Gary Indiana's now-classic trilogy (followed in 1999 by Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story and in 2003 by Depraved Indifference) chronicling the more-or-less permanent state of “depraved indifference” that characterized American life at the millennium's end.

In Resentment, Seth, a New York–based writer arrives in Los Angeles (where he has history and friends) in mid-August, 1994, to observe what will become the marathon parricide trial of the wealthy, athletic, and troubled Martinez brothers, broadcast live every day on Court TV. Still reeling from the end of his obsessive courtship of a young SoHo artist/waiter, Seth moves between a room at the Chateau Marmont and a Mount Washington shack owned by his old cab-driving, ex-Marxist friend, Jack, while he writes a profile of Teddy Wade—one of the era's hottest young actors, who has “dared” to star as a gay character in a new Hollywood film. Studded throughout with scathing satirical portraits of media figures, other writers, and the Martinez trial teams, Resentment captures an era that seems, two decades later, at once grotesque, familiar, and a precursor to our own.

Introduction by Patrick McGrath
Afterword by Chris Kraus

Cover of The Stone Door

New York Review of Books

The Stone Door

Leonora Carrington

Fiction €16.00

The Stone Door is a surrealist allegory intertwining myth, mysticism, and romance. Written by Leonora Carrington after World War II, the novel follows a woman's symbolic journey through esoteric teachings, ancient lands, and dreamlike visions in pursuit of spiritual awakening and the unification of male and female forces. Both a metaphysical adventure and a tribute to Carrington's personal love story, it offers a visionary exploration of transformation and liberation.