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Cover of The Virosexuals

PSS Editions

The Virosexuals

Orion J. Facey

€23.00

Manchester, UK. 2080.
It is a subculture whereby people are sexually attracted to the idea of transmitting and receiving STI’s. It started as a counter-culture against computer algorithms that determine every aspect of people’s lives, from careers to romantic interests, where they live, all over the world. The Virosexuals decided to alter their own bodies in order to subvert the algorithm. Now treated as non humans and thus ignored, Virosexuals like Amygdala are left to survive on their own…

Amygdala’s world consists of: her open relationship with Cel, her philosophical musings and drugged-up rants with her best friend Skunk/Winny, as well as her pursuit of all the completely curable (and thus fetishised) meatspace ‘zeases the club scene can offer. She tries to negotiate her body, her sexuality and her desires and find the source of the ‘Petitmort' threat…!

Amygdala’s dealer ran off on her. She’s out of estrogen, and so when Alejandro offers her a bountiful supply of ‘mones if she works for him – doing what? – she’s not super sure… What she does know: ESCHATOS 2.0 is trying to kill her. There’s a rumour buzzing on The Chat. A deadly virus, nicknamed ‘Petitmort’, is going around. It was manufactured by ESCHATOS 2.0, and maybe only those who have installed the latest update of the Treehouse Link are susceptible. Could Alejandro’s mission for Amygdala be connected to this virus sweeping the underground kink and BDSM scene?

Orion J. Facey's The Virosexuals, the author’s first novel, is a science-fantasy you won’t regret plugging into.

The Book Cover is Artwork by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
Design and Typeface by Atelier Carvalho Bernau
Editing by Taylor Le Melle
Copy Editing by Natasha Lall
Production by Daniella Valz Gen, Ima-Abasi Okon and Rehana Zaman
Pages: 280
Dimensions: mm × mm
Published: 30 June 2021

Language: English

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Cover of Ecce Homo

JRP Editions

Ecce Homo

General Idea

LGBTQI+ €50.00

The General Idea drawings.

Focusing on one specific and lesser-known aspect of the manifold practice of General Idea, the Canadian collective founded in Toronto in 1969 by Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal—both deceased in 1994—and AA Bronson, this volume highlights their drawing practice. It offers a generous insight into 125 carefully selected drawings realized between 1985 and 1993—the period the collective spent in New York—spanning the diversity and innovation of their singular approach to drawing and art. The publication's design is inspired by George Grosz's legendary Ecce Homo album (1922–1923) because, according to AA Bronson, "the Anti-Semitism in Grosz's narrative is mirrored by the homophobia in ours."

Investigating motifs in the group's multimedia works such as poodles, stiletto heels, masks, heraldry, and metamorphosed genitalia, these drawings were primarily produced by Jorge Zontal during group meetings. However, given General Idea's mandate for co-authorship, as well as the circumstances under which they were executed, the drawings are considered to be collaborative. Although they are done entirely by hand, the repetition of specific motifs follows a viral logic that is akin to General Idea's own penchant for mass reproduction. Seen together, these drawings are a fascinating window into General Idea's distinct artistic vision as well as their unique notions of collaboration and co-authorship. As Claire Gilman states in her introduction: "The drawings are on the one hand dizzyingly full—this is particularly true of the later drawings where cockroaches spawn and multiply amid dots and splatters of color—and, on the other, hauntingly vacant consisting of mere stains or barely-there outlines, even within a single series. Lest we get too caught up in any one particular rendition, another follows, giving the lie to its predecessor. In their mutability and insistent flow, they are an intimate manifestation of the theatrical nature of existence, exposing representation's inadequacy while acknowledging its urgency."

Edited and introduced by Lionel Bovier and Claire Gilman, co-curators of the exhibition Ecce Homo. The Drawings of General Idea, 1985–1993 held in 2022–2023 at MAMCO Geneva and The Drawing Center, New York, the book also features a conversation with AA Bronson and an index of the drawings.

Awarded: "Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2022".

Founded in Toronto in 1969 by Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal—both dead in 1994—and AA Bronson, the collective General Idea adopted a generic identity that "freed it from the tyranny of individual genius." Their complex intermingling of reality and fiction took the form of a transgressive and often parodic take on art and society. Treating the image as a virus infiltrating every aspect of the real world, General Idea set out to colonize it, modify its content and so come up with an alternative version of reality.
Paintings, installations, sculptures, photographs, videos, magazines, and TV programs: General Idea's is an authentically multimedia oeuvre, that has lost nothing of its freshness and can now be seen as anticipating certain aspects of a current art scene undergoing radical transformation.

Cover of Dyke Affair Vol. 1

Self-Published

Dyke Affair Vol. 1

YeeWen Wong, Jade Wilson

LGBTQI+ €12.00

Issue 01 is an A5 collection of essays, journalism, poetry, illustrations, and photography by Dyke contributors all over the world.

With contributions by Louise Dalgleish, Ráitseach (Alyssa Delahan Meade), Hex Coles, Kenoya Musa, Megan O’Driscoll, Olive Franklin, Inés Pesado Catrufo, Karla Lamb, Eva Kelly, Celina Jiménez, and others.

Cover of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition

Sinister Wisdom

The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition

Judy Grahn

LGBTQI+ €23.00

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.

Cover of Permanent Volta

Nightboat Books

Permanent Volta

Rosie Stockton

Poetry €17.00

Permanent Volta is a book of poems about constraint and debt, as much as it is about excess, credit, loving luxury, and hating work. These are love poems about how queer intimacies invent political and poetic forms, how gender deviance imagines post-sovereign presents and futures.

Taking cues from Rosa Luxemburg's birdsongs and the syntax of invasive flowers, these poems strive to love lack. If history sees writers as tops and muses as bottoms, these poems are motivated by refusal, inversion, and evading representation. In Permanent Volta, the muses demand wages, and then they demand the world. Full of bad grammar, strange sonnets, and truncated sestinas, these poems are melancholy and militant, lazy and anti-state, greedy and collective.

Permanent Volta is for anyone motivated by the homoerotic and intimate etymology of comrade: one who shares the same room.

Cover of The Queer Art of Failure

Duke University Press

The Queer Art of Failure

Judith Halberstam

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives.

Jack Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance.

Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. Halberstam pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.