The Xenotext Book

First published in 1987, Nicole Brossard's classic novel returns to Coach House in a new edition. A seminal text in Canadian and feminist literature, Mauve Desert is a must-read for readers and writers alike.

This is both a single novel and three separate novels in one. In the first, Mauve Desert, fifteen-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor chasing fear and desire, cutting loose from her mother and her mother's lover, Lorna, in their roadside Mauve Motel. In the second book, Maudes Laures reads Mauve Desert, becomes obsessed with it, and embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning. The third book - Mauve, the horizon - is Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert. Like all good translations, it is both the same and revealingly different from the original.

Nicole Brossard's writing is agile and inventive; from moment to moment gripping, exhilarating and erotic. Her language drifts and swells like sand dunes in a desert, cresting and accumulating into a landscape that shifts like wind and words; she translates the practice of translation, the pulse of desire.

We are not where we need to be but, we ain't where we were is the first volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against that reports on active research engaged within the artistic professions and institutions since 2017. Its aim is to question the underlying neoliberal logics in the contemporary art world, by orienting our object of study towards the struggles that impact it. With this publication, our hope is to put into practice various values specific to the campaign: the existence of a systematic and fair remuneration, a desire for transparency, the sharing of knowledge, and the visibilization of demands proper to the field of the visual arts and concomitant struggles. It is the result of militant experiences, at the convergence of our individual experiences and collective questionings.

With texts by Tiphanie Blanc, Antonella Corsani, Fanny Lallart, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ramaya Tegegne and an interview with Outrage Collectif.

Living With Ghosts explores the ways the unresolved traumas of Africa’s colonial past, and its unfulfilled project of decolonisation, continue to haunt the present global order. The reader further expands on these complex ideas through philosophical, historical, and literary approaches. Reprinted texts by thinkers such as Achille Mbembe, C.L.R. James, and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni explore the historical experiences of the African postcolony and the problematics of decolonisation. Meditations on artists including John Akomfrah and Abraham Oghobase provide engaging entry points to their multi-layered artistic practices. Also featured are images of artworks in the exhibition and an in-depth conversation between Bouchra Khalili and KJ Abudu.

Texts by Achille Mbembe, Jacques Derrida, C.L.R. James, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, KJ Abudu, Emmanuel Iduma, Walter D. Mignolo, Avery F. Gordon, Adjoa Armah, Joshua Segun-Lean. Conversation with Bouchra Khalili and KJ Abudu.

Published here in a stunning edition with images created by Carson, several of the twenty-five startling poetic prose pieces have appeared in magazines and journals like The New Yorker and The Paris Review.

As Carson writes: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong.’”

In the late 1970s, Lindiwe Mabuza, a.k.a. Sono Molefe, sent out a call for poems written by women in anc camps and offices throughout Africa and the world. The book that resulted, published and distributed in Europe in the early 1980s, was banned by the apartheid regime.

Authorised by the editor, this re-issue of Malibongwe re-establishes a place for women artists in the history of South Africa's liberation. These are the struggles within the Struggle: a book that records the hopes and fears, the drives and disappointments, and the motivation and resilience of women at the front lines of the battle against apartheid. Here we see the evidence, too often airbrushed out of the narratives of national liberation, of a deep and unrelenting radicalism within women; of a dream of a South Africa in which not only freedom reigned, but justice too.

A warm-spirited elegy to an abandoned work, brilliantly comic and wryly contemplative, by one of the great artist-investigators of our time.

Originally published in 2008 in the groundbreaking Atelos series, To After That (TOAF) introduced a new kind of writing—somewhere between criticism and memoir and philosophy—that Renee Gladman has continued to explore in books like Calamities and My Lesbian Novel.

TOAF is a recuperative song, an effort to give space and life to an abandoned project, but it is also, itself, a beautiful meditation on process and distance and duration, and a reminder that time is the subject of any writing.