Thread Ripper

Co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, this incredible life-after-death novel asks us to consider how much of our memory, of our bodies, of the world as we know it ― how much of what we love can we lose before we are lost? And then what happens?

The heroine of the spare and haunting It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known―where she loved and was loved.

Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another.  A bracing writer of great nerve and verve, Anne de Marcken bends reality (and the reader’s mind) with throwaway assurance.

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Delivering a near-Beckettian whopping to the reader’s imagination, this is one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times.

“Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge is the third volume of Renee Gladman’s magnificent, melancholy series about the city-state of Ravicka, or about the architectures of its absence. It is tempting to read the Ravickian books as an extended allegory—of architecture itself, perhaps, except that architecture is already half-allegorical, its every element raised to prefigure whatever meanings can make their way to them. If any can. In Ravicka, meanings—indeed most contact of any kind—remain in abeyance, building, in absentia, the constitutive negative spaces of the narrative. There is a plot; it lays out zones of sheer ambience. Experiences, of which there are many, unfold as a redolent lingering in the structures of immateriality, the radical realities of the insubstantial. Gladman is a philosopher of architecture, though not that of buildings. Rather, she thinks (and writes) the drifts, partitions, and immobilities of identity, affect, communication, the very possibility of being human. Profound, compelling—haunting, even—the story of Ravicka is astonishingly ours.” - Lyn Hejinian

In the 2090s, Earth is somehow still here. Drones and clones are big business and Henries Ickles, debonair New Los Angeles infoarchitect, wants in on the action. Metaphysical theories are put into practice, invisible art is critiqued, quasicrystals are crafted, yogurt is spilled. From diplomatic misadventures with metallic herds in RealSweden to an underwater rendezvous in the free domes of MiamiVII, Ickles, ad Infinitum is a compendium of the exuberant and the abject, a refracted hologram of the absurdities of cultural production that swerves between incisive ode and knowing lampoon.

Mark von Schlegell has been pushing the envelope with independently-published experimental fiction and theory since the 1990s. He was born in New York, moved to L.A. in 2000, and currently lives in Cologne. His first novel, Venusia (Semiotext(e), 2005) was honor's listed for the Otherwise Award in Science Fiction.

The power of Sabahattin Ali comes from beyond his words. It is his sense of observation, insight and commitment to fight for a fairer society that have carried his voice into the modern day.

The four tales in this book - Death of the Giants, A Tale of Love, A Tale of Sheep and The Glass Pavilion - were compiled and published in Sırça Köşk [The Glass Pavilion] in 1947. At the time Sabahattin Ali penned these tales, the young Turkish Republic was still struggling to establish a proper democracy with one sole party in parliament. In 1948 the Turkish Council of Ministers decided to ban Sırça Köşk, and all remaining copies were swiftly confiscated. Even after his death, the words of Sabahattin Ali were deemed as a governmental threat and for decades publishers were reluctant to print his work.

Almost eighty years later, these political and social tales remain just as poignant. Does this showcase Sabahattin Ali’s visionary spirit or a general lack of vision within our societies?

Oh oh this is the first issue of Tongue Ring, a journal of experimental writing in English & French, with original contributions and translations of texts* by Ariana Reines*, CAConrad*, Camille Kingué, Kaur Alia Ahmed*, Rafael Moreno, Taos Bertrand, and Théo Robine-Langlois*. 

Vous voyez, c’est ça mon genre. Je ne sais pas ce que c’est. 
Mais c’est mon genre. J’ai cet esprit en moi—qui est très ému
par la féminité. Je pourrais me mettre à pleurer. Je veux poser
mon manteau par terre pour la laisser marcher dessus
—Ariana Reines

Premier numéro de la nouvelle revue fantastique et bilingue (FR + EN) d’écriture expérimentale Tongue Ring, avec des contributions originales ainsi que des traductions* de textes de Ariana Reines*, CAConrad*, Camille Kingué, Kaur Alia Ahmed*, Rafael Moreno, Taos Bertrand, and Théo Robine-Langlois*.