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Cover of Trans Girl Suicide Museum

Hesse Press

Trans Girl Suicide Museum

Hannah Baer

€16.00

One part ketamine spiral, one part confessional travelogue from the edge of gender, TGSM is a hallucinatory transmission on sex, identity, the internet, and the flickering wish not to exist in a given body at a given point in time. TGSM raises questions with which we have begun to negotiate broadly as a culture: what is actually happening to someone when they transition? how should we understand or describe such processes? what is the role of drugs, of hallucination, of imagination, in transition? is being a trans person in this moment in history, when the identity is ever more carefully traced [and tracked] by larger cultural forces, more liberated than before? 

Drawing its source material from chance encounters, wordless interactions in basements or bathrooms or hotel rooms, to archives of 20th century critical theory, sleepover secrets exchanged between old friends, rhetorical barbs deployed in the classrooms of elite universities, arguments on the phone with your parents across timezones, the nonverbal codes of high and low fashion, and scribbled notes on the backs of receipts for medicines you don't know how they work, TGSM is a morbid yet strangely hopeful meditation on the possibilities and meanings of gender variation in our time.

Hannah Baer runs the meme account @malefragility on instagram, and studies clinical psychology in new york city.

recommendations

Cover of London-rose — Beauty Will Save the World

Divided Publishing

London-rose — Beauty Will Save the World

Fanny Howe

Fiction €15.00

The story of failure asks one question only: What do people who lose do next? “Let the best one win.” War is one way. The other way is religion. Let me at the stakes. It’s so much a matter of patience. No fury, beyond all reason, no sequence broken, but diverted. Nothing seems to cooperate when you lose control. Blue becomes violet. Bend your head to the blank. The solution is so simple: don’t identify yourself with your description of yourself.

"It feels we aren’t reading prose but language that oscillates between liturgy and prayer." — Eugene Lim

Cover of E! Entertainment

Wonder Press

E! Entertainment

Kate Durbin

Fiction €18.00

In E! Entertainment, Kate Durbin zooms into the privileged dramas of MTV's The Hills and Bravo's Real Housewives, the public tragedies of Amanda Knox and Anna Nicole Smith. Durbin traces the migratory patterns of the flightiest members of our televised demimonde, from the vacant bedrooms of the Playboy Mansion to the modern gothic set of Kim Kardashian's fairytale wedding, rendering a fabulous, fallen world in all its hyperreal strangeness.

Cover of Joan of Arkansas

Ugly Duckling Presse

Joan of Arkansas

Emma Wippermann

Poetry €20.00

Joan of Arkansas is an election-season closet drama about climate catastrophe, divine gender expression, the instructions of angels, and heavenly revelation relayed via viral video. Fifteen-year-old Joan has been tasked by God (They/Them) to ensure that Charles VII (R–Arkansas) adopts radical climate policy and wins his bid as the Lord’s candidate to become the president of the United States. Arkansas is flooding, the West is burning, and borders are closed: “Heaven or / internet—it’s / hard to be / good.”

Winner of the 2023 Whiting Award for Drama.

Cover of Death Book ll

Baron Books

Death Book ll

Bruce LaBruce

LGBTQI+ €80.00

Death Book is dedicated to Bruce LaBruce’s archive of rarely published or previously unpublished work characterized by morbid fascinations. Here photographs challenge the viewer to explore what lies beneath the veneer of Western society.

The book brings this body of work together for the first time, combining LaBruce’s performances, actions, film production stills and photography that explicitly outline his obsessions, with never-before exhibited archival works from projects including Hustler White, Otto; or Up with Dead People, and L.A. Zombie.

The book is edited as loosely connected vignettes, characterised by horror, the carnage accelerated rather than overcome, questioning existing values, hierarchies, and perceptions of good and evil. A variety of faces and body parts appear, including those of actors Francois Sagat and Tiger Tyson, model/actor Tony Ward, artists Kembra Pfahler and Slava Mogutin, and cameos by legendary figures such as performance artist Ron Athey, musician/artists Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye, artist Dash Snow, actor Brad Renfro, Asia Argento and Bruce LaBruce himself.

The Death Book also introduces the art director Max Siedentopf, who has designed the book as a paraphrase of the Bible, punctured with three bullet holes, piercing the book from front to back. The book contains an introduction by artist, photographer and writer Slava Mogutin.

Cover of Cold Heaven

O Books

Cold Heaven

Camille Roy

Poetry €14.00

Cold Heaven joins two plays, Sometimes Dead is Better and Bye Bye Brunhilde, with an introduction by the author. Both plays have the dissonant, radical beauty of poetry.

As Roy writes in her Introduction to the book: “Plays are porous, written to be entered… Plays provide a frame for studying collisions… Language can be an (uncontrollable) character, moving in on the others, creating a stir… [I]n a play… the private self disappears. Writing can move out into the dead zone between any two people and test what is there.”

Imagine a Punch and Judy as lesbians whose domestic and sexual squabbles are paraded in the language of brilliant poets; these are Camille Roy's Fear and Technique. A wonderful play.