Skip to main content
rile*books

Search books

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

Cover of Vernon Subutex 1

FSG Originals

Vernon Subutex 1

Virginie Despentes

€16.00

From the provocative writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes comes volume one of her acclaimed trilogy of novels, Vernon Subutex—short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize. But who is Vernon Subutex?

Vernon Subutex was once the proprietor of Revolver, an infamous music shop in Paris, where his name was legend throughout Paris. By the 2000s, however, with the arrival of the internet and the decline in CD and vinyl sales, his shop is struggling, like so many others. When it closes, Subutex finds himself with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Before long, his savings are gone, and when the mysterious rock star who had been covering his rent suddenly drops dead of a drug overdose, Subutex finds himself launched on an epic saga of couch-surfing, boozing, and coke-snorting before finally winding up homeless. Just as he resigns himself to life as a panhandler, a throwaway comment he once made on Facebook takes the internet by storm.

The word is out: Subutex is lugging around a bunch of VHS tapes shot by that same dead rock musician—his last recordings on this earth. Soon a crowd of wild characters, from screen writers to social media groupies, from porn stars to failed musicians to random misfits, are hot on Vernon's trail . . . but Vernon is none the wiser.

Virginie Despentes is a writer and filmmaker. She worked in an independent record store in the early '90s, was a sex worker, and published her first novel, Baise Moi, when she was twenty-three. She adapted the novel for the screen in 2000, codirecting with the porn star Coralie Trinh Thi. Upon release, it became the first film to be banned in France in twenty-eight years. Despentes is the author of more than fifteen other works, including Apocalypse Baby, Bye Bye Blondie, Pretty Things, and the essay collection King Kong Theory.

recommendations

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 Drag King Dreams

Seal Press

Drag King Dreams

Leslie Feinberg

Fiction €23.00

Max Rabinowitz, a butch lesbian bartender at an East Village club, is shaken when her friend, a transvestite, is murdered. As the community of cross-dressers, drag queens, lesbians, and gay men stand together in the face of this tragedy, Max taps into the activist spirit she thought had disappeared.

Leslie Feinberg is an editor, writer, and political organizer. Stone Butch Blues, Feinberg's first novel, is an internationally acclaimed classic of trans literature. It won the Lambda Award and the American Library Association Lesbian and Gay Book Award. Feinberg's other works Trans Liberation, Trans Gender Warriors, and Transgender have also been at the forefront of the trans movement. Feinberg lives with her wife, Minnie Bruce Pratt, near New York City.

Cover of Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice: Queer Bibliographic Explorations

GenderFail

Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice: Queer Bibliographic Explorations

Be Oakley

Essays €21.00

Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice: Queer Bibliographic Explorations is a special expanded 5th edition centering on archiving as artistic practice. This manifesto talks to the core of GenderFail collecting and archiving practices that look to the softness as a metaphor for the material and content of artist-made publications. The GenderFail Archive Project is a socially engaged reading room that looks at archiving as practice. The project stems from GenderFail’s desire to share the publications from their personal library archive and give a platform to other publishers that they cherish. This publication features and highlights over a hundred artist books, art books, and zines.

This edition features a new section previously unpublished, showing bibliographies created for exhibitions and programs with the GenderFail Archive project at spaces such as Wendy's Subway, The Studio Museum of Harlem, and Cleveland Institute of Art's Reinberger Gallery.

This publication also features the 4th edition featured section showing seven curated GenderFail Archive Project reading lists from “Publishing Now,” a class I taught from 2021-2023 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. For this course, I wanted the students to read zines and publications being produced in real-time, so I started to digitize my collection as I acquired specific titles that I felt the students would resonate with. Many of the readings for this course were scanned from my collection of over 2,000 zines, artist books, and art books that make up the GenderFail archive. Since we could not meet in person (due to the pandemic), I spent hours scanning zines and artist books to be used as required readings for the course. Each reading list will accompany a link and QR code to read and engage with the complete scanned copies of all 31 featured artist books, art books, and zines.

The Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice: Queer Bibliographic Explorations, is among my most cherished project I’ve published of the over 125 editions I’ve designed and printed with GenderFail.

Cover of Textdemic: A Retrospective on Jenny Holzer’s Laments

GenderFail

Textdemic: A Retrospective on Jenny Holzer’s Laments

A.L. Steiner

Poetry €22.00

Textdemic | A Retrospective on Jenny Holzer’s Laments” Ed. by A.L. Steiner and GenderFail, a publication based on A.L. Steiner + Friends on Jenny Holzer at Dia Chelsea. This book is based on the Artists on Artists Lecture Series when the Dia Art Foundation invited Steiner to curate a public program based on a work of the artist's choice.

Steiner chose Jenny Holzer’s Laments and invited Morgan Bassichis, Riel Bellow, Gregg Bordowitz, Alexander Chee, Malik Gaines, Guadalupe Maravilla + Alexa Mishell Guillen, Lucas Michael, Eileen Myles and Pamela Sneed to present in Dia’s first in-person program after the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2021. This publication features records of the poems, lectures, and performances during this memorial program. The book's design plays homage to the 1990 Laments publication by the Dia Art Foundation.

For this publication, Steiner and GenderFail invited Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, Associate Curator at Dia Art Foundation and the organizer of the Artists on Artists Lecture Series, to write an afterword for the book. In this, she states: "Dispensing altogether with the monographic formula that characterizes the institution, for her Lecture A.L. Steiner convened a group of artists, writers, and activists to join her in responding to Jenny Holzer’s 1989 text-based installation, Laments. Holzer identified the thirteen texts that comprise Laments as 'voices of the dead,' a visual choir in response to the raging HIV/AIDS epidemic and government inaction. Over the protracted COVID-19 lockdown, Steiner developed the idea to organize an evening for the voices of the living to lament today's crises.”

Cover of The Waves

Mariner Books

The Waves

Virginia Woolf

Fiction €20.00

"I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me."

Innovative and deeply poetic, The Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece. It begins with six children—three boys and three girls—playing in a garden by the sea, and follows their lives as they grow up, experience friendship and love, and grapple with the death of their beloved friend Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing their inner lives: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando.