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Cover of Writing on Raving

OR Books

Writing on Raving

McKenzie Wark ed., Zoë Beery ed., Geoffrey Mak ed.

€20.00

Writing on Raving is the definitive mix of voices from the Brooklyn underground rave scene and beyond, providing fresh language for the shared and infinitely varied experience of dancing through the night until the morning.

New York rave culture is having a moment. The music, mostly, is techno, certain flavors of which became the soundtrack to a dancefloor culture that is queer in a different way to house music centered gay nightlife. Wark, Mak and Beery want to document and annotate and celebrate, but also critique, this world in the making. Writing on Raving centers the New York scene, but isn't limited to it.

This is a book for all of those who need the rave. Who need to dance. Who have at some point needed that beat in their lives. This is a book for all those who have journeyed through the night, through sound, through movement, through chemistry, into other places, other times, other encounters.

This seeking gives us hours, years, on the dance floor to think about why we rave, to locate these reasons in our bodies and the space around us. But the rave is not the place to articulate them. It is too loud; our friends are too distracted, or too high. At the afters, tired and drained and covered in schmutz, we think some more. We look around at our raver friends, and wonder: How did we get here? What happened to us? What is this tentacular, thrashing, swelling thing that we all made together? That thing that is now slumped and aching and coming down now into our fragmentary, singular lives

Between all of us, there are many answers to such questions. Wark, Mak and Beery have gathered their favorite ones to share in this first-ever anthology of writing on raving.

McKenzie Wark is a writer and scholar based in New York City. She is the author, among other things, of Raving (2023) and Life Story (2024).

Geoffrey Mak is the author of Mean Boys: A Personal History (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Zoë Beery is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, and a nightlife harm reduction organizer at parties and festivals in the U.S. and Europe.

Published in 2025 ┊ 260 pages ┊ Language: English

recommendations

Cover of Disobedience

JRP Editions

Disobedience

Jacqueline de Jong

Painting €42.00

Published to accompany the artist's retrospective at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (September 2025–March 2026), this comprehensive monograph offers a detailed overview of the work of Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong. Designed by Sabo Day and edited by Melanie Bühler, curator of the exhibition, this publication spans De Jong's entire artistic journey of from her editorial activities and bold figurative paintings of the 1960s to her "Billiards" series in the 1970s, and her latest series of the 2020s that reflect the current state of the world. 

It features new essays by Karen Kurczynski (Professor of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst), Emily LaBarge (writer and critic), Tiana Reid (Assistant Professor of English at York University), Paul Bernard (Director of Kunsthaus Biel), as well as an as-yet-unpublished conversation with the artist and McKenzie Wark (writer and theoretician). 

Organized through six sections entitled "Disobedience," "Publishing," "Chaos," "Pop," "Play," and "Politics," all lavishly illustrated, it underlines the challenging approach to art and life developed by De Jong formally, visually, and conceptually from the early 1960s until 2024.

Edited by Melanie Bühler
Texts by Emily LaBarge, Gianni Jetzer, Jacqueline de Jong, Karen Kurczynski, McKenzie Wark, Melanie Bühler, Paul Bernard, Tiana Reid.

Cover of GLEAN 7 - Spring 2025

GLEAN

GLEAN 7 - Spring 2025

Futurefarmers

Periodicals €20.00

Futurefarmers, Berlinde De Bruyckere, City Report Sofia, McKenzie Wark, Koyo Kouoh, Bas Smets, Aglaia Konrad, Hugo Roelandt, Candice Breitz, Otobong Nkanga, Sharjah Biennial, Charlie Porter, Subversive Film, 019, Emmanuel Van der Auwera.

Cover of When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader

Duke University Press

When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader

Susan Stryker, McKenzie Wark

LGBTQI+ €27.00

Susan Stryker is a foundational figure in trans studies. When Monsters Speak showcases the development of Stryker’s writing from the 1990s to the present. It combines canonical pieces, such as “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” with her hard to find earlier work published in zines and newsletters. Brought together, they ground Stryker’s thought in 1990s San Francisco and its innovative queer, trans, and S/M cultures. The volume includes an introduction by editor McKenzie Wark, who highlights Stryker’s connections to developments in queer theory, media studies, and autotheory while foregrounding Stryker’s innovative writing style and scholarly methods. When Monsters Speak is an authoritative and essential collection by one of the most important and influential intellectuals of our time.

Cover of Across the Acheron

Winter Editions

Across the Acheron

Monique Wittig

Fiction €20.00

In her darkly funny 1985 take on Dante’s Divine Comedy, acclaimed French writer and activist Monique Wittig restages the journey through the circles of hell, limbo, paradise from a lesbian feminist perspective. 

Never-before published in the US, Across the Acheron follows the adventures of “Wittig” and her anti-Virgilian guide through laundromats, billiard parlors, dyke bars, and picnic grounds of a 1980s San Francisco populated by hunters and their prey, lost souls, and fantastical beasts, including a robotic eagle and angelic bikers. Wittig reimagines Dante’s epic poem through a feminist and queer lens, subverting his cosmological order and upending gender identities and literary traditions. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig’s final novel back into print for the first time since the early-1990s, revised according to the author's notes, and with a new introduction by Sophie Lewis.

Across the Acheron is a work of lesbian struggle and triumph across two kinds of hell. The hell of the classic western literary canon—and the hell of San Francisco. Monique Wittig brings all of her writerly powers and political experience to bear here, as witness to the horrors of heterosexual patriarchy and also to the possibility of another world for another life. Her work is a rare combination of deeply felt materialism and radical linguistic freedom. If we're to have another world, we'll need to create another language. She knew that, and she lived it.” McKenzie Wark

“Even in fiction Monique Wittig’s writing is critical, prescient, brilliant, satirical, searing, and way ahead of its time. I’m so glad this work is back in circulation to revisit and revel in.” Pamela Sneed

“In this unendurable yet compelling journey through the circles of patriarchal hell, Wittig encounters hordes of tortured women who do not struggle against their oppressors. Their brainwashing is as difficult to witness as their bloodied flesh. Only through communal activism does the seeker’s soul becomes tough enough to enter Paradise, where bare-breasted angels dismount motorcycles and offer baskets of 'cherries, strawberries, raspberries, apricots, peaches, plums, tomatoes, avocados, green melons, cantaloupes, watermelons, lemons, pawpaws, pineapples and coconuts.’ The bounties of Across the Acheron are lush and many.” Dodie Bellamy

“A Guernica of the human (feminist) condition, a blacker, bleaker, more vengeful Alice’s tea party, this is a novel as graphic as a painting, whose brilliance its translators have creditably preserved.” Publishers Weekly

Introduction by Sophie Lewis
Translated by David Le Vay with Margaret Crosland

Cover of À perte de mère – Sur les routes atlantiques de l'esclavage

Brook

À perte de mère – Sur les routes atlantiques de l'esclavage

Saidiya Hartman

Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.

Saidiya Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, is a scholar of African American literature and cultural history.

Preface by Maboula Soumahoro.

Translated from the English (American) by Maboula Soumahoro (original title: Lose Your Mother. A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

Cover of Snow Business

Isollari

Snow Business

Philippa Snow

Essays €17.00

A collection of Philippa Snow's most celebrated writings, articulating with majestic precision the thorny, unbreakable bond between mass media, popular culture and art.
Snow Business marks Philippa Snow's emergence as one of the twenty-first century's greatest cultural critics. From the 2000s into the 2010s, reality television and "second-screen media," designed to play in the background while we look at phones, have proliferated, inaugurating the dumbient age. Celebrities have never been more ordinary; there have never been so many ordinary people who are celebrities.

A collection of her writing from the last half-decade, Snow Business articulates with majestic precision the thorny, unbreakable bond between mass media, popular culture and art. The memoirs of Pamela Anderson and the Kardashian sisters are just as worthy exemplars of "autofiction" as the writing of Olivia Laing and Annie Ernaux; Spring Breakers has succeeded in updating The Great Gatsby; and we are still afraid of Francis Bacon.

Snow has no interest in distinctions of high and low culture. If masterpieces of fiction, painting and cinema reflect back to us some vital and mysterious part of ourselves, mass-distributed popular culture does the same thing, and often with greater clarity and violence—if we are only brave enough to look. Fortunately, Snow does the looking for us.

Alongside her essays are also works of fiction, vignettes whose protagonists are actors, singers, child stars. These are strange, sometimes conspiratorial, and often nightmarish. Just as Snow Business can describe culture with stunning clarity, it can inhabit culture's moving parts, making it again something indescribable, a sensuous vision, a complete fever dream.

Philippa Snow is a writer whose work has redefined contemporary criticism through her analysis of popular culture, art, and media. Her work regularly appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, The New Republic, The Nation, The White Review, and the Financial Times. She is the author of Which As You Know Means Violence (Repeater, 2022), Trophy Lives (Mack, 2024), and It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me (Virago, 2025). Through her keen examination of reality television, celebrity culture, and high art, Snow illuminates the increasingly blurred boundaries between popular entertainment and artistic expression in the twenty-first century.

Cover of After Sex

Silver Press

After Sex

Alice Spawls, Edna Bonhomme

Essays €18.00

Who decides what happens after sex? The last decade has seen many significant changes to the laws governing women’s reproductive rights around the world, from liberalisation in Ireland to new restrictions in the USA. After Sex offers personal and political perspectives from the mid-20th century to the present day, setting feminist classics alongside contemporary accounts. These essays, short stories and poems trace the debates and tell the stories; together, they ask us to consider what reproductive justice might look like, and how it could reshape sex.

The writers pay special attention to people — both fictional and real — who have sought control over their sexual lives, and the joy, comedy, difficulties and disappointments that entails. But above all, After Sex testifies to the power of great writing to show us why that freedom is worth pursuing — without shame and without apology.

With contributions from: 
Lauren Berlant, Joanna Biggs, Edna Bonhomme, Gwendolyn Brooks, Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, Storm Cecile, Lucille Clifton, Rachel Connolly, T.L. Cowan, ’Jane Does’, Maggie Doherty, Nell Dunn, Andrea Dworkin, Anne Enright, Deborah Friedell, Tracy Fuad, Kristen Ghodsee, Vivian Gornick, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Barbara Johnson, Jayne Kavanagh, Lisa Hallgarten and Angela Poulter, Jamaica Kincaid, Patricia Knight, R.O. Kwon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Natasha Lennard, Sophie Lewis, Audre Lorde, Amelia Loulli, Erin Maglaque, Holly Pester, Adrienne Rich, Denise Riley, Sally Rooney, Loretta J. Ross, Madeleine Schwartz, SisterSong, Sophie Smith, Annabel Sowemimo, Amia Srinivasan, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Alice Walker and Bernard Williams.