Books

East Pakistan, 1971. On their way to visit their mother, two sisters, Lucky and Jamila, are captured by Pakistani soldiers and thrown into a world of horror.

Locked in a room in an unknown village-turned-camp by the river, the women look through a lone barred window onto white jasmines blooming day and night. Meanwhile, around the camp, deadly guerrilla fighters from the Bengali Mukti Bahini gather to take back territory from the Pakistan Army.

As Bangladesh crowns painfully into the world, Lucky and Jamila must choose between heartbreak and secrecy to return from an unspoken violence.

Saima Begum is a British-Bangladeshi writer based in North London. She won the MFest Short Story Competition in 2021. The First Jasmines is her first novel.

The prequel to Love Me Tender, narrating Debré's transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian and writer.

I see all her beauty, I see the beauty of women. I see my own body, new. I tell myself there are so many things that are possible.

First published in France in 2018, Playboy is the first volume of Constance Debré's renowned autobiographical trilogy that describes her decision, at age forty-three, to abandon her marriage, her legal career, and her bourgeois Parisian life to become a lesbian and a writer.

The novel unfolds in a series of short, sharp vignettes. The narrator's descriptions of her first female lovers—a married woman fifteen years older than her, a model ten years her junior—are punctuated by encounters with her ex-husband, her father, and her son.

As Debré recently told Granta: “It was a bit like Saint Augustine and his conversion. In the same week, I had sex with a girl and I had the feeling that I could write. I had this incredible feeling that I could catch things, that life was there to be caught.”

Looking at the world through fresh eyes, the narrator of Playboy questions everything that once lay beneath the surface of her well-managed life. Laconic, aggressive, and radically truthful, she examines gender and marriage, selfishness and sacrifice, money and family, even the privilege inherent in her downward mobility.

Writing her way toward her own liberation, Debré chronicles the process that made her one of the most brilliant, important French writers today.

Collected writings, artworks and manifestos outlining the developments in Indigenous cinema and its most adventurous practitioners. 

Founded in 2018, COUSIN Collective is dedicated to promoting Indigenous artists working with the moving image. Temporal Territories is the collective's critical anthology on Indigenous experimental cinema, bringing together new works, reprints of key writings, theoretical interventions, artist portfolios, intergenerational dialogues and manifestos. With topics ranging from science fiction to found-footage filmmaking to the strange case of the DeMille Indians, the volume surveys a varied and vital body of work, and suggests new forms still to come.

As COUSIN writes in their introduction, "We hope this collection can be something like a celebration, a point along your path that fosters conversations and connections. ...There are no rules to this thing, and you are not alone."

Contributors include: Raven Chacon, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Lou Cornum, Grace Dillon, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Miguel Hilari, Sky Hopinka, Kite, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Pedro Neves Marques, Fox Maxy, Michael Metzger, Jas M. Morgan, Caroline Monnet, Shelley Niro, Adam Piron, Tiare Ribeaux, Diana Flores Ruíz, Walter Scott, Girish Shambu, Paul Chaat Smith, Adam Spry, Elizabeth Weatherford.

This book was published in conjunction with COUSIN Collective.

Special edition: 100 out of 300 books are reworked by making cutouts in the book.

Highly acclaimed in Denmark, Girlbeast is a fearless, unsettling, and poetic reimagining of the Lolita narrative, where power shifts unpredictably, and desire and coercion become indistinguishable. In a world that fetishises girlhood, it asks whether a girl be blamed for internalising the roles imposed upon her? Can she wield her youth as power in a system designed to render her powerless?

With sharp, fast-paced prose and an addictive plot, Cecilie Lind crafts a daring examination of female agency, sexuality, and the complexities of consent. The novel evokes the idea of the girl as animal – a creature conditioned to be both docile pet and wild beast, torn between submission and rebellion, innocence and desire.

Brave, provocative, and unflinching, Girlbeast is a gripping, vital novel for our times.

WINNER OF THE 2023 DANISH CRITICS PRIZE, SHORTLISTED FOR THE DR NOVEL PRIZE, MONTANA’S LITERATURE PRIZE & THE JYLLANDS-POSTEN FICTION PRIZE

Cecilie Lind (b. 1991) studied at Forfatterskolen (The Danish Academy of Creative Writing), and debuted in 2010 with The Wolf Ate My Eyeliner. Lind’s breakthrough in Denmark came with the publication of the highly acclaimed book-length poem My Child, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Critic’s Prize and the Politiken’s Literary Award. She was awarded The Native Language Prize in 2020, and Girlbeast won the Danish Critics Prize in 2023. Lind’s most recent novel, Bristefærdig (Ripe), was published to critical acclaim in 2025.

Hazel Evans (b. 1994) is an artist, writer and literary translator based near Aarhus, Denmark. She was the 2022/23 emerging translator for Danish to English at the National Centre for Writing, and her debut translation, Into a Star by Puk Qvortrup, was published by Hamish Hamilton. In 2024, she received The Inger and Jens Bruun Translation Prize for her translation of Rasmus Daugbjerg’s Troll, forthcoming from Penguin Press.

Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, Dao Strom’s Yellow Songs vibrates with the ramifications and ripples of Empire. Each of the four Yellow Songs books reckons with the intimate consequences of the colonial project, reconfiguring them into complex and lucid, literal and figurative songs of selfhood. Embodied, critical, wholehearted, collective, personal, genre-defying—Yellow Songs renders the brute force of history with tender precision. Art book quality printing in full color with felt paper inserts.

Yellow Songs 1: Voiced-Voiceless unearths, unwinds, un-bodies the violence of stigma, reclaiming the ventriloquized voice of David Bowie's "China Girl” through a lyric-critical essaying (assaying) of cultural tropes, racialized and gendered power plays, and memory.

In collaboration with Laurent Poleo-Garnier, NIGHTNIGHT is an archive of images and texts from different sources addressing the theme of the night. Over the book as a party that degenerates with fatigue, alcohol and other stimulants, images and layout deteriorate, the subjects get tired, the vision is cloudy...

Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

Palestine is a microcosm of the on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple dignity for the Palestinian.

A visual and text based investigation led by Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili during many years following the traces left by the Mouvement des travailleurs arabes, a group fighting for the rights of the Arab workers in France at the turn of the 1970s. 

Khalili focused her attention on the theatre groups Al Assifa and Al Halaka who were created in this political environment. The publication unfolds from The Circle (2023), a video installation shown for the first time at the 15th Sharjah Biennale (2023), at Macba (2023) and at the Luma Foundation (in Arles in 2023-2024 and Zurich in 2025).

The book is published in conjunction with Bouchra Khalili's exhibitions as guest visual artist of the Festival d'Automne in Paris in 2025.

Texts by KJ Abudu, Bouchra Khalili, Mohamed Amer Meziane, Abdellali Hajjat ; interviews with Saïd Bouziri, Hedi Akkari, Smaïne Idri, Mustapha Mohammadi, Philippe Tancelin, Mia Radford, Lucas Yahiaoui.

Publication including the films Transformation Scenario, 70.001, and Faux Terrain, as well as a visual essay, a glossary and texts by Heike Geißler, Fanni Fetzer, and Franciska Zólyom.

“When I visited the Elias Canetti archive at the Zentralbibliothek Zurich, I was looking for manuscripts and sketches for his major work Crowds and Power (1960). I imagined that Canetti must have made drawings, as the behaviour of the various crowd types he identified was described in such detail. I hoped that these drawings would help me transfer the group behaviour he describes to virtual figures in an animated film.

The archive of manuscripts, arranged by Elias Canetti himself, was handed over to the Zurich library and contains the notes and sketches he completed during the development of Crowds and Power, a period of almost forty years. However, in this context I found no drawings—Canetti had only made graphic lists on various themes. So where did Canetti's precise descriptions of the scenes come from?”

Clemens von Wedemeyer (born 1974 in Göttingen, lives and works in Berlin) creates films, videos and media installations poised between reality and fiction, reflecting power structures in social relations, history and architecture.

Edited by Fanni Fetzer and Franciska Zólyom.
Texts by Heike Geißler, Fanni Fetzer, Franciska Zólyom.

Set against a backdrop of trans life that begins with her own transition in the 1960s, Vivian Blaxell takes us on a witty and expansive sweep through history, from Australia to Japan, to Hawai’i to Mexico, to heretofore unmapped regions of the mind. In seven devastatingly intelligent parts, her essay covers a vast range in time and space — from the arson of a Japanese temple to a transformative encounter with a coral reef, from Nietzsche and Hegel to Indigenous metaphysics, from a perplexing relationship with a beautiful man to the unknowable minds of animals. Fleshy and philosophical, searching and exalted, utterly distinctive and assured, Worthy of the Event belatedly establishes Vivian Blaxell as one of the major writers of her generation.

In these essays, Ben Burgis criticizes fashionable radical-liberal identity politics and makes the case for universalism about rights and an unabashedly “class-first” approach to socialist political strategy. This may sound to some ears like a call for abandoning marginalized people. On the contrary, he argues, focusing on economic inequality empowers the victims of bigotry and retrograde social practices the resources and material security to stand up for themselves far more effectively than any diversity trainer or “anti-racism” consultant could represent their interests. As we face a rising tide of reactionary authoritarianism, it’s more important than ever to ditch the identitarian pieties of the recent past and think hard about how the Left can actually win.

Yoko Tawada's first essay collection in English presents and electrifying new side of the National Book Award-winner as she dives deep into her lifelong fascination with cross-hybridizing languages. The accent here, as in her fiction, is on the art of drawing closer to the world through defamiliarization. Tawada famously writes in both Japanese and German, but her interest in language reached beyond any mere dichotomy. 

The term "exophonic," which she first heard in Senegal, has a special allure for the author: "I was already familiar with similar terms. 'immigrant literature,' or 'creole literature,' but 'exophonic' had a much broader meaning, referring to the general experience of existing outside of one's mother tongue." Exophony opens a new vista into Yoko Tawada's world and delivers more of her signature erudite wit—at once cross-grained and generous, laser-focused and multidimensional, slyly ironic and warmly companionable.

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025. Translated from Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda.

The My Comrade Anthology collects pages from past issues of My Comrade selected by Linda Simpson, printed in a substantial 256-page volume on newsprint.

My Comrade was an underground gay culture zine that set itself apart from the deluge of Xeroxed zines popping up in New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Through parody of both mainstream tabloid magazines and the self-serious gay press, a campy and ironic sensibility, and radical left sympathies and sloganeering, My Comrade captured the zeitgeist of the gay downtown scene. Publishing 11 issues between 1987 and 1994, and three issues since, My Comrade documents the last years of underground gay culture before marriage equality and representation at elite levels of American society became the primary drivers of gay politics and aesthetic production. My Comrade was briefly revived from 2004 to 2006, and again on the occasion of the exhibition “My Comrade Magazine: Happy 35th Gay Anniversary” at Howl! in 2022.

"Having a party (hope you will be there)", is a catalogue of an exhibition organized by Mickael Marman and D&TLG at CFAlive in Milan with artists from the black European diaspora, including original contributions, photos of the show, as well as a brand new intro text by Olamiju Fajemisin.

In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression. Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters – the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost – that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.

Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize.

An epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor. 

In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men "buy him things," lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to see what happens, landlords turn tenants out, and Turner writes poetic tracts to friends about it. Part pornography, part novel, all love letter, A Queen in Bucks County is an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out.

2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST

A collection of linked essays concerned with the life and mind of the writer by one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. Each essay takes a day as its point of inquiry, observing the body as it moves through time, architecture, and space, gradually demanding a new logic and level of consciousness from the narrator and reader.

"Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer—she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes."
—Eileen Myles

WINNER of the 2017 Firecracker Award for Nonfiction from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP).

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, geographies, and syntaxes as they play out in the interstices of poetry and prose. She is the author of ten published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians; Calamities, a collection of linked essays on writing and experience, which won the 2017 Firecracker Award in Nonfiction; and a monograph of ink drawings, Prose Architectures. She lives in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.

A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story.

With an introduction by Theo Downes-Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss and Kelly Link.

Steering the Craft is Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier bag of the tools of a writer’s craft: how – and why – to write. From the sound of language to tenses to point of view, Le Guin offers a comprehensive and generous guide to the fundamental components of narrative, illustrating her incisive analysis with examples from some of her favourite writers. Revised and updated for the twenty-first century, this handbook includes exercises that the writer can do alone or in a group.

With echoes of Shirley Hazzard and Virginia Woolf, a new novel of startling intelligence from prize–winning author Michelle de Kretser, following a woman looking back on her young adulthood, and grappling with the collision of her emotions and her values.

In the late 1980s, the narrator of Theory & Practice—a first generation immigrant from Sri Lanka who moved to Sydney in her childhood—sets up a life in Melbourne for graduate school. Jilted by a lover who cheats on her with another self-described "feminist," she is thrown into deeper confusion about her identity and the people around her.

The narrator begins to fall for a man named Kit, who is in a “deconstructed relationship” with a woman named Olivia. She struggles to square her feminism against her jealousy toward Olivia—and her anti-colonialism against her feelings about Virginia Woolf, whose work she is called to despite her racism.

What happens when our desires run contrary to our beliefs? What should we do when the failings of revered figures come to light? Who is shamed when the truth is told? In Theory & Practice, Michelle de Kretser offers a spellbinding meditation on the moral complexities that arise in this gap. Peopled with brilliantly drawn characters, the novel also stitches together fiction and essay, taking up Woolf’s quest for adventurous literary form.

Past Words is three books in one: a collection of previously published texts and two exhibition-like experiments: A Year with Prem Krishnamurthy at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and Endless Exhibition at the Kunsthal Gent. These parts are iinterconnected but distinct, not least because each is designed by a different designer—Ann Richter, David Knowles, Mark Foss & Valentijn Goethals. Together, they chart the past—and future—of a peripatetic performance of a practice, taking stock of a fifteen-year period through writing, a medium that 1s both primary and secondary. This writing is about design, about curating, about exhibition-making, and about how all three are themselves forms of storytelling. They allow us to draft narratives that stand just to the side of accepted realities, to sneak wild ideas into the world with the hope they may—with time—turn into facts. 

Based in Berlin and New York, designer and curator Prem Krishnamurthy (born 1977) is head of the artist group Department of Transformation and of the design consultancy Wkshps. In 2015 he was the recipient of the Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Award for Communication essDesign. As both creator and curator, Krishnamurthy aims to discover “how art & design can be agents of transformation for individuals, communities and institutions.” 

With an introduction by Krist Gruijthuijsen.

A new book by poet-activist CAConrad combining essay, memoir and (Soma)tic poetry rituals. Documenting the pervasive homophobic violence of the 1980s and the overwhelming losses of AIDS, this work is an unwavering testament to queer resilience. CA’s text forms a resounding incantation to friends and lovers lost. SIN BUG is the first book published as part of the Open Narratives series.

he wrote “I have AIDS
and kissed this wall”
X marked the spot
I wrote “I’m not afraid”
and kissed him back
wherever he is

CAConrad has been writing poems for more than 50 years and working with (Soma)tic poetry rituals for over 20 years. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). The Book of Frank is available in 9 different languages, most recently French and Italian. They also exhibit poems as sculpture with recent shows in London, Melbourne, Porto, Santander, and Tucson. Please visit them online at CAConrad.com.

Wound Building is a volume of essays, with digressions, on one group of contemporary poets active in a self-organizing political poetry scene in the UK, most of whom have little to no audience outside of the little magazines that they publish and the reading series they put on. The book is a front-line report on the rapid development of this poetry in the period between 2015 and 2020, with a particular focus on the relationship of poetry to violence and its representation. The poets discussed here write violent love poems and violent elegies as well as violent fantasies composed in stabs of violent verse and violet prose. The poems themselves comprise fantasies of killing David Cameron, dreams of being split open along a seam, basement songs, hundreds of pages of notes on working life in a privatized care home in Hove, East Sussex, a four-line slogan about the Cologne groping scandal of New Year 2016, variations on the Refugees Medical Phrasebook, a life wasted in a factory in Guangzhou, an autobiographical sci-fi internet fever dream, an anarchist elegy, and a refusal to argue. Ultimately, Hayward argues that the lessons this poetry teaches is never to write a "worthy" narrative when a fucked up collage will do. Rather than a cohesive "account" of a "school" of poets, or a "contribution" to the boring tittle-tattle of aesthetic debates over British poetry as an institution, Wound Building is a front-line report on the local disasters of a contemporary UK poetry caught in the grip of the historical cataclysm of capitalist culture.

Wound Building is further concerned with aesthetic problems related to Marxism, anarchism, contemporary trans politics, and class, though its "theoretical" preoccupations are subordinated to its desire to provide a ground-level view on the writing itself, its production, its intellectual aporia, and the ways it finds itself outstripped by the ongoing "march of events." The book will be of interest not only for those concerned with contemporary British political and experimental poetry, but also more generally for anyone who wishes to think carefully about what it means to make art about present-day history and its many horrible enormities.

The book's title is derived from the idea of sublime woundedness that subtends the context of the poets discussed here: the impressions of wounds opening up like LED-lit shopfronts in the night, in a parallel universe in which injury is intoxicatingly impersonal and structural, and which forms the environment in which the poems fight to absolutize the value of every last breath, or face into the reality of extravagantly violent wish fulfillment, or dissolve themselves in a search for new ways of professing love, or transform into a kind of expressionism of vomiting up medical-diagnostic categories found in abstract social labor, or pump their verses full of the convulsive rhythms of surprise and sudden relief, without any guarantee that this is the right thing to do or that anyone will even fucking hear. Wound Building does not historicize this state of affairs as much as it attempts to live alongside the immediacy of this work, in order to see what is still possible for poetry, and criticism, to make and do.

“in the coherence, we weep is both an artist book and an exhibition. The project is about the critical potential of incoherencies. It is an attempt to map methodology across media, while welcoming glitches that allow for moments of critical self-reflection and knowledge production. Developed in parallel, the book and exhibition critically reflect on each other’s approaches. It looks at strategies for how text can be alive and vibrant across various architectural contexts as well as those used in the artist’s family archive, particularly annotation, redaction, indexing, blurring, and learning through reading and writing.” - KW Institute for Contemporary Art

“Multilayering was in that sense an important aspect, which got translated with the material and the design by choosing papers with differents gradients of transparency, as well as interfering and overlapping text layouts. We also designed the cover with a blue scratch off drawing on top of another artwork, so every book might change a bit over time depending on the use. This reflects the artist‘s idea of including the audience and an ever changing oeuvre, where the relation between pieces become important too.” - Studio Pandan

Texts by Dr. Christina Landbrecht, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Sofie Krogh Christensen, Chang Yuchen, Ladi'Sasha Jones

This artist book is published on the occasion of Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research 2022 solo exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2023).