Books

How To Become est une maison d'édition autogérée basée à Paris. Nous publions les textes d'auteuces engagés dans des pratiques féministes et peu diffusés par le réseau des grandes maisons d'édition françaises.

Créée en 2016, elle est composée d'artistes et écrivaires en majorité gouines, HTB publie de la litterature expérimentale née d'influences post-post- sapphiques ainsi qu'un choix de tradu d'auteuices non traduites en langue française. HTB s'articule autour d'ateliers d'écriture: How to Become a Lesbian, et d'une revue annuelle publiant les choses issues de l'atelier.

Before making his first films in the 1950s, Chris Marker was a regular contributor to the Paris-based magazine Esprit from 1946 to 1952. Unbound by genre or form, Marker's pieces range from short stories, essays, poems, and reviews to fabricated reportage and invented news affairs, all gemmed with the hallmarks of his style: a blurring of reality and imagination, a wry sense of humor, a sustained political engagement, and, of course, a limitless curiosity for animal life.

Eternal current events marks the first time these exemplary works are available in English, published in an adapted facsimile of the original periodical. In these short selections, what one encounters is less a past life before his turn toward cinema than a preamble to his celebrated body of work. Moving images did not replace Marker’s production as a writer but were incorporated into it. Before the “imaginary films” there were “imaginary current events”; before the travels through time in La Jetée there was a bulletin rethinking the psychogeography of the around-the-world trip; and before the musings on a Japanese temple consecrated to cats in Sans Soleil, there was a summary report on the theological implications of the 1952 Parisian Cat Fair. Marker did not just begin his career as a writer, he remained one throughout his life.

La sexualité comme un problème proprement philosophique de la psychanalyse.

La satisfaction de parler contient en soi une clé de la satisfaction sexuelle (et non l'inverse) – une clé de la sexualité et de ses propres contradictions. Alenka Zupančič aborde la question de la sexualité comme un problème proprement philosophique de la psychanalyse – celle de Freud et de Lacan – et non celle des praticiens cliniciens tels que décrits par Lacan « orthopédistes de l'inconscient ». Que se passe-t-il, comme l'affirme Lacan, si nous pouvons obtenir exactement la même satisfaction que le sexe par la parole, l'écriture, la peinture, la prière ou autres activités ? Il ne s'agit pas d'expliquer la satisfaction que procure la parole en indiquant son origine sexuelle, mais bien de souligner que la satisfaction de parler est elle-même sexuelle.

Alenka Zupančič soutient que la sexualité est à la limite d'un « circuit court » entre ontologie et épistémologie. La sexualité et le savoir sont structurés autour d'une négativité fondamentale qui les unit au point de l'inconscient. L'inconscient (en tant que lien avec la sexualité) est le concept d'un lien inhérent entre l'être et la connaissance dans leur négativité même.

Alenka Zupančič est une philosophe lacanienne, spécialiste renommée de Nietzsche, professeure à l'European Graduate School / EGS et à l'Université de Nova Gorica, Slovénie. Elle est également research advisor et professeure à l'Institut de philosophie du Centre de recherche de l'Académie slovène des Sciences et des Arts. Avec Slavoj Žižek et Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupančič est l'une des figures les plus incontournables de l'Ecole de psychanalyse théorique de Ljubljana dont les travaux s'intéressent aux relations entre sexualité, ontologie et inconscient, à la critique de la théorie du sujet et à l'exploration théorique du concept lacanien du Réel.

In Bab Al-Saha, a quarter of Nablus, Palestine, sits a house of ill repute. In it lives Nuzha, a young woman ostracized from and shamed by her community. When the Intifada breaks out, Nuzha’s abode unexpectedly becomes a sanctuary for those in the quarter: Hussam, an injured resistance fighter; Samar, a university researcher exploring the impact of the Intifada on women’s lives; and Sitt Zakia, the pious midwife.

In the furnace of conflict at the heart of the 1987 Intifada, notions of freedom, love, respectability, nationhood, the rights of women, and Palestinian identity—both among the reluctant residents of the house and the inhabitants of the quarter at large—will be melted and re-forged. Vividly recounted through the eyes of its female protagonists, Passage to the Plaza is a groundbreaking story that shatters the myth of a uniform gendered experience of conflict.

A virtuosic inquiry into the forms and uses of healing, from ancient and modern medicine to contemporary literature, ecology, and protest.

In the era of the “chronic acute” long predating COVID-19, Eleni Stecopoulos set out to investigate the imagination, aesthetics, and ideology of healing—its mysteries and mystifications, its many channels and codes. Fusing lyric inquiry with cultural criticism, Dreaming in the Fault Zone explores art’s treatment of our conditions at a time of both increased cynicism about healing and longing for it. Stecopoulos talks to physicians, poets, psychotherapists, disability activists, ethnographers, spiritual seekers; curates performances and takes part in community rituals; documents pilgrimages and visits therapeutic landscapes. Whether writing about the poet H.D.’s psychoanalysis with Freud or madness and apartheid in Bessie Head’s novel A Question of Power, the salve of demagogues or a global alliance of people with contested illnesses, Stecopoulos confronts the poetics and politics of affliction, empathy, memory, and survival. Weaving together esoteric scenes and everyday practice, with flashes of humor, these essays travel in a space of impasse and unending experiment.

A punk rock anti-memoir told through the eyes of a biracial Afrolatino punk academic. 

¡PÓNK! follows Moose, an alienated academic and lead guitarist for Pipebomb!, as he navigates through spaces in and out of South East Los Angeles: punk clubs, college classrooms, family gatherings, street protests, and euphoric backyard shows.Oscillating between autofiction, memoir, and lyric, Clayton blurs genres while articulating the layered effects of racism, trauma, immigration, policing, Black hair, performance, and toxic academic language to uncover how one truly becomes an "ally." Borrowing from the spatial lyricism of Claudia Rankine, the genre-bending storytelling of Alexander Chee, and the racial musings of James Baldwin, ¡PÓNK!'s narrative takes back punk rock and finds safe space in the mosh pit.

Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) Pauline Oliveros' life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others' sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the '50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960's she influenced American music profoundly through her inclusive work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.

She founded 'Deep Listening(R), ' which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. She described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. 'Deep Listening is my life practice, ' Oliveros explained, simply. Oliveros founded Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation, now the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer, NY. Her creative work is currently disseminated through Pauline Oliveros Publications and the Ministry of Maåt, Inc

The Consequences is a hybrid collection of prose and poetry; an autofictional examination of the pain of a transatlantic relocation from New York to the blanketing beige of Paris to rejoin a totemic muse. It also focuses on corgi attacks, Maryland, painful anxiety, the struggle to accept the things one cannot change, the third party and the past as adamantine shackles. The "towering sexual iconography of Mike Immerman" looms over the disorientation of a reluctant resident in “the City of Light.”

The festival is a space of communion and celebration, a romanticized collision of bodies, music and magic. The revolution will look like a festival, we’ve been told by philosophers, writers, artists, and marketers. But the festival is also, of course, the space of formalizing ideology, ritualizing the consumption and violence that propels existing structures of power. 

This poetry collection views the migrant, female body as both the glorified and martyred totem of the festival-of-all-festivals we call globalization. Drawing from sources such as Sigmund Freud, James George Frazer, H.D., the Situationist International, seventeenth century narratives of Dutch sailors shipwrecked on the Korean peninsula, the rise of K-pop and the “Korean Wave,” and a zoo-breaking gorilla named Bokito, Festival features kaleidoscopic poetic sequences aiming to show that if anything universal is to be found in lyric poetry’s “I,” it is the result of centuries-long entanglements and contaminations, and of the bodies made to bear these exchanges, to give birth to this century’s globalized subject.

“FESTIVAL is an ode to both beauty and misery. Mia You’s ingenious poetry will have you laughing through your tears. Do NOT miss out!”
— Yael van der Wouden

"She reanimates the form-of-life which is a poem with a feminist skepticism, without foreclosing her robustly idealist commitment to poetry’s continuance"
— Lisa Robertson

Andrew Berardini on Artificial Intelligence; Pepón Osorio; Arash Nassiri; Gloria E. Anzaldúa; Marcela Guerrero speaks with C. Ondine Chavoya; Daisy Lafarge; Dani Blanga Gubbay; Davide Stucchi speaks with Alex Bennett; Luca Lo Pinto on Hanuman Editions; Reynaldo Rivera & Abdellah Taïa; Jungle Books...

This issue comes with different covers, randomly distributed.

The book Posting brings together a selection of feminist posters from Dutch archives to reflect on posting as an activist strategy, holding the potential to create counter-publics to mainstream culture and to fight against the erasure, exoticization, or tokenism of bodies and experiences that deviate from normative preconceptions.

As is the case for many professions, in the history of Dutch graphic design the absence of women, non-binary, queer, Black designers is striking. This doesn’t only point back to systematic processes of exclusion in the first place, but also to the biases at play regarding whose work is remembered and archived. While efforts have been made to add forgotten names to the existing canon, the many posters, flyers and other printed matter shelved in queer and feminist archives remind us to question the notion of single authorship altogether and instead study graphic design as a decisively collaborative and transdisciplinary practice, which is especially true for community-led and volunteer-based projects.

The posters featured in this book point to this rich landscape of feminist organizing, and were found at the International Institute of Social History and the International Archive for the Women’s Movement (IAV-Atria) in Amsterdam.

A collection of brief descriptions of Toine's movement performances- and installations since 1979. The book, that started four years ago as a possible form in which Toine's ephemeral works could live on, gradually developed into a writing project about movement and the imaginative power of language.

Each of the 120 selected works has been translated in the most concise way into words and sentences.

Because of the possible role that the book could play in the discussion about conserving and documenting volatile works of art, Toine included related texts by other writers who directly or indirectly responded  to my writing: Marcus Bergner  Hannes Böhringer  Florian Cramer  Jan Van Den  Dobbelsteen  Nell Donkers  Tim Etchells  Ger Groot  Geert Koevoets Thomas Körtvelyessy  Dom H. van der Laan  Dick Raaijmakers  Jan Laurens Siesling  Sandra Smets  Hans Stevens  ieke Trinks  Samuel Vriezen  Ciel Werts - Emilie Gallier 
Editing and text advice   Kathrin Wolkowicz  Dick van Teylingen

translations:  Simon Benson  Maaike Trimbach  Samuel Vriezen  Helen Adkins  Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

graphic design: Koos Siep 
Edition: 2 x 250 copies

Hackers, scholars, artists and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology.

When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.

The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor and researcher Mindy Seu (who began the project during a fellowship at the Harvard Law School's Berkman Klein Center for the Internet & Society, later presenting it at the New Museum), it includes more than 1,000 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.

Contributors include: Skawennati, Charlotte Web, Melanie Hoff, Constanza Pina, Melissa Aguilar, Cornelia Sollfrank, Paola Ricaurte Quijano, Mary Maggic, Neema Githere, Helen Hester, Annie Goh, VNS Matrix, Klau Chinche / Klau Kinky and Irina Aristarkhova.

"Elles sont de sortie" is the title of a periodic publication launched in 1977 by Pascal Doury and Bruno Richard. The plural and feminine form of the enigmatic phrase "elles sont de sortie," chosen almost by chance, announces a protean work and often collective experience. From its origins to the most recent iterations, including Doury's more confidential individual trajectory after "Elles sont de sortie," Choquer le Monde à Mort traces five decades of a corpus of nearly three hundred publications. It addresses some of the most emblematic editorial works, as well as others that remain unpublished, alongside ambitious and sometimes scandalous exhibitions, few of which are documented.

This work is the result of several years of research, enriched by numerous firsthand interviews, and unfolds in three parts: a chronology and analysis of a singular and marginal artistic history, works and iconographic documents, and an anthology bibliography. Together, these elements reveal the complexity of an editorial object with porous boundaries, both in its forms and its contents, oscillating between graphzine, artist book, poetry collection, and personal journal. Its ramifications, status, and legacy retrospectively reveal the importance of a discreet yet seminal work.

Thus, "Elles Sont de Sortie" also serves as an opportunity to revisit the paths of two aesthetic and provocative artists, deeply devoted to their art and true free spirits in an art world often too narrow for them. It immerses us in a plethora of works that are intimate and raw, as well as subtle and refined, all in service of a project that, in Doury's words, aims to "shock the world to death."

Edited by Tiphanie Blanc, Jonas Delaborde, Anna Lejemmetel.
Contribution by Anna Lejemmetel.

Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge.

Now, comedy is characterized by edgy humour and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive cultural warfare in the media and among people. Our comedy is fraught with tension like never before, and so too is our social life. We often hear the claim that no one can take a joke anymore.  But what if we really can’t take jokes anymore?

This book argues that the spirit of comedy is the first step in the building of society, but that it has been lost in the era of divisive identity politics. Comedy flares up debates about censorship and cancellation, keeping us divided from one other. This goes against the true universalist spirit of comedy, which is becoming a thing of the past and must be recovered.

This publication brings together the texts from the pieces Black (2011), No Title (2014), We to be (2015) and oslo (2017) created and performed by Mette Edvardsen. These pieces have been developed using language as material, looking into the relationship between writing and speaking, between language and voice. Mette Edvardsen is working on the verge of the visible, considering choreography as writing.

In The Book of Na, translation acts at the edge of perception. Tracing across projects in film, video, and performance, Na Mira reflects on the violent fragmentation of bodies while refusing the containment of geographic and corporeal borders. In 1977, a name is cut at an immigration office. This gap turns into an intergenerational score for becoming heat, hexagram, hologram. Using oracular and glitching technologies, Mira witnesses what escapes data: doppelgängers, dreams, endangered tigers, tesseracts, A. Turiyasangitananda Coltrane's stairs, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in a theater, Korean shamanism, frozen ligaments, wildfires, borderlands, subatomic particles, and pink. Syncing to a clock with neither face nor hands, Mira’s hauntological permutations in time, death, and relation travel outside the symbolic order and draw energy from the void.

Na Mira’s autobody rites have been presented at sites including Seoul Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art; Participant Inc., New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She grew up between the US and East Asia and teaches outside.

Afternoon Editions no. 2: text and drawings by Chrysa Parkinson titled Weaknesses. Between January and March 2019 Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine was presented as a solo-exhibition at Index Foundation in Stockholm. During this period Chrysa Parkinson was invited as a guest writer for Afternoon Editions. Weaknesses is a leap in memory.

A sequence of ten poems; in separated continuance, an outcry that ventriloquises and manifests languages of exclusion and yet with dogged persistence protests them. 

“Oh strike the light, float the boat, for sake of common peril they are fallen away as gathered up in sight of lamentable in- difference and will go down against us”. 

Werkplaats Typografie presents a catalog of Works from the Collection of Holly van Houten. Spanning multiple decades and personally selected from around the world, the collection includes over a thousand items that memorialize the life of this candidly private, bohemian connoisseur. Carefully examined by our specialists, a curated selection of rarities, antiquities, oddities, and works of art is available in this catalog, which accompanied an exclusive auction held during Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair in May 2025 in Los Angeles, Van Houten’s beloved city.

Project by: WT Year 25 & Year 26 for LA PMABF led by Hannes Drißner, Lisa Lagova, Nuno Beijinho

Designer: Hannes Drißner, Lisa Lagova, Nuno Beijinho. Objects photographed by Augustinas Milkus and Jordi de Vetten

Published on the centenary year of Pasolini’s birth, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper is a dual edition that stages a dialogue between cinema today and Pasolini’s timeless films and words.

The two complementary volumes slide into one another, forming a unique set that evokes and celebrates Pasolini’s enduring influence. The smaller book features his epic autobiographical poem ‘Poet of the Ashes’, in a revised translation by esteemed poet Stephen Sartarelli; the larger book comprises original tributes by vital filmmakers from across the contemporary cinema landscape.

Twenty filmmakers shared personal reflections in the form of essays, poems, photographs, drawings and more: Catherine Breillat, Luise Donschen & Helena Wittmann, Jia Zhangke, Radu Jude, Payal Kapadia, Alexandre Koberidze, Dane Komljen, Mike Leigh, Mariano Llinás, Roberto Minervini, Valérie Massadian, Luc Moullet, Ben Rivers, Angela Schanelec, Ulrich Seidl, Basma al-Sharif, Deborah Stratman, Anocha Suwichakornpong and Gustavo Vinagre.

Extensive survey of the politically outward-looking Conceptualism emerging from Art & Language in the UK. Especially considering its critique of the norms of Modernist art practices in contemporary art, particularly practices of art education.

Edited, compiled and introduced by Paul Wood, Biting the Hand: Traces of Resistance in the Art & Language diaspora is about a dissident formation of artists active in the UK in the 1970s and 80s.

The book tells the story of artists engaging with a critique of then-contemporary modernist art education, who have embarked on a series of theoretical investigations which became increasingly politicised under the pressures of an evolving social crisis. Increased racism, unemployment and attacks on the organised working class all raised questions about how a critical art might respond.

By the late 1970s, these radical artists, mostly in the orbit of the Art & Language group, were producing posters and leaflets for a wide range of left-wing causes, as well as analyses of the politics of art and design education and the role of cultural ideology in maintaining consensus. In the 1980s, as Thatcherism tightened its grip, those involved went their separate ways into areas as diverse as media work, trade unionism, health and education.

Biting the Hand has three parts: a retrospective introduction setting the formation in its historical context, and two annotated documentary sections presenting examples of the work as both text and image, written and edited by Paul Wood.

It also includes a foreword by Sezgin Boynik, publisher, and an afterword by Ann Stephen, curator and art historian, further expanding on the book's subject.

For many years Paul Wood worked for the Art History Department of the Open University. His publications from that period include Conceptual Art (2000), Western Art and the Wider World (2013), and the four-volume anthology Art in Theory (1990-2020), co-edited with Charles Harrison and others.

Edited, compiled and introduced by Paul Wood.
Foreword by Sezgin Boynik; afterword by Ann Stephen.

A philosopher’s path towards embodiment through Tai Chi and psychedelics.
This book proposes different forms of embodiment that are not necessarily leading to production of subjectivity or territorialized identities but rather putting the “self” at risk allowing us to be emancipated from the mandatory illusion of self-realization. This can be facilitated by a daily commitment with a set of body altering practices that disjoint us from the ordinary accustomed experience of reality and provide us access to “other” layers of the real. These practices grant access to the primary control centers of the body that regulate frequencies of energy and consciousness in a deeper way and enable the body to unfold in different dimensional spaces of experience: rendering sensible the multi-layered energetic body.

Riots are extraordinary events that have been recurring with increasing frequency and occupy a highly controversial space in the political imagination. Despite their often negative portrayals, it is undeniable that riots have played a pivotal role in the confrontation between authority and dissent. Recently, with the deepening crises of capitalism, racial violence, and communal tension, an “age of riots” has powerfully begun. As master fictions of the sovereign nation-state implode, and the hegemonic silencing of the dispossessed reveals the cracks in governability, Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound brings together artistic works, political texts, critical urban analyses, and research projects from across the world in an endeavor to “sense,” chronicle, and think through recent riots and uprisings—evoking a phenomenology of the multitude and surplus population.

With contributions from Asef Bayat, Joshua Clover, Vaginal Davis, Keller Easterling, Zena Edwards, Nadine El-Enany, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Gauri Gill, Natasha Ginwala, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Louis Henderson, Satch Hoyt, Hamid Khan, Gal Kirn, Josh Kun, Léopold Lambert, Margit Mayer, Vivek Narayanan, Ai Ogawa, Oana Pârvan, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, SAHMAT, Thomas Seibert, Niloufar Tajeri, Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Dariouche Tehrani, and Ala Younis.