Books

Contributions by: Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, Georgia Sagri, John Kelsey, Matthew Pang, Cathy Wilkes, Sarah Rapson, Nick Irvin, Gene Beery, Anne Dressen, Anne Pontégnie, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Sara Deraedt, Anne Rorimer, Kari Rittenbach, Olga Balema, Maria Nordman, Louise Lawler, Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Adrian Morris, Matt Browning, John Miller, Envers Hadzijaj, Enzo Shalom, Bedros Yeretzian, Morag Keil, Helmut Draxler, Gianna Surangkanjanajai, Steve Cannon, Rae Armentrout, Zoe Hitzig, Pierre Guyotat, Lola Sinreich, Fanny Howe, Hélène Fauquet, Marie Angeletti, Richard Hawkins, Andy Robert, Alexander García Düttmann, Daniel Horn, El Hadji Sy, Henrik Olesen, Aurélien Potier, Richard John Jones, Stéphane Barbier Bouvet, Nora Schultz, Peter Fend, Megan Francis Sullivan, Jill Johnston, Sturtevant, Tonio Kröner, Bernard Bazile, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Jérome Pantalacci, Gérard Traquandi, Gladys Clover, Maria Wutz, Jimmie Durham, Richard Sides, Camilla Wills, Michael Callies, Steven Warwick, Matthew Langan-Peck, Dan Graham, Nina Könnemann, Hans Christian Dany, Valérie Knoll, Win McCarthy, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Anna Rubin, Heji Shin, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Inka Meißner, Simone Forti, Morgan O’Hara, Angharad Williams, Ye Xe, Lily Van Der Stokker, Yuki Kimura, Peter Wächtler, Eva Steinmetz, Michael Van den Abeele, Marc Kokopeli, Bradley Kronz, Robert Grosvenor, Samuel Jeffery, Charlotte Houette, Adam Martin, Wade Guyton, Chloe Truong-Jones.

Edited by Marie Angeletti with Gianmaria Andreetta and Camilla Wills.

Printed in December 2022.
416 pages, Edition of 840.
© 2022 Claude Balls Int. / the author(s).

Cumin Baleen is a forty-one-year-old writer living in Philadelphia—this city of hospitals—who works at the upscale grocery Sea & Poison and is navigating the onset of an autoimmune condition. To start a medication that may help, an eye exam is required and this leads to a nightmarish laser eye surgery. The laser shoots into her brain, making her language spare and her sentences clause-less, a vexing constraint that stalls her book on gynecological malpractice: she wants others, in the realm of our for-profit medical industry that "renders the Hippocratic Oath its opposite," to see poison.

Meanwhile, Cumin is kicked out of her boyfriend Mari's studio after he falls for Janine, their landlord, and starts renting a closet in Maron's bedroom—polyamorous Maron who is hooking up with Alix, whom Cumin lusts after. Disheveled from medicines and medical scams, Cumin declares, "I don't know what to say, I'm saying I have a cracked appearance. It's not a pity party, it's a character sketch. Insofar as you'll need to be looking at me, that your mind should fill me up with its own swaying cognitive and toxic reeds if we are to do this, your imagination should touch me with its ridiculous poison."

Caren Beilin's hypnotic and fractured story is at once an homage to Shusaku Endo's terrifying novel of human vivisection The Sea and Poison and the spirit of OuLipo, the pioneering French writing group that sought new literary potential through constraints.

Caren Beilin was born in Philadelphia in 1983. She is the author of the novel Revenge of the Scapegoat, which won the Vermont Book Award for Fiction. Her other books are Blackfishing the IUD, Spain, The University of Pennsylvania, and Americans, Guests, or Us. She lives in Cleveland and Philadelphia and teaches at Case Western Reserve University.

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.

Là is an immersive, politically charged sound journey – a lament for the Al Naqab desert in Palestine. It is the result of a collaboration between Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Eitan Efrat, Laszlo Umbreit, and Ot Lemmens. The album combines acoustic instruments like flute and cymbals with processed electronics and mechanical sounds. 

The track Ensemble is made from sound recordings of eleven 16mm film projectors, playing simultaneously and in intervals, creating a texture centered around a single pitch – La/A. 

The tracks For Her, There, and No are recordings of live sessions played by Laszlo Umbreit and Eitan Efrat.  

The album also features an extended text by Rose Higham-Stainton titled Strategies for Survival, spread across a 12-page booklet.

Hot wings and tenders est un recueil de poèmes bilingue anglais/français qui décline l'exploration d'une jeune femme queer de son corps, sa sexualité, et ses modalités d'existence matérielles. Alternativement tendres, crus, drôles et vifs, les poèmes de Marl Brun utilisent des protocoles d'écriture en apparence mathématiques pour tenter de capturer l'absurde logique du monde. Ils sont les énoncés analytiques d'une intimité qui demeure sensible et échappe à toute tentative de rationalisation.

A collection of photographs from the archives of the icon of underground and alternative Parisian nights Dora Diamant.

A self-taught photographer, Dora Diamant has left thousands of photos. The Dora Diamant Association, custodian of this archive, and Éditions L'Amazone have joined forces to bring them to life by devoting a series of publications to them. Each volume of the Dora Diamant Archive was created by a different person and is the result of a subjective selection and arrangement specific to its author.

Figurehead of the Parisian underground and queer nights, photographer, DJ, multimedia and polymorphic artist, Dora Diamant was the daughter of Pascal Doury.

Selected by Yamil Farah and Mélanie Matranga.

Through the harsh noise of reality, a signal appears. At first faint, but slowly, as we approach, it grows louder, more defined. Aerial photographs depict odd structures and garbled sounds, blurred images of decaying media, alien architecture. It calls out your name.

Psalmist Kaput lures the reader into a misama of fragmented speech, disembodied voices, deteriortating thresholds, and lo-res nightmares. Fusing text and image, it is a work undefinable and wholly its own.

Enter the exclusion zone, witness its monuments, and if you're able, find your way back out again. "Soon we will all be submerged."

A take away cup and a cloud is an essay written alongside the dance performance Seems to be by Denise Lim and Stina Ehn. It plays with a variety of containers–the list form being one. By mixing a personal with a historical gaze it traces the trajectory of mundane commodities and  the replacement of material with imaterial objects brought about to the everyday by technical progress. 

With this new book of sedimented lyric, John Wilkinson’s poetry enters a terrain of creatures flattened in shale, in flat screen and in digital code. If Silicon Valley would repopulate Jurassic Park and defeat death, Wilkinson’s poetry would make actual what slides past in the disregarded day, whether the flattening of a city or the return of seasonal blossom. This poetry swells dry roots; it breaches the total coverage that flatlines the heart’s response, through its urgent and generous rhythms.

Designed and typeset by Phil Baber.

DEARS is a print magazine for transversal writing practices at the crossroads of art, poetry and experimental writing. It brings together authors and writers from different backgrounds and constitutes a dedicated platform for texts escaping the usual genres and disciplinary boundaries.

DEARS promotes the exploration of new forms of language as a way to foster new forms of living together, and emphasizes the growing relevance of trans- versal writing practices in this respect.

DEARS no. 5 / Summer 2023 / ever.over

With texts by Diaty Diallo, Douglas Keaney, Dzifa Benson, Sevinç Çalhanoğlu, Jana Vanecek, and an epigraph by Trinh T. Minh-ha.

From the acclaimed author of the novel Oval comes a book of "fan nonfiction" about living and writing in the age of extinction.

In this constellation of essays, Elvia Wilk asks what kinds of narratives will help us rethink our human perspective toward Earth. The book begins as an exploration of the role of fiction today and becomes a deep interrogation of the writing process and the self.  

Wilk examines creative works across time and genre in order to break down binaries between dystopia and utopia, real and imagined, self and world. She makes connections between works by such wide-ranging writers as Mark Fisher, Karen Russell, Han Kang, Doris Lessing, Anne Carson, Octavia E. Butler, Michelle Tea, Helen Phillips, Kathe Koja, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, and Hildegard von Bingen.  

What happens when research becomes personal, when the observer breaks through the glass? Through the eye of the fan, this collection delves into literal and literary world-building projects—medieval monasteries, solarpunk futures, vampire role plays, environments devoid of humans—bridging the micro and the macro and revealing how our relationship to narrative shapes our relationships to the natural world and to one another.

In the 2090s, Earth is somehow still here. Drones and clones are big business and Henries Ickles, debonair New Los Angeles infoarchitect, wants in on the action. Metaphysical theories are put into practice, invisible art is critiqued, quasicrystals are crafted, yogurt is spilled. From diplomatic misadventures with metallic herds in RealSweden to an underwater rendezvous in the free domes of MiamiVII, Ickles, ad Infinitum is a compendium of the exuberant and the abject, a refracted hologram of the absurdities of cultural production that swerves between incisive ode and knowing lampoon.

Mark von Schlegell has been pushing the envelope with independently-published experimental fiction and theory since the 1990s. He was born in New York, moved to L.A. in 2000, and currently lives in Cologne. His first novel, Venusia (Semiotext(e), 2005) was honor's listed for the Otherwise Award in Science Fiction.

‘Human beings embody whatever they meet, and it’s all there when you work whether you want it there or not.’ Practice is like the dust that accumulates, and revisiting fragments of essays and talks on choreography Jonathan Burrows ended up embracing the haphazard and the mess, moments of unfocus and focus, harnessing them in pithy formulations and scores, adding room and punctuation and line breaks in the process so readers can hear the rhythm as he writes his dance on writing dance.

Jonathan Burrows is a choreographer, who has worked for many years in collaboration with the composer Matteo Fargion, with whom he continues to create and perform work. He is the author of A Choreographer’s Handbook (Routledge, 2010) and is currently an Associate Professor at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

Ten stab wounds. An old woman in a pool of blood. A nineteen-year-old neighbor now a murderer. 

Since publishing her first novel in 2018, Constance Debré’s work has exposed the flaws in the social order with dizzying passion and intelligence. Her first-person trilogy—Playboy, Love Me Tender, and Name—describes the trajectory of leaving a comfortable bourgeois life as mother and wife employed as a criminal justice attorney to become a writer and lesbian. Her books radically challenge all received ideas of the couple, motherhood, family, and inheritance. 

In Offenses, Debré trains her sights on a single case of inevitably flawed justice that, like hundreds of others like it, reveals the enmeshed culpabilities of the perpetrator, the victim, the place, and the past. In a housing project adjacent to Paris, an unemployed teenager kills his elderly neighbor in order to pay off a drug debt of €450. Writing with impassioned detachment, Debré uses forensic detail to explore the ambient senselessness behind this senseless crime.

There is a geography, Debré writes. We live in a vertical world, you don’t see. A world made of worlds. Not side by side but set concentrically and upon one another. A bit like Middle Age representations of the universe, a bit like Dante’s circles of hell. Each world only communicating with the worlds directly in contact with it and none of the others.

In Offenses, Debré scathingly describes the misery of poverty and the absence of any horizon beyond.

An experimental essay on voice, narrative, literature and translation. In this text Daniela tunes into the hums of voices heard within books, to the recollected csitation, to singing with stitched lips.

The Loveliest Vowel Empties presents for the first time in English the collected poems of legendary Swiss Surrealist Meret Oppenheim, printed with facing-page originals in German and French.

Oppenheim's poetry, 49 poems written between 1933 and 1980, moves beyond Surrealism to inhabit a voice all her own, with imagery and sound that, as the Herald Tribune wrote, 'express witty and poetic responses to the surprises of life.' A key figure of the Paris art scene in the 1930s, Oppenheim moved in a circle that included Andér Breton, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Elsa Schiaparelli. Writing for the Village Voice about her work, Gary Indiana noted that 'the singularity of Meret Oppenheim's work is such that nothing seems dated... the range of the work and its quirky self-assurance are striking.' The publication of her collected poems coincides with a major retrospective exhibition of her artwork at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

What is an artists’ life made of? From the home to the studio, from the studio to the gallery, from one exhibition to the next, from one place to another – a suite of moves and a list of addresses. Tobias Kaspar’s work sheds light on the ambivalent position of the artist, taken in a web of social and economic relations: in the second volume of New Address, he uses the tone of the diary, combined with the code of the moodboard, to document the side aspects of the life of a “stereotypical artist.”

The book gathers black & white photographs taken between 2018 and 2024, during the installation or the opening of exhibitions; at performances, dinners, parties; in different homes and rooms Kaspar has been living in; and in the course of daily activities. Contrary to an exhibition catalogue, projects by the artist such as his line of jeans, or his series of bronze sculptures made from disposable packaging, are thus shown “in the middle of affairs.”

An additional booklet opens with a short essay by artist Mikael Brkic, reflecting on the “behind the scenes” logics, followed by a letter penned by writer Leif Randt, and a text in which curator Kari Rittenbach discusses Tobias Kaspar’s work in relation to the economics and aesthetics of display and fashion. It concludes with a list of artworks in the order as they appear in the main book.

Published with the support of Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung, Pro Helvetia, Kultur Stadt Zürich.

Licorice Candies collects short stories and poems written during the author’s most experimental and frenzied phase. The backdrop shifts from barren plazas in Buenos Aires to basement parties in Berlin. “I wished that, by continually moving horizontally, in a straight line, my body would touch Germany…that you could reach Berlin from Buenos Aires in a second without any planes that all the coolest cities in the world were each a continuation of the next: Lima, Buenos Aires, Berlin.” The medium through which these desires manifest is the Internet. The Internet—a ubiquitous force that becomes the notebook for the author’s poetry: typo-ridden love letters the grammarless confessions of a polyglot a geography that bends to the author’s will, making everything closer, more intimate.

Translated from Spanish by Jacob Steinberg

A beautiful compilation of poems, stories, essays, talks, and illustrations by Ursula K. Le Guin. Edited and designed by Conner Bouchard-Roberts. 

With additional essays on Le Guin's thinking and craft by: adrienne maree brown, Isabelle Stengers, Moe Bowstern, Lola Milholland, Nisi Shawl, David Naimon, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Margaret Killjoy, Julie Phillips, and Harold Bloom.

This book serves as the companion publication to a gallery exhibition, of the same name, about Ursula’s life and work, showing at Oregon Contemporary Museum (from Nov 1st 2025 - Feb 8th 2026 in Portland, OR) curated by the Author’s son, Theo Downes-Le Guin.

This collection of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's film scripts vividly evokes the close connection between their influential work as theorists and their work as filmmakers. It includes scripts for all six of Mulvey and Wollen's collaborative films, Wollen's solo feature film, Friendship's Death (1987), and Mulvey's later collaborations.

Each text is followed by a new essay by a leading writer, offering a critical interpretation of the corresponding film. The collection also includes Wollen's short story Friendship's Death (1976), the outlines for two unrealised Mulvey and Wollen collaborations, and a selection of scanned working documents. The scripts and essays collected in this volume trace the historical significance of a complex cinematic project that brought feminist, semiotic and psychoanalytic concerns together with formal devices and strategies.

The book includes original contributions from Nora M. Alter, Kodwo Eshun, Nicolas Helm-Grovas, Esther Leslie, Laura Mulvey, Volker Pantenburg, Griselda Pollock, B. Ruby Rich and Sukhdev Sandhu.

An artistic exploration of the political and emotional stakes of translation in the context of asylum law, through the lens of rarely heard testimonies: those of interpreters.

The Interpreter Dis/appears stems from an investigation conducted between 2019 and 2023 by curator, editor, and translator Virginie Bobin, focusing on both professional and volunteer interpreters and translators, as well as representatives from the state and organizations working with exiled individuals navigating asylum application procedures in France. By redirecting attention to the voices of interpreters—rarely visible figures in this ecosystem—the project delves into the ambiguous role of translation at the intersection of those who govern and those governed by asylum law. Within such a controlled environment, can the act of translation, with all its complexities, still express fleeting gestures of solidarity or even resistance? Through the exchanges prompted by these questions, the book seeks to reframe the prevailing public and political discourse on asylum, harnessing the embodied experiences of a small group of interpreters as an alternative lens to reveal the underlying power dynamics at play. It also probes the ethical and political potential of translation. The Interpreter Dis/appears unfolds across a variety of theatrical, artistic, and theoretical writing, alongside insightful contributions from artists and researchers who open up different perspectives for understanding and activating these issues.

The reader series Scriptings: Political Scenarios, edited by Achim Lengerer, publishes carefully selected scripts and texts by artists that refer neither to academic forms nor to purely literary forms of writing, but rather embed "text" as a fully integral part of contemporary political and visual art practice.

Contributions by Alix Eynaudi, Vir Andres Hera, Mihret Kebede, Franck Leibovici, Serena Lee, Marianne Mispelaëre, Eliana Otta, Rester. Étranger, Olia Sosnovskaya, Myriam Suchet, TOGETHER UNTIL _ __ (what)* ?

Dans « The Prime Times, Volume 1 », Sophie T. Lvoff met en scène sa pratique quotidienne d’atelier. Au travers de poèmes en haïku, de gros titres et de photographies de son atelier traversé par la lumière du jour au milieu de l’après-midi, le journal chronique la torpeur des longues journées de travail mêlées d’attente, de glimpses et de glances. 

En attendant the prime time, Sophie lit les nouvelles sur son téléphone, parcourt paresseusement sa bibliothèque, écrit des emails à des amix éloigné·es et parfois à elle-même. Elle note des blagues et des poèmes dans son cahier, mange des snacks, doute d’elle-même, fume, jette des regards autour d’elle, jusqu’au moment précis où la photo doit être prise.

In « The Prime Times, Volume 1 », Sophie T. Lvoff dramatizes her daily studio practice. Through haiku poems, headlines, doodles and photographs of her studio pierced by mid-afternoon daylight, the journal chronicles the torpor of long workdays mixed with waiting, glimpses, and glances.

While waiting for the prime time, Sophie reads the news on her phone and lazily reads her collection of books, writes emails to far-away friends and sometimes to herself. She notes things in notebooks and writes jokes and poems, stretches, eats snacks, doubts herself, smokes, glances around, until the precise moment when the picture has to be taken.

Comeback Death, Jennifer Soong's third book, weaves its registers of what Soong names as "dread, gender, sarcasm, sublimation of pain, fruit, ambition, and fecundity" through an English which is not only polyvocal but uncannily porous. Its languages (English, Russian, German, ancient Greek) underscore a perverse pastoral range that somehow bridges Oxford, New Jersey, and Lesbos. With a ferocity both musical and analytic, Soong's third book offers an unprecedented set of tonalities for immense architectures of feeling.

"In Comeback Death, Jennifer Soong dramatizes one of the key problems of our time, and indeed any time, which is how to reorganize the (negative) affects structuring intersubjectivity and thus conditioning our capacity to act in a common interest among others."—Thom Donovan