Books

Amna, Nimo, Mouna – these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, climbs to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s; as a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo; a self-made divorcee and a lover; a ‘pious mama’ donning her hijab; and, finally, as a feminist activist during the Arab Spring.

Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister – who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years – in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.

Hallucinatory, stylish, and erotic, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.

YOUSSEF RAKHA is an Egyptian author of fiction and nonfiction working in Arabic and English. He is the author of The Book of the Sultan’s Seal, The Crocodiles, and Paulo, which was long-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and won the 2017 Sawiris Award.

In Sleigh Ride, a kinetically wondrous prose tale from poet Joe Fletcher, a father and his convalescing son plunge in carpentered, stallion-drawn sleigh slashing through lush forest, advancing through a sequence of diorama-like settings. The books ten chapters are interspersed with gouache collages by Kraków artist Mikołaj Moskal (REMMUS), rooted and riverine, functioning as curtains swept aside to reveal each chapter of Fletcher’s exhilarating nocturne.

There was a sleigh: jet black and gleaming.

The long steel runners curved at their termini like arabesques of ice. It was too dark to clearly discern the design on its side, but it was intricate, ornate, suggestive of cuneiform and the minarets of Cairo. Two orange lanterns mounted above the driver’s chair were each encircled by a cloud of gnats and moths. Draped in fabulously embroidered saddlecloths, Ajax and Hector stomped the earth.

Given that the only exit from the cellar was the door, hardly wider and taller than a man, I marveled at how father could have extracted his creation from his smithy and pointed it at the forest. But I said nothing as I climbed unaided onto the purple velvet couch.

Organs, hormones, toxins, lesions: what is a body? In 3 Summers, Lisa Robertson takes up her earlier concerns with form and literary precedent, and turns toward the timeliness of embodiment. What is form's time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body's mortality, its thickness, its play. The ten poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices – Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras – in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems' landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time – embodied here in Lisa Robertson’s forceful cadences – can tell.

‘Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.' —The Village Voice

"The brilliant Verity Spott has a new book out, called Hopelessness and published by the 87 Press. The work defies categorisation: Verity is a poet, and this book is certainly poetry, but large parts are in prose form and towards the end it even takes on the structure of an absurdist play. There seems to be a loose narrative, and even recurring character voices, so I’m tempted to call it a short experimental novel, in the vein of Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal Of Albion Moonlight (a personal favourite). Ultimately though I’d just call it a book; one full of words that are profound, moving, silly, sad, challenging and beautiful in equal measure. Even though it’s still a boldly experimental piece, in some ways Hopelessness feels like the most accessible thing Verity’s done. Without wanting to sound condescending, it’s also the most mature. You don’t get much more universal than death, love and loss, and these seem to be the main themes explored here. Another is language itself, the way it defines and limits our experience, and the way that we’re constantly at the mercy of words and phrases as they’re deployed by the authorities, the media, and eventually our own thought processes. Dissenting voices continually talk over one another throughout Hopelessness, often sampled from outside sources, or parodies thereof: Sappho, MR James, traditional hymns and folk songs, Hollywood movies, talk radio, tabloid newspapers, dreams and demagogues. Through it all there’s a painful lesson about how loss can make us bitter and hard, and how by refusing to move forward we become empty caricatures mouthing meaningless clichés to wound and hurt. But grief and loss can also teach us about love, if we let them, and there is so much grief and love in this book. Verity continually rearranges reality (that is, language) as if searching desperately for a way out, but in the end, as always, there is just life, love, and death. Hopelessness is a bravura performance, wholeheartedly recommended." — Ben Graham

Verity Spott is a poet from Brighton. Verity is the author of several books including Hopelessness (the 87 Press), Click Away Close Door Say (Contraband Books), We Will Bury You (Veer Books) and Poems of Sappho (in translation, Face Press). From 2018 to 2019 Verity was Poet in Residence at the University of Surrey. Verity teaches poetry in Brighton with The Creative Writing Programme and (alongside Kat Addis) with the Hollingdean Wednesdays project where they hold a poetry reading and writing group in Hollingdean Community Centre. Verity's poems have been translated into Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and German and their book Hopelessness has been translated into French and published by Même pas l'hiver. Verity plays cello in the improvised tune duo Benzo Fury and the free jazz trio In Threads. Since 2006 Verity has run the monthly poetry, performance and music event Horseplay.

Dictee is the best-known work of the multidisciplinary Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. This restored edition features the original cover and high-quality reproductions of the interior layout as Cha intended them. Produced in partnership with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, this version of Dictee faithfully renders the book as an art object in its authentic form.

A formative text of modern Asian American literature, Dictee is a dynamic autobiography that tells the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles),and Cha herself. Cha's work manifests in nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Deploying a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry, Cha links these women's stories to explore the trauma of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory it causes. The result is an enduringly powerful, beautiful, unparalleled work.

A subversive collection about Palestinian resistance, liberation and art. 

Written across Palestine and its diaspora—from Gaza and the West Bank to the United States—Intifadas is a subtly transgressive poetry collection about uprising in its many forms—in art, politics, and in our most personal relationships. Whether by dumping black paint on a park where a tank and fighter jet commemorate a war, or by trying to rescue a moth trapped in a garage, the defiant and resilient voices in this collection subvert traditional narratives of loss. Furious, tender, and darkly funny, Intifadas asks what art can do in the face of catastrophe, and answers with poems that refuse easy consolations.

Cait McKinney traces how lesbian feminist activists in the United States and Canada between the 1970s and the present developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives to use as a foundation for their feminist, antiracist, and trans-inclusive work.

For decades, lesbian feminists across the United States and Canada have created information to build movements and survive in a world that doesn't want them.

In Information Activism Cait McKinney traces how these women developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives that formed the foundation for their work. Often learning on the fly and using everything from index cards to computers, these activists brought people and their visions of justice together to organize, store, and provide access to information.

Focusing on the transition from paper to digital-based archival techniques from the 1970s to the present, McKinney shows how media technologies animate the collective and unspectacular labor that sustains social movements, including their antiracist and trans-inclusive endeavors. By bringing sexuality studies to bear on media history, McKinney demonstrates how groups with precarious access to control over information create their own innovative and resourceful techniques for generating and sharing knowledge.

A book that examines the process of performing the self, distinctive for the formation of the self in Western neoliberal societies in the 21st century. It approaches the self from a transdisciplinary angle where political and cultural anthropology, performance studies and dramaturgy intersect.

Starting from their concern with the crisis of the social, which coincides with the rise of individualism, Vujanović and Cvejić critically untangle individualist modes of performing the self, such as possessive, aesthetic, and autopoietic individualisms. However, their critique does not make for an argument for collectivism as a socially more viable alternative to individualism. Instead, it confronts them with the more fundamental problem of ontogenesis: how is that which distinguishes me as an individual formed in the first place? This question marks a turning point in the study, where it steps back into the process of individuation, prior to, and in excess of, the individual. 

The process of individuation, however, encompasses biological, social, and technological conditions of becoming whose real potential is transindividual, or more specifically, social transformation. A ‘theater of individuation’ (Gilbert Simondon) captures the dramaturgical stroke by which the authors investigate social relations (like solidarity and de-alienation) in which the self actualizes its transindividual dimension. This epistemic intervention into ontogenesis allows them to expand the horizon of transindividuation in an array of tangible social, aesthetic and political acts and practices. As with every horizon, the transindividual may not be closely at hand; however, it is certainly within reach, and the book encourages the reader to approach it.

"Towards a Transindividual Self is an ambitious and capacious effort to theorize a new way to approach collectivity for political purposes through the lens of performance. Convinced that the current neoliberal conjuncture has only heightened a form of capitalist individualism that blocks notions of the social, the authors aim to show that a "transindividual formation of the self can bring about different courses of action and a more socially driven imagination." Transindividuation, they assure us, shows how "we form ourselves on the basis of interdependence, sharing, commonality, as well as indispensability of the individual as the agent of creativity/ knowledge, freedom, and change, who 'possibilizes' their own conditions of formation." 
— Professor Janelle Reinelt (University of Warwick), co-editor of Critical Theory and Performance (University of Michigan, 2006)

"Perhaps the most striking thing about this book is the manner in which it is able to engage with multiple discourses from political theory to aesthetics. In this way it both follows the ambitious scope of Simondon’s work on individuation, and expands into areas that Simondon did not cover, most notably politics and cultural politics, which is the book’s central concern. Rather than ask the question is the individual imagined or real, an effect of social relations or their distortion, the focus on the transindividual makes it possible to grasp individuation as a process: “Instead of pondering how the passage from one to many occurs, individuation permits us to immediately trace a bidimensional process in which both individual persons and the collectivities they form are altered. Another meaning of the crisis of the social has brought about a perfect slogan of such a process of transindividuation: ‘No one will be left alone in the crisis.” (…) Towards a Transindividual Self does a brilliant job of not only arguing for the importance and relevance for the transindividual as a concept for politics, performance, and the politics of performance, but of demonstrating a bold standard for political and aesthetic inquiry."
— Professor Jason Read (University of Maine), author of The Politics of Transindividuality (Brill, 2015)

Co-published by Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Sarma and Multimedijalni institut.

First Nettles collects poems written between 2021 and 2024, from precarious off-key lyrics to sprawling elegies of damaged life. A book of flailing, desperate music, hurt and hopeful, held together by pins and gaffer tape, art and courage and comradeship. Includes the sequence “Seizures” (2022) – “perfect in its openness and lyrical disfigurement” (Danny Hayward).

“[An] exhilarating collection […]. The sequences here are ferociously and admirably radical, with some superb political satire and verve to the poems.”  —Adam Piette, Blackbox Manifold, no. 34 

Designed and typeset by Phil Baber; cover collage by Sam Keogh

This collection, a retrospective exhibit of the work of a woman who created a unique place for herself in the world of letters, contains a sample of practically every period and every manner in Gertrude Stein’s career. It includes The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in its entirety; selected passages from The Making of Americans; "Melanctha"from Three Lives; portraits of the painters Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso; Tender Buttons; the opera Four Saints in Three Acts; and poem, plays, lectures, articles, sketches, and a generous portion of her famous book on the Occupation of France, Wars I Have Seen.

During a residency on Fire Island, artist and writer Hannah Black decided to tackle a highly daunting project: the 2020 novel.

The result of her efforts, Tuesday of September or the End, is a slim, playful work of speculative fiction. Written in the aftermath of the early months of the pandemic and the uprisings of summer 2020, the novel explores the ruptures of the year with a satirical sci-fi bent. Black chronicles the lives of two characters, Bird and Dog, as they contend with rapidly changing political possibilities during the pandemic while the run of Moley Salamanders (i.e. Bernie Sanders) concludes and aliens finally invade earth. Through a galvanic vision of how the riots of 2020 might have turned revolutionary, Black offers a meditation on collective life. This crucial novel invites readers to consider who we are—and, by extension, what we are here for—when our normal referents are muted, deleted and upended.

Hannah Black (born 1981) is a New York-based visual artist, critic and writer from Manchester, England. Her work spans video, text and performance and draws from communist, feminist and Afro-pessimist theory. She is the author of Life (2017, with Juliana Huxtable) and Dark Pool Party (2016). Black is represented by the gallery Arcadia Missa in London and Isabella Bortolozzi in Berlin.

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.

You are asking me where I live and it’s making me think all these things about space, where I start and end in space and where space starts and ends in me and when, in space, I am a body and when I’m a book, in space.

So begins Renee Gladman's Theory for Moving Houses, and with these lines we are invited into a liminal space of imagination and investigation, as Gladman guides us through the architectures of her poetics. Foundational here is a sense of fluidity, a slippage of time, a devotion to “non-linear and hyper gestural movement,” a communal spirit. Gladman’s inquiry into her intersecting practices of writing and drawing reveals a deep commitment to uncertainty and “fictional knowing.” Yet again, Gladman upends traditional expectations of prose, as she leads us through landscape of her Ravicka series novels, ultimately surprising us with a novel within nonfiction. The latest volume in Wave’s Bagley Wright Lecture Series, Theory for Moving Houses is not only visionary in its contemplations but also is a virtuosic example of the ways in which language can shape utopian sites of possibility.

The Appendixes #1-4 is an editorial series by Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré and Victoria Pérez Royo that came out of the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. For a two-year residency at Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers (2022-23), they came together as a small work group, shaping the work process, hosting presentation formats and making the publication series on paper as four cahiers.

The cahiers comprise a collection of commissioned texts and contributions created for this context, selected documents and traces from work sessions and encounters organized during the residency, texts read together and republished for this occasion, a collection of references, notes in progress, unfinished thoughts and loose fragments - on paper, between pages.

p 5-7 Almost on my way to you
p 8-10 Presque en route vers toi
Laía Argüelles Folch

p 12-13 Exercise in translation of Breve ensayo sobre la carta (Brief essay on the letter) by Laía Argüelles Folch
p 14-15 Exercice de traduction de Breve ensayo sobre la carta (Bref essai sur la lettre) de Laía Argüelles Folch
Quim Pujol, Paula Caspão, Simon Asencio, Pascal Poyet, Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré, Victoria Pérez Royo & Laía Argüelles Folch

p 16-17 Like a dinosaur upon awakening
p 18-19 Comme un dinosaure au réveil
Pascal Poyet

p 20-23 Is she a translator?
p 24-27 Est-elle traductrice?
Olivia Fairweather

p 28-29 New edition revised by my author
p 30-31 Nouvelle édition revue par mon auteur
Léa Poiré

p 32 Notes from a translation in progress
p 33 Notes d'une traduction en cours
Kate Briggs

p 34-37 Mothers & tongues
p 38-41 Langues (maternelles)
Mette Edvardsen

p 42-43 Collective reading of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
p 44-45 Lecture collective de Finnegans Wake de James Joyce
Dora García and readers, et les lecteur·rices

p 46-49 Notes for a talk that did not happen
p 50-53 Notes pour une conférence qui n'a pas eu lieu
Olivia Fairweather

p 54-65 Meticulous comparison of two books with their versions rewritten from memory, excerpts from a work document
Comparaison méticuleuse de deux livres avec leurs versions réécrites de mémoire, extraits d'un document de travail
Julián Pacomio & Ángela Millano

Art et production de Boris Arvatov fait partie des classiques oubliés des avant-gardes qui se sont épanouies durant la Révolution russe. Publié à Moscou en 1926, il vient porter le fer dans les débats qui agitent l’école constructiviste : que doit être le statut de l’art après la révolution, ses liens avec les techniques industrielles de reproduction, avec la critique de la vie quotidienne, comment doit-il entrer dans l’usine ? Autant d’interrogations radicales, témoignages d’une séquence politico-sociale bouillonnante. Une nouvelle conception de l’art émerge, qui laissera une empreinte indélibile sur une tradition de critiques matérialistes de la culture, de Walter Benjamin à Peter Bürger, en passant par Fredric Jameson, celle qui posera la question de l’articulation entre pratique artistique et logiques propres à la sphère de la production. Un document exceptionnel enrichi d’illustrations, paraissant en français pour la première fois, une porte prviliégiée sur un moment-clé de la modernité exthétique du XXe siècle. 

Boris Arvatov (1896–1940) est un artiste et critique d’art russe. Il est notamment connu comme théoricien du productivisme, un mouvement d’avant-garde post-révolutionnaire lié au constructivisme. 

A lost gem of permutational conceptualism from a key figure in artist's book culture, available again

Known internationally as one of Mexico's most important conceptual artists, Ulises Carrión (1941-89) played a decisive role in defining and conceptualizing the genre of the artists' book through his manifesto, The New Art of Making Books (1975), which he wrote soon after the 1972 publication of SONNET(S) and his move from Mexico City to Amsterdam, where he opened the legendary bookshop gallery, Other Books and So, the first space dedicated exclusively to artists' publications and an important precursor to such artists' book hubs as Printed Matter.

One of Carrión's earliest bookworks, SONNET(S) represents a landmark shift in the artist's output from poetry to artists' books. Here, Carrión takes a single poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti through 50 typographic and procedural permutations. This republication is supplemented by new essays on Carrión's bookworks by contemporary artists, writers, and scholars from Mexico, Europe and the US. 

Published March 2021

I am still transitioning, but I am unsure into what.

Who are all these Evas? They puncture and disrupt the domestic space and equilibrium of the narrator, who alternately relies upon them or administers their care. Foam is the latest boundary-blurring, genre-resistant, strange and speculative new fiction from Kate Zambreno, the inimitable and relentless literary stylist and conceptualist. Inspired by the absurdities of Eva Hesse and other soft sculpture, these are speculative art essays and textures, a document of precarity and slippery time—mischievous, moody, estranged—a masterwork of tone and atmosphere.

Alaa is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland after the Nakba. Ariel, Alaa’s neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza yet faithful to the project of Israel. When he wakes up one morning to find that all Palestinians have suddenly vanished, Ariel begins searching for clues to the secret of their collective disappearance.

That search, and Ariel’s reactions to it, intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. Between the stories of Alaa and Ariel are the people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv – café patrons, radio commentators, flower-cutters – against whose ordinary lives these fissures and questions play out.

Critically acclaimed in Arabic, spare yet evocative, intensely intelligent in its interplay of perspectives, The Book of Disappearance is an unforgettable glimpse into contemporary Palestine as it grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory.

Winner of the 2022 Palestine Book Awards Creative Award
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry

These poems emerge directly from the experience of growing up and living one’s entire life in Gaza, making a life for one’s family and raising a family in constant lockdown, and often under direct attack.

In this poetry debut, conceived during the Israeli bombing campaign of May 2021, Mosab Abu Toha writes about his life under siege, first as a child, and then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, and yet, his poetry is inspired by a profoundly universal humanity.

In direct, vivid language, Abu Toha tells of being wounded by shrapnel at the age of 16 and, a few years later, watching his home and his university get hit by IDF warplanes in a bombing campaign that killed two of his closest friends. These poems are filled with rubble and the ever-present menace of surveillance drones policing a people unwelcome in their own land, and they are also suffused with the smell of tea, roses in bloom, and the view of the sea at sunset. Children are born, families continue traditions, students attend university, and libraries rise from the ruins as Palestinians go on about their lives, creating beauty and finding new ways to survive.

Black Bedouin, by Mohammed Zenia and Tenaya Nasser is a book of the IMMEDIATE — written immediately (in the span of five days, very literally at the printing press at 1080PRESS) in response to the current genocide against, and in solidarity with, the people of Sudan and in the context of immediate echoes in Palestine, Congo, Pakistan, and more — and throughout it all imbued with the immediacy that the global situation demands of us and our moral consciences. Black Bedouin rings in the creative immediacy of New York School all-night-writing-to-mimeograph-next-day with the political immediacy of a this-is-happening-right-now Crass single or Etel Adnan's incomparable (but here spiritually correlated) The Arab Apocalypse. In other words, Black Bedouin hits every star in a very cool and specific constellation. — Dave Morse

Bhanu Kapil's 'Ban en Banlieue' follows a brown (black) girl as she walks home from school in the first moments of a riot. An April night in London, in 1979, is the axis of this startling work of overlapping arcs and varying approaches. By the end of the night, Ban moves into an incarnate and untethered presence, becoming all matter - soot, meat, diesel oil and force - as she loops the city with the energy of global weather. Derived from performances in India, England and throughout the U.S., 'Ban en Banlieue' is written at the limit of somatic and civic aims.

« Jusqu’à ce soir-là, je ne me doute pas qu’il y a des scorpions en France. Dans mon esprit, tous les scorpions vivent en Algérie. Je ne sais pas exactement ce qu’est l’Algérie, je n’y suis jamais allée, mais je sais, grâce à ma mère, que je suis scorpion “du deuxième décan”. » 

Lydia Amarouche est directrice éditoriale, autrice et curatrice. Son travail puise dans l'exploration de documents d'archives, une matière première qui lui permet en particulier d’aborder la question du passé et du présent colonial. En 2020, elle fonde Shed publishing, une maison d'édition indépendante publiant des essais de critique sociale et politique ainsi que de la littérature jeunesse. 

SABR/Collection est une série de publications qui rassemble des œuvres littéraires de format court et de genres variés. Dirigée par Nesrine Salem, la collection souhaite mettre en avant les macro-réalités des auteur·ices choisi·es pour rendre visible le caractère intersectionnel des luttes.

STW, your favourite station! functioneert als een radioprogramma. Een boek dat lyrisch proza uitzendt van We make stuff up for a living (een CV medley) tot COMPUTER_SONG, een ceremoniële quiz met Adult Hood & Young als protagonisten, een grillige anekdote van iemand die zich ergert aan een Call Service, en meer! Thanks for tuning in!

Encre verte pour tableaux noirs. Vingt-sept poèmes de Timothée Trouche (maître d’hôtel et instituteur) compilés avec la complicité de Teddy Coste (groom et solitaire).