Books

Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidence through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and videotapes.

The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this unique correspondence in which Lorde and Parker discuss their work as writers as well as the intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. These letters are a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

Introduction by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan.

Fifty years after the Fall of Saigon and twenty years after her family’s emigration to America, Minh Nguyen returns to her native Vietnam to find out what’s left of the old revolutionary project. In Memorial Park, a collection of essays pairing travelogue and criticism, Nguyen encounters relics of proletarian romance and vestiges of authoritarian control amid an evermore corporatized society. Along the way, she considers how contemporary artspeak confuses state censors, the rise of luxury “Smart Cities” as they supplant socialist housing complexes, and the enduring appeal of propaganda signs that once promised utopia. 

Driven by a diasporic curiosity that seeks discovery over dwelling on loss, Memorial Park avoids nostalgic idealism or reflexive condemnation. Instead, Nguyen takes seriously the legacy of Vietnamese liberation by naming what it has become—and what it has not. What emerges is a complex picture of the country today and a reflection on how we inherit and reckon with radical histories that shape our world.

Minh Nguyen is a writer and curator based between New York City and Ho Chi Minh City. She is the curator of Dogma, a collection and gallery in Ho Chi Minh City focused on art and political graphics, and managing editor of e-flux journal. Her art and film criticism has appeared in publications such as Art in America, Artforum, e-flux, Momus, Mousse, and frieze, and she has curated exhibitions and programs at Wing Luke Museum, Northwest Film Forum, King Street Station, Gene Siskel Film Center, and Chicago Cultural Center. Formerly an instructor at Parsons School of Design—The New School, she has received a Warhol Arts Writers Grant, Fogo Island Arts Writing Award, and New York University’s Asia/Pacific/America Institute Visiting Scholar fellowship.

Vietnam is dissected under Minh Nguyen’s sharp scalpel. Attending to the unresolved pathologies of the past and the detours of the present, Memorial Park sketches the multiple faces of a country in full mutation. In turn lucid, sensitive, acerbic, and full of humor, this collection of essays mixes personal narrative, and social, cultural, and historical critique with discerning observations to interrogate what remains of that old dream of a communism that is “too good to be true.”
— Thuận, author of Chinatown and Elevator in Sài Gòn

What would it mean to “normalize” one of the most transformative conflicts of the Cold War in public consciousness? And how might the diasporic imaginary trouble such narratives, whether revolutionary or reactionary? Some five decades after the fall of Saigon, Minh Nguyen returns to her ancestral home to confront both the live and mediated reality of Vietnam on the ground—and elsewhere. In deeply poetic, incisive, and insightful reflections, she speaks to what is “hauntingly unassimilable” about the present tense of the American War.
— Pamela M. Lee, author of Think Tank Aesthetics

With confidence and measure, this thoughtful collection investigates culture in Vietnam in today’s so-called post-socialist context. Nguyen makes sense of the nation through the conjunction of what she was told by her parents as a diasporic kid growing up in America, and what she experiences when she returns to Vietnam as an adult. Her writing unfolds complex political histories and their ongoing implications for contemporary art and cultural practice, with unique attention to process and how research happens. This book takes the reader on a journey at the end of which everything is as it was, but different through her telling.
— Yaniya Lee, author of Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art

The first monograph on the work of artist Tony Cokes, creating a visual cartography of a body of moving image work that spans twenty years.

Tony Cokes's video works are eviscerating critiques and affective art works, bringing together color theory, sound, music, and texts, and quoting a polyphony of voices including Aretha Franklin, Mark Fisher, David Bowie, Public Enemy, and Donald Trump. Combining political and social commentary with cultural theory and a critique of capitalism, Cokes's works viscerally confront the social condition, particularly the prejudices and threats suffered by black subjects. This book is the first monograph on his practice, creating a visual cartography of a body of work that spans twenty years.

It features four critical pathways into Cokes's decades-long practice, with essays contributed by notable academics, and conversations between Cokes and artist Kerry Tribe. Cokes's work deals with mediation and distribution, and the book itself becomes another conduit for the dissemination of theory, critique, and counter-narrative—a process that Cokes so powerfully engages in as an artist.

This book accompanies Cokes's solo exhibition, If UR Reading This It's 2 Late: Vol. 1–3, across three international art institutions: Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University; and ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels.

This publication accompanying his most comprehensive exhibition to date exhibition is Jack O’Brien’s first monograph. Conceived by the artist himself, it complements the exhibition in both form and content, documenting his practice from 2021–2025 and transfers it into a different medium. Developed as an artist’s book it stands in direct relation to the magazine collages in the exhibition. The torn book cover, perforated paper pages, and a shoelace sealed under cellophane make the publication itself a sculptural gesture.

O’Brien negotiates themes such as staging, visibility, queer identity, and the circular dynamic between consumption, body, and performance. The title refers to the English “cue”—a theatrical cue—and at the same time to its repetition. This double meaning reflects O’Brien’s working method, in which material, form, and gesture continually oscillate between suggestion and withdrawal, presence and dissolution. O’Brien works with found and discarded objects, which he transforms through gestures of wrapping, binding, and perforation. His sculptures, installations, and collages use industrial materials such as cellophane, shrink wrap, and synthetic textiles.

The catalogue brings together the first substantial essays on O’Brien’s work. Alexander Wilmschen introduces the exhibition, in which chance becomes the driving force of reordering, and situates O’Brien’s work within the context of queer phenomenology. Kristian Vistrup Madsen examines the sadomasochistic dimensions of the work. Juliette Desorgues reads the sculptures as embodied punctuation. In conversation with Jeppe Ugelvig, O’Brien reflects on his artistic methodology and language.

The result is a monograph which also formally works with the moments of controlled instability that are so striking in the exhibition: floating, supported and warped.

Texts: Juliette Desorgues, Kristian Vistrup Madsen, Jack O’Brien & Jeppe Ugelvig (Interview) and Alexander Wilmschen

A collection of poetry reclaiming Catholic prayers and biblical passages to empower girls, women, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community. 

The extreme level of sass in Emily Austin’s Gay Girl Prayers does not mean that this collection is irreverent. On the contrary, in rewriting Bible verses to affirm and uplift queer, feminist, and trans realities, Austin invites readers into a giddy celebration of difference and a tender appreciation for the lives and perspectives of “strange women.”

Packed with zingy one liners, sexual innuendo, self-respect, U-Hauling, and painfully earnest declarations of love, this is gayness at its best, harnessed to a higher purpose and ready to fight the powers that be.

"Gay Girl Prayers offers a template for queer resistance to religious doctrine in revised Bible verses. Emily Austin has forged an unholy hymnal, a book of praise songs that shuck off stuffy Christian constraints to embrace instead unrepentant joy. She redefines Heaven not as a place for the puritanical, but rather a series of intimate moments between queer girls ‘who take lamps to one another’s bed chambers' and reimagines, through erotic apocrypha, divinity inclusive of ‘the curious… the closeted… the butches… the femmes… bisexuals, pansexuals… all queer trans people.’ Gay Girl Prayers is a renunciation of orthodoxy, a proclamation of queer solidarity, and a celebration of self-love."
—Evelyn Berry, author of Grief Slut and Buggery

What is the difference between hearing and listening? Does sound have consciousness? Can you imagine listening beyond the edge of your own imagination?

In response to the anti-war movements of the 1960s, pioneering musician and composer Pauline Oliveros began to expand the way she made music, experimenting with meditation, movement and activism in her compositions. Fascinated by the role that sound and consciousness play in our daily lives, Oliveros developed a series of Sonic Meditations that would eventually lead to the creation of Deep Listening – a practice for healing and transformation open to all, rooted in her musicianship. 

Quantum Listening is a manifesto for listening as activism. Through simple yet profound exercises, Oliveros shows how Deep Listening is the foundation for a radically transformed social matrix: one in which compassion and peace form the basis for our actions in the world. 

This timely edition brings Oliveros’ futuristic vision – blending technology and spirituality – together with a new Foreword and Introduction by Laurie Anderson and IONE.

I Am Abandoned documents a little-known, but visionary performance by Barbara T. Smith. Taking place in 1976, it featured a conversation in real time between two psychoanalytic computer programs (known today as two of the earliest chatbots) alongside a staging of Francisco Goya’s The Naked Maja (1795–1800) and The Clothed Maja (1800–1807), in which the artist projected an image of the famous painting on top of a female model. The publication includes a full transcript of the “conversation” between the two programs; documentation and ephemera from the performance; Smith’s reflections on the night; and an afterword by scholar and artist Mashinka Firunts Hakopian.

I Am Abandoned was part of the exhibition The Many Arts and Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and rather than simply celebrate new technology, Smith also sought to challenge what she saw as a “built-in problem” that “computers were only a new example of the male hypnosis.” In collaboration with computer scientist Dick Rubinstein, she enlisted the computer science teams at Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to mount a conversation between a program named DOCTOR, which was designed to be a surrogate therapist, and another named PARRY, which was trained to mimic a paranoid schizophrenic patient.

While the computer operator worked in the next room, each new page of the conversation was projected on the wall where a model dressed as The Clothed Maja reclined beneath the text, with a slide of the nude version of the same painting, The Naked Maja, projected onto her. The audience was rapt with attention for the livestreamed conversation. The performance went on for nearly two hours, before the model eventually grew furious from being ignored (abandoned) by the computer operator, stormed over, and attempted to seduce him. Shortly after, the gallery director pulled the plug on the entire event, claiming it distracted the audience for too long from the other works on view.

To revisit I Am Abandoned today is to see the artistic and truly liberatory potential that art can have when it intervenes in new technologies. Much like the original performance, in which the model grew alienated from the proceedings, what gradually emerges are the stakes these new technologies present. Against today’s backdrop of AI and a still male-dominated tech field, Smith’s early work with emerging technologies, and in this case chatbots, is prophetic and hints at the contemporary conversation around the gendered and racialized machinic biases of our current computational landscape. Though Smith, like many women of her generation, was overlooked by the landmark surveys of art and technology during the 1960s and 70s, her career incisively probed new technologies, using them to question gender dynamics, community, and self. Her projects from the Coffin books (1966–67), created with a 914 Xerox copier in her dining room, to performances like Outside Chance (1975), which created a small snow squall in Las Vegas out of 3,000 unique, computer-generated snowflakes, and the interactive Field Piece (1971), where participants’ movements altered the soundscape of a fiberglass forest, all exemplify her open-ended approach to art and tech. “Each person lit their own way,” Smith remembers, “And produced their own soundtrack.”

Barbara T. Smith is an important figure in the history of feminist and performance art in Southern California. Her work—which spans media and often involves her own body—explores themes of sexuality, traditional gender roles, physical and spiritual sustenance, technology, communication, love, and death. Smith received a BA from Pomona College in 1953, and an MFA in 1971 from the University of California, Irvine. There she met fellow artists Chris Burden and Nancy Buchanan, with whom she co-founded F-Space in Santa Ana, the experimental art space where many of her performances were staged. Smith’s work has been exhibited since the 1960s in solo exhibitions, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024), the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2023), and Pomona College Museum of Art (2005), and featured in group exhibitions, including how we are in time and space: Nancy Buchanan, Marcia Hafif, Barbara T. Smith, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2022), State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970, Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana (2012); WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007); and Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998). Smith is the recipient of the Nelbert Chouinard Award (2020), Civitella Ranieri Visual Arts Fellowship, Umbria, Italy (2014); Durfee Foundation’s Artists’ Resource for Completion (2005, 2009); Women’s Caucus for Art, Lifetime Achievement Award (1999); and several National Endowment for the Arts Grants (1973, 1974, 1979, 1985). The Getty Research Institute acquired Smith’s archive in 2014 and published her memoir, The Way to Be, in 2023. Her survey catalog, Proof: Barbara T. Smith was published by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2024.

A fullness of the erotic that pervades the entirety of the book to its edges, where a continual corruption of our often unexpressed desires overflows into forms both lyrical and traditional. "Butterflies Come Out At Night" continuously asks where the "you" stands, and if desire can empower one to reach a fullness of self. No othering, but flowing seamless from source to rapid source. The book explores this encompassing and embracing body of care and power through poetry, collage, enchantments, and spells and keeps an aura that constantly shifts where the erotic nature of both writer and reader bloom through out the reading.

Rage is not just a feeling—it’s fuel.

The Hajar Book of Rage ignites the first spark in the elements anthology series, harnessing the primordial force of fire as a fury that destroys and transforms. Bringing together fiction, poetry and essays by writers of colour, this Fire-themed collection delves into the fierce, animating power of rage as a catalyst for revolutionary change.

Here, rage teaches. It reveals what we’re fighting against and what we’re fighting for. It mobilises us into action, rouses our ideals and refuses to let us compromise. And it is unruly and consuming—a blaze that resists containment.

This is a searing tribute to the fires of anger that fuel our resistance and burn down the worlds that cannot hold us.

The Hajar Book of Rage is the first book in elements, a series by Hajar Press on the politically transformative power of Fire, Earth, Water and Air.

What do you worship? What claims your time, your faith, your silence? What are the icons you carry, the relics you protect, the devotions that define you?

For our inaugural issue, we invite you to reflect on the objects, ideas, rituals, and obsessions that shape your devotion. Worship is not confined to temples or texts, it flickers in longing glances, whispered prayers, silent routines, and fervent beliefs. It can be sacred or profane, communal or solitary, chosen or inherited.

We encouraged our writers and artists to interpret this theme freely, critically, emotionally, playfully, or abstractly. Whether they explored worship through fiction, nonfiction, poetry, visual art, or hybrid forms, we were looking for work that comforts, commands, or consumes.

This issue features art and writing from: Triinu Silla, Michel Krysiak, Anna Tracey, Antonina Anna Kubicka, Ari Wentz, Jonathan David Sijl, Renacuajo Sánchez, Florence Hutchinson, Marta Calero Segura, Eden Ridout, Artémis Toumi, Simone Viola, Zoe Pappouti, Laura Soto Sánchez, Autumn Anderson, Woodkern, Cathal McGuire, Nena Pawletko, Ignacio Aguilera, Marine Victoria Lobos Garay, Andreea Luță, Isabel Ferreras González, Rafael Torrubia, Emilia Tapia, KC Willis, Simon Jin, Jacky Weerman, Róisín Gallagher, and Rin Anishchanka. 

Many contemporary philosophers – including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben – ascribe an ethical or political value to anarchy, but none ever called themselves an “anarchist.” It is as if anarchism were unmentionable and had to be concealed, even though its critique of domination and of government is poached by the philosophers.

Stop Thief! calls out the plundering of anarchism by philosophy. It’s a call that is all the more resonant today as the planetary demand for an alternative political realm raises a deafening cry. It also alerts us to a new philosophical awakening. Catherine Malabou proposes to answer the cry by re-elaborating a concept of anarchy articulated around a notion of the “non-governable” far beyond an inciting of disobedience or common critiques of capitalism. Anarchism is the only way out, the only pathway that allows us to question the legitimacy of political domination and thereby wfree up the confidence that we need if we are to survive.

Dear Friend is a monthly letter format publication covering design events, issues, and ideas. This publication distributed via snail mail is initiated by Sandra Nuut and Ott Kagovere.

The publication edited by Sandra Nuut & Ott Kagovere features all the letters from the Dear Friend publishing project, which they initiated at the Graphic Design Department of the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2018. The book includes contributions by Singapore-based design writer Justin Zhuang, designer and writer Else Lagerspetz, and artist Lieven Lahaye. The book is designed by Ott Kagovere and published by Lugemik and Estonian Academy of Arts.

Texts by Justin Zhuang, Lieven Lahaye, Else Lagerspetz

Letters written by Alicia Ajayi, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, Claudia Doms, Nell Donkers, Maarin Ektermann, Rosen Eveleigh, Maryam Fanni, Saara Hannus, Eik Hermann, Paul John, Maria Juur, Ott Kagovere, Maarja Kangro, Arja Karhumaa, Kristina Ketola Bore, Nicole Killian, Rachel Kinbar, Tuomas Kortteinen, Keiu Krikmann, Kadri Laas, Else Lagerspetz, Lieven Lahaye, James Langdon, Jungmyung Lee, Kai Lobjakas, Michelle Millar Fisher, Maria Muuk, Sheere Ng, Sandra Nuut, Laura Pappa, Jack Self, Indrek Sirkel, Paul Soulellis, Triin Tamm, Laura Toots, Alice Twemlow, Loore Viires, Sean Yendrys, Justin Zhuang

Le titre du livre « Index of operational and code names » reprend l'intitulé d'un document trouvé sur Internet constitué d'une liste de 437 mots anglais classés par ordre alphabétique et accompagnés de brèves indications concernant les opérations militaires pour lesquelles ces mots ont servi de noms de code.

Ce document a inspiré à Diane Guyot la série « Index War » réalisée selon un protocole simple consistant à produire un dessin pour chaque mot de la liste.

Composé de 86 dessins issus de cette série, certains reproduits pour le support du livre, d'autres présentés au sein d'un cahier photographique tels qu'ils sont aujourd'hui accrochés dans les intérieurs de leurs propriétaires, et d'une partie textuelle placée en fin de volume qui restitue l'intégralité du document source, le livre, comme le suggère la mention volume 1 qui accompagne son titre, ne marque pas le point d'achèvement de l'œuvre mais témoigne au contraire d'un processus en cours.

L'articulation des composantes de l'œuvre dans l'espace du livre en constitue en mème temps une nouvelle version, à la fois spécifique et autonome. L'activation du dispositif codex/index invite le lecteur à une méditation sur la notion de code, où s'entrecroisent sémiotique de l'image, technique de propagande et technologie de l'information.

Having fled to France in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles joined the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital, where he carried out a transformative clinical practice for over twenty years, in part under the Vichy regime. 

Saint-Alban was an extraordinary event, a commune, an informal refuge in a time of extreme danger, a sort of upwelling spread through word of mouth. Those entering the asylum were welcomed, and that welcome never stopped. Care happened through a broad range of communal activities for staff and patients: theater, cinema, collective writing, horticulture, the sorting of colored pearls, gymnastics, singing, a monthly newspaper. The dignity of every patient was of foremost importance. 

Now, as then, warmongers are willing to poison and slaughter without blinking, making all of life difficult if not impossible: the pull of such asylums is obvious. Tosquelles is a ground-breaking record of the life and work of the founder of institutional psychotherapy. Assembled by Joana Masó, with many texts translated to English for the first time, it is a direct encounter with Tosquelles’s clinical, intellectual, and political writings. 

“Tosquelles’s work serves as a model for dismantling capitalist institutions, a revolutionary venture whose essence Joana Masó captures.”
Paul B. Preciado 

“This remarkable collection allows us to experience the genius of Tosquelles in all its dimensions for the first time. We accompany him through his early work in Reus and Barcelona, the development of his therapeutic ideas and inventive practices in war-torn Catalonia and in exile at the Septfonds Camp, his legendary years at Saint Alban and his lesser-known later years in Melun, Nouvelle Forge and La Candélie. Joana Masó guides us to the creative heart of a man whose counter-cultural, counter-intuitive thinking excited generations of intellectuals in France and now inspires the world.”
Rosie Stockton 

“Resistance hero, anti-Stalinist Marxist, Surrealist, revolutionary practitioner of social therapy, mentor to Frantz Fanon: Francesc Tosquelles was one of the most innovative thinkers in modern psychiatry, a visionary whose moment may finally have arrived.”
Adam Shatz

With texts by Francesc Tosquelles, trans. Robert Hurley and Mara Faye Lethem

In Lilacs, syringa vulgaris gives its name to a form of long poem that promotes sense memory. Here, we have one lilac for each of the senses, and a sixth for love, which synthesizes them all.

Rainer Diana Hamilton is the author of God Was Right and The Awful Truth. They write, broadly, about the forms that dreams and art have taken.

“I wanna ____ all my friends at once”: how would you complete the lyric Arthur Russell wrote for “Go Bang”? In Rainer Diana Hamilton’s hands, “smell” or “touch”—or “talk to,” for Hamilton a near-synonym for “love”—might be more appropriate than Russell’s “see.” Or maybe they’ll have argued us into believing that yet a different faculty counts among the senses, in these poem-essays that swerve from memory to love letter to argument. A narrative of lost and developed capacities, a felt history of class antagonism, a treatise masquerading as a flower, a flower in every organ—Lilacs is rude with ambition, underneath its abundant charm.” —Kay Gabriel

“Every new poem by Rainer Diana Hamilton is a gift in which poetry is made new again.” —Andrew Durbin

the second poetry collection from Natalie Briggs titled ‘FLOWER ENGINE’. This collection of cinched, bright free-verse explores the passing locations of love and the slow, private operations of pain’s knocking counterweight. The book extends Briggs’ relay of concise universal suggestions, translating them through brief, intimate utility. 

The success of new far-right movements cannot be explained by fear or rage alone – the pleasures of aggression and violence are just as essential. As such, racism is particularly intense when it is erotically charged, migration presenting as a sexual threat to white women being one of many examples. Germany’s strikingly successful right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland is, according to the historian Dagmar Herzog, characterized by this “sexy racism,” with its second main feature being that of an obsessive antidisability hostility—both elements resonating strongly with Nazism. In The New Fascist Body, Herzog connects her analysis of fascism’s libidinous energy with its animus against bodies perceived as imperfect. Only by studying the emotional and intellectual worlds of past fascisms can we understand and combat their current manifestations.

The book features an afterword by Alberto Toscano, author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso 2023).

In its second issue, Manufacturing Narratives, Makan focuses on how interrogating narrativity can provoke fundamental questions about how societies define or choose to accept societal or historical truths in today’s world. Spanning across [and beyond] the Mashreq and Maghreb, the various contributions reflect a shared space of inquiry that bridges geographies and fosters emergent dialogues across shifting territorialities. This issue invited contributors to right (as much as write) narratives: to question authorship and its social collectivities, to retell alternative public histories, to explore gender roles, and to unsettle the exoticism, folklorization, and political textures of fiction as a practice of indiscipline. Together, these contributions re-articulate the genealogies of our present through the pluralities of the past, offering tools to imagine and manufacture alternative futures, and realities otherwise.

With contributions by Ala Younis, Bari Abbassi, George Bajalia, Karim Kattan, Karima Kadaoui, Tamkeen, Kenza Sefrioui, Lahbib El Moumi, Laila Hida, Maureen Mougin, Mohamed Amer Meziane, Monica Basbous, Nadia Tazi, Sénamé Koffi Agbodjinou, Salma Barmani, Sonia Terrab, Soufiane Hennani, Yto Barrada.

A disaffected young woman seeking self-estrangement and withdrawal from the world decides to quit her day job as a bookseller to live out, or live in, an experiment: to become a full-time narrator. She moves through sentences, afternoons, a rented apartment, an artist’s studio, a party, the post office with the flowering focus of a realist novel, transposing physical and social life to the space of fiction. As she chronicles the process of becoming a subject in writing, the narrator confronts her fantasy of uninterrupted interiority—and its limits.

What is “fiction” and how does one “enter” into it? Composed in the tense of Literature, Lara Mimosa Montes’s The Time of the Novel is a book about detours, psychic swerves, and surprising encounters with the Real as it converges with the written.

Paul Preciado's controversial 2019 lecture at the École de la Cause Freudienne annual conference, published in a definitive translation for the first time. 

In November 2019, Paul Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne's annual conference in Paris. Standing in front of the profession for whom he is a mentally ill person suffering from gender dysphoria, Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka's Report to an Academy, in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars.  

Speaking from his own mutant cage, Preciado does not so much criticize the homophobia and transphobia of the founders of psychoanalysis as demonstrate the discipline's complicity with the ideology of sexual difference dating back to the colonial era, an ideology which is today rendered obsolete by technological advances allowing us to alter our bodies and procreate differently. Preciado calls for a radical transformation of psychological and psychoanalytic discourse and practices, arguing for a new epistemology capable of allowing for a multiplicity of living bodies without reducing the body to its sole heterosexual reproductive capability, and without legitimizing hetero-patriarchal and colonial violence.  

Causing a veritable outcry among the assembly, Preciado was heckled and booed and unable to finish. The lecture, filmed on smartphones, was published online, where fragments were transcribed, translated, and published with no regard for exactitude. With this volume, Can the Monster Speak? is published in a definitive translation for the first time.

It is a royal-format (16x24) print review of 250 pages, offering a manifesto where Global South narratives and ideas come to life. Through photography, articles, poems, and essays, each issue deconstructs dominant narratives, highlighting diverse voices. Presented in their original languages with English translations, the review fosters a global dialogue. Issue 0, titled "Ummah – Divine Oneness, Worship Plurality", explores the rich diversity of Islam, challenging colonial stereotypes and offering a new vision from Muslim and culturally Muslim perspectives.

Aggressively rebounding after recessions and the pandemic, sprawling landscapes of tourism in the Mediterranean continue to build upon the iconic spatial typology of sea & sun vacationing: the beach. But behind the leisurely scattered bodies and the quiescent summer shores, beachfronts are assembled as intensely ordered infrastructures for the heavy machineries of tourism.

Approaching the beach as an operational socio-technical landscape, this book unpacks stories of construction, programming, and maintenance: from traces of moving sands in Lefkada island to mirror postwar developments in Delos and Mykonos islands, and from historic and bodily excursions to workings of the Athenian riviera to rituals of eco-certification under Blue Flags.

The texts frame the beach as a machine, one with protocols of function and metabolic needs, studying how it directs the capture of land and bodies, while establishing forms of environmental control. As a repeatable and proliferating type of infrastructure space, the beach has the potential to expose parallel evidence of seeming globalizations and patchy planetarities.

Contents:

Flying Flags, Fixing Sands
by George Papam

Moving Sands: Ammoglossa
by Eleni Grapsa

Delos Symposia
and Delos LTD:
Making Global Leisurescapes
by Petros Phokaides

Beach Making:
The Naked Body on the Rocks
by Phevos Kallitsis

Beach Effect
by Hannah Freed-Thall

Hello Hygiene:
A Guide for Bathers
by Lydia Xynogala

Throughout this book-length poem, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist.

In Or, on being the other woman, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life. Throughout this book-length poem, White writes through a hybrid of poetry, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist. She considers black social life—from art and motherhood to trap music and love—as unspeakably troubling and reflects on the degree to which it strands and punishes black women. She also explores what constitutes sexual freedom and the rewards and dangers that come with it. White meditates on trap music and the ways artists such as Future and Meek Mill and the sonic waves of the drum machine convey desire and the black experience. Charting the pressures of ordinary black womanhood, White pushes the limits of language, showing how those limits can be the basis for new modes of expression.