Books

God Is a Bitch Too is the accelerated and acidic English-language debut of Colombian poet María Paz Guerrero­. In this chapbook, god is needy, Latin American, and an overweight woman. No one asks god to dance. Someone speaks, someone tries: “One is the measure of their body.”

God Is a Bitch Too is #13 in the Señal series for contemporary Latin American poetry in bilingual editions.

Faut-il cautionner la prostitution pour soutenir les travailleuses du sexe ? Faut-il pénaliser les clients ? La prostituée est-elle le symbole de l'oppression des femmes ? Juno Mac & Molly Smith posent un regard nouveau sur ces questions souvent conflictuelles. Elles rejettent l'alternative entre condamnation et glorification du travail du sexe, et étendent leur propos à des problématiques plus larges : les frontières, l'exploitation, le sexisme et la suprématie blanche. En délaissant les symboles passionnés et en examinant les effets concrets des différents régimes législatifs, elles démontrent que la lutte des travailleuses du sexe est d'une importance capitale pour le mouvement social.

Sahar Khraibani’s ONE THOUSAND GHOSTS IN THIS FEAST contends with desire, grief, and language as sites of injury and release. Written over a period of three days—amid ongoing genocide, land seizure, and displacement—the long poem counters logics of possession with those of relation. Khraibani’s all-caps, first-person address impels the poem forward, centering intertextuality as a force through which spectral presences shine.

Sahar Khraibani is a writer and artist whose work has been presented with Montez Press, The Brooklyn Rail, Magnum Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, the Poetry Project, and Hyperallergic among others. Sahar is a recipient of the Creative Capital / Arts Writers Grant, a fellowship at The Poetry Project, a MacDowell Fellowship, a 2024 residency at Mass MoCA, and is an alumni of the Whitney Independent Study Program. Sahar teaches at Pratt Institute and is the author of Anatomy of A Refusal (1080PRESS, 2025). 

ONE THOUSAND GHOSTS IN THIS FEAST lays bare the “SENSELESS DECAY” potentiated by empire’s relentless categorization, containment, and calculated death delivery. Khraibani’s debut chapbook collapses the imposed and perceived distance written by borders, disrupts anticipated colonial language logics, and bursts “INTO THE MADNESS OF THE ORGY” with queer interference reverberating in all directions. From the soil, from the graveyard, from the dancefloor, from their favorite spot on the eroding waterfront, Sahar broadcasts, IN ALL CAPS, “THE UNNAMEABLE TRUTH.”
— Andrea Abi-Karam

‘Kamer I - Oesters’ is een kort verhaal geschreven in het kader van het kunstproject Beste Anna,. Hierin fungeert de figuur van de openlijk lesbische Rotterdamse schrijfster Anna Blaman als motor voor vragen, gesprekken en correspondenties rondom feminisme, schrijvende vrouwen en de canon, anders zijn, eenzaamheid en vriendschap.

Ook verkent Katinka met dit onderzoek Anna Blaman als personage voor een toekomstige roman. In ‘Kamer I - Oesters’ betreedt de hoofdpersoon Anna’s met een rolkoffer vol boeken van andere schrijvers, fluistert ze hun woorden in de kieren in Anna’s muren en verleidt ze Anna met een pauwendans.

Anna Blaman (1905-1960) was openlijk lesbisch, in die tijd een groot taboe, maar zag zichzelf niet als voorvechter van een beweging. Een belangrijk thema in haar werk is de vraag of we een ander werkelijk kunnen kennen. De personages in haar romans zijn vaak alleen en verlangen naar een ander, die altijd onbereikbaar blijft. In 1948 publiceerde Blaman de roman Eenzaam Avontuur, die erg veel stof op deed waaien vanwege enkele (homo-)erotische personages die in het boek voorkomen. 

Casual Encountersz presents On The Rag, America’s Greatest Tabloid. Blending art and literature with sex, slime and sleaze, On The Rag emerges from LA's underground reading series Casual Encountersz to create a new media platform where the Ivory Tower and the gutter collide. On The Rag is a literary journal, gossip mag and conceptual art project all in one. Get off the apps…And get On The Rag!

Often dissident, sometimes adherent, Nothing About is, in essence, indefinable because it is adaptive and fluid. Speculative or hands-on, this discipline – if we can call it that – displays all the ambivalences of our contemporary lifestyles: superficial and profound, profane and divine, present everywhere and nowhere, and often regarded as futile, even though it could nonetheless destroy the most beautiful of insides. This book brings together a variety of intellectual tools and insights – polysemic and ambiguous, bespoke and improvised, ornamental and criminal, spanning media, technology, the arts and other, often undefined fields – that analyze the impact of the discipline on contemporary design. In the end, what makes Nothing About charming is that this inside – insofar as it is still defined as such – has only the humble ambition of accompanying beings, both animate and inanimate, within their environment, like a friend who is never far away. 

Introduction by Javier Fernández Contreras. Text contributions by Daniel Zamarbide, Line Fontana & David Fagart, Valentin Dubois & Bertrand Van Dorp, Camille Bagnoud & Ahmed Belkhodja, Javier F. Contreras & Roberto Zancan, Paule Perron, Philippe Rahm, Youri Kravtchenko, Leonid Slonimskiy, Simon Husslein, Vera Sacchetti, Jan Dominik Geipel, Valentina De Luigi, Jean-Pierre Greff.

Across objects, writing, sound and choreography, British artist Cally Spooner addresses the manners in which specific technological and financial conditions shape and organize life. This volume surveys her artistic output of the last five years.

Sweat Shame Etc. includes a lecture by Spooner along newly commissioned essays by Laura McLean Ferris, Pierre Bal-Blanc, and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti. A 2018 series of drawings on paper, from which the monograph takes its name, features hastily sketched figures that take care of their bodies while shedding clothes, socks, limbs, and torsos. Though their heads are scratched out, they remain unexpectedly determined and unperturbed.
Published following the eponymous exhibition at the Swiss Institute, New York, in 2018-2019.

Cally Spooner (born 1983 in Ascot, UK, lives and works in London and Turin) is an artist who exhibits performances that unfold across media—on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and as illustrated in drawings.

Edited by Alison Coplan and Laura McLean-Ferris.
Texts by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti, Laura McLean-Ferris, Cally Spooner.

A meta-textual matryoshka doll of a novel from a renowned voice in Flemish literature. 

The twisting narrative of Louis Paul Boon's 1953 masterpiece follows a young girl named Ondine and her brother Valeer, born into poverty at the turn of the century in the industrial city of Aalst, Belgium. Ondine's coming of age is interwoven with a reworking of the medieval fable of Reynard the Fox, as well as a metanarrative in which an author named Louis Paul Boon and his colorful group of friends discuss the writing of a novel named Chapel Road, debating how best to present Ondine's story.

Groundbreaking among post-war Dutch literature for its postmodern structure and irreverent, dialect-studded use of language, Boon's allegory of the rise and fall of socialism in Flanders presents his theory of the novel as a type of "illegal writing" where digressions are far more important than a carefully constructed plot.

Introduction by Chad W. Post

Louis Paul Boon (1912-1979) started out as a house painter but went on to become the author of a large and rich oeuvre spanning several genres: from the compelling historical epics he composed later in life to his sharp, witty work as a newspaper columnist and his tongue-in-cheek, scabrous novels. Boon is one of the most important writers of Flemish literature in the twentieth century, a keen observer of society, the individual and the interplay between them.

Adrienne Dixon is a translator of Dutch and Flemish literature.

Chad W. Post is the founder and publisher of Open Letter Books. He is also the editorial director of Dalkey Archive Press, where he was formerly the associate director. Over the course of his career, he founded the Translation Database, the Best Translated Book Awards, multiple literary podcasts (Two Month Review, Three Percent), the Three Percent website, and currently writes two newsletters: The Three Percent Problem, and Mining the Dalkey Archive. He is also the author of The Three Percent Problem: Rants and Responses on Publishing, Translation, and the Future of Reading. His articles and book reviews have appeared in a range of publications. In 2018 he received the Words Without Borders Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature. 

A secret can be a private space for self-creation – or a shared site of pleasure.

We explore secrets in a plethora of forms and contexts. From layered accounts of mediaeval ecstasy to the unexplored sensory experience of smell. From camouflaged play to queer readings of astrological charts and the hidden history of house music. From a very analog point of view to the outskirts of the internet.

Affiliation, de Mira Mattar, autrice londonienne issue de la diaspora palestinienne, explore des thèmes tels que le genre, la famille, la religion, la guerre, l’écologie, le colonialisme et l’amour, en lien avec des lieux comme la Jordanie, le Liban, la Palestine et le Royaume-Uni. Interrogeant nos affiliations personnelles et collectives, et la manière dont les systèmes de pouvoir influencent nos désirs et nos identités, le livre s’ouvre sur quatre Lettres d’Amman qui propulsent le texte poétique dans le mouvement du monde et attestent de la dynamique de l’exil palestinien, où l’éclatement, l’effacement et l’appropriation se mêlent avec les effets contemporains de la mondialisation. 

La deuxième partie du livre, intitulée Affiliation (pour mon père) est un long poème rétrospectif qui court sur une trentaine de pages. L’écriture à la première personne de Mira Mattar met en tension des contextes politiques, domestiques, intimes, économiques où se déploient des affiliations coloniales, capitalistes, patriarcales, nationalistes. Elle en restitue les violents processus internes, passant du refus de se soumettre à l’impossible échappée. Dans Affiliation, on fait l’expérience d’être en dehors: en dehors de son corps, en dehors d’un pays, en dehors d’une pièce. Il n’y a aucune position stable, et le sujet se construit dans un éclatement constant. Peu de livres articulent aussi finement expérimentation formelle et nécessité de l’expression verbale. Affiliation est un flux de langage dont on peut sentir l’urgence à chaque vers.

The Secret History of Kate Bush, first published in 1982 as Kate was on the verge of superstardom, is a daring and unorthodox dive into the world of music, fame, and cultural obsession. Written by Fred Vermorel—a close associate of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, and renowned for his subversive "anti-biographies"—the book shatters the boundaries of traditional celebrity profiles. Told from the perspective of a die-hard fan, it unveils the mystique of one of pop’s most elusive icons while exposing the capitalist machinery driving the entertainment industry. Part biography, part cultural critique, and entirely provocative, this is not just a book about Kate Bush but a rebellious manifesto against the commodification of art.

Republished in 2022 by Le Gospel in France, this special edition goes even deeper with unpublished treasures from Vermorel’s personal archive. Featuring an exclusive interview with Kate’s father, Dr. Robert Bush, a razor-sharp foreword by novelist and musician Tony O’Neill (Digging the Vein), and Vermorel’s own afterword reflecting on his explosive work four decades later, this is a must-read for anyone fascinated by Kate Bush, the art of fandom, and the raw power of creative rebellion. Fred Vermorel is a pioneer of the in-depth study of celebrity and fan cultures, best known for his controversial "anti-biographies" of pop icons including the Sex Pistols, Kate Bush, Vivienne Westwood, and Kate Moss.

A weird, wild ride across non-narrative vignettes and dryly funny aphorisms exploring the shared intensity of violence and the erotic.

As if hauled up squirming from the bowels of the internet, Sex Goblin metabolizes sex writing, popular culture, and autofiction to present the real and the imagined as equally surreal possibilities. In the narrator’s childlike voice, all things become both mundane and strange—a child and their dog fused after a car accident, moments of tenderness amidst frat hazing, witches, and hiking accidents. At turns charming and bizarre, Cook’s work channels sexual violence through the lens of the absurd to alchemize shame and abuse into something that registers differently than trauma. Sex Goblin is a barely factual but deeply felt field guide to relationships and relatability.

Lauren Cook is a transsexual naturalist and the author of I Love Shopping (Glo Worm Press, 2019). He is from upstate New York.

A forgotten mid-century genius, recently rediscovered in France and never before translated into English, Hélène Bessette is a treasure and a bracing force to reckon with.

With a contribution by Eimear McBride
A New Yorker Best Book of 2025

Lili Is Crying, Hélène Bessette’s debut novel, conveys with singular force the fraughtness and depth of the troubling relationship between Lili and her mother, Charlotte. With a near-mythic quality, Bessette's stripped-back prose evokes at once the pain of thwarted love—of desire run cold—and the promise of renewal. Lauded by critics on its initial 1953 publication for its boundary-pushing style, Lili Is Crying catapulted Bessette to cult status in France. The novel is moving and maddening in turns, with its characters trapped in their own cruelties and sorrows, but in its spareness and strength it feels true. "Show me a woman who's chosen something." Bessette's books were hailed for their unusual economy of expression, rarity, strange humor, and sheer vivacity. She characterized her new kind of novel as "a freshly cut slice of life, whose force comes from its lack of commentary."

A self-taught typographic letterer, Chrystel Crickx used to cut out letters by hand and sell them by the piece in her Publi Fluor shop in Schaerbeek, Belgium. Commercialized between 1975 and 2000 for local advertising and signage purposes, these letters have since been digitized and made more widely available to users outside of the Belgian borders and in other contexts. At the margins of standard means of communication, they have contributed to shape (and still do) the urban visual landscape, in Brussels and elsewhere.

This non-standard, collective essay attempts both to recount the life of a type model — as well as of its successive authors and their tools — while expanding the field of investigation to examine the cracks between the different stories summoned up by Chrystel Crickx's practice summons up.

Violence is arrayed against us because we’re Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about, and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.

Foreword by Da’Shaun L. Harrison.
Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal.

"Joy James’s Revolutionary Love is umph-degree love; or love beyond measure. It is anything love. It is love without reckoning. It is love that dares all things, beyond which others may find the spirit-force to survive; to live to fight another day. Such love is also fighting itself, for the sake of ensuring that others may live." — Mumia Abu-Jamal

An essay in the form of painting studies - including persons, dogs, a frog, a hoofed animal, fish, hare, trees and plants.

This special, limited-edition issue of Plaster celebrates Akomfrah’s commission for the British Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. The linen presentation box contains: an essay by Akomfrah’s long-time friend and collaborator, the BAFTA-winning film curator June Givanni; an interview with Akomfrah by Harriet Lloyd-Smith; original portraits by photographer Siam Coy and a fold-out poster featuring an exclusive still from Akomfrah’s film installation, Listening All Night To The Rain, now screening in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

With creative direction by Constantine // Spence and design by Emma Ralph.

Joan of Arkansas is an election-season closet drama about climate catastrophe, divine gender expression, the instructions of angels, and heavenly revelation relayed via viral video. Fifteen-year-old Joan has been tasked by God (They/Them) to ensure that Charles VII (R–Arkansas) adopts radical climate policy and wins his bid as the Lord’s candidate to become the president of the United States. Arkansas is flooding, the West is burning, and borders are closed: “Heaven or / internet—it’s / hard to be / good.”

Winner of the 2023 Whiting Award for Drama.

William Rowe, the poet, and eminent translator of Latin American poetry from Vallejo to Raul Zurita & others presents his latest book of poems, Sixfingersafterwards, in six sections. The title word ‘afterwards’, which refers to a large part of the first section of poems takes inspiration from an Ayahuasca session. According to Freud, Afterwardness or Nachtraglichkeit as originally harmless memory can later be re-experienced as traumatic through the lens of new mature understanding. The Marxists view the capitalist state as inherently connected to a ‘death culture’ where the pursuit of profit overrides the human life, turning the system into a form of a vampirism that consumes the living labour. All the sections are written with a deep commitment, elaborating a painful truth in a remarkable open poetic sensitivity. Our language ravaged by ‘vampirism’ where ‘Language itself seemed to form death communiques.’  Other sections are about love, ‘when my daughter says she loves me very much.’  Or a section of Quechua poems translated by Rowe, which shed light on the extensive range of his writing and interconnectedness of his creativity. The poems in this collection leave nothing out of the traumatic pain from capitalism nor its ‘dark dark shine of money.

I dreamt of Rowe, reading these poems to the track called Walking on the ceiling, by the late Chicago blues guitarist, who played with six fingers. I renamed it to Walking the ceiling toward eternity, to honour the Sixfingersafterwards. A must-read!
- Ulli Freer

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin, body, and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing collection, one that confronts America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle. 

Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Smith has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Poetry Foundation, and lives in Minneapolis.

Published in conjunction with the first major U.S. museum show of Joan Jonas’s art in nearly fifteen years, this monograph features new scholarship on her multimedia installations and performance practice from the early 1970s to the present. Inspired by the format of a reader, it breaks new ground by contextualizing and expanding understandings of Jonas’s body of work through three thematic approaches: the critical notions of gender, being and otherness; the politics of landscape and ecology; and new conceptions of medium specificity and un-specificity. Richly illustrated, with never-before-published sketches and drawings, the volume includes an interview with the late Douglas Crimp and Jonas’s personal reflection on their enduring friendship.

Edited by Barbara Clausen and Kristin Poor with Kelly Kivland, with an introduction by Clausen; essays by Clausen, Adrienne Edwards, André Lepecki, Poor, and Jeannine Tang; interview with Douglas Crimp; writings by Joan Jonas; conversation between Heather Davis, Joan Jonas, and Zoe Todd; and coda by Kivland

Renowned Japanese photographer Takashi Homma observes his daily life through the poses of his cat.

A cat wanders, perches, and lounges in various spaces around a humble Tokyo apartment. It is perfectly tranquil in its surroundings, simply going about its daily life. In one image, the cat lays serenely amidst pot plants on the balcony, squinting in morning sunlight; in others, it balances precariously on the edge of the bath, snuggles beneath a sleeping bag, plays in a cardboard box, hides beneath an open umbrella. Here and there, evidence of the cat's fellow inhabitant in the apartment—a man, who also happens to be the internationally renowned photographer Takashi Homma—creeps into the frame. A knee, a foot, a shock of blonde hair, half of a face. There are artefacts of his life and practice too. Framed photographic prints draped in bubblewrap lean against a wall; a tangle of musical effects pedals make for colourful constellation against the cool blue of the carpet.

Many have written of the unique atmosphere and energy of Takashi Homma's pictures. His photographic mannerisms are so light, so subtly empathetic to his subjects, that we all but dissolve into the world he creates. The photographs that populate This Is Not My Cat are no exception. Unencumbered by a sense of fussiness or perfection, these images are casual, diaristic, and quotidian. As viewers, we become part of the images and their atmosphere, rather than poring over their details. They are about feeling as much as they are about looking

The title—This Is Not My Cat—seems multipart. Whereas the anomaly imbedded in Homma's iconic photobook Tokyo and My Daughter is that the girl pictured was not in fact his own child, here, his own cat is recast as belonging to another. Or perhaps it is that a cat's independence cannot be truly curbed. They quietly live, play, and exist alongside us. They move through life in our shadow, but forever in their own world. 

Takashi Homma (born 1962, lives and works in Tokyo) is one of the most internationally recognised Japanese photographers active at the front lines of contemporary photography today.

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.

A trenchant, darkly humorous, and unsentimental look at Calcutta society. 

Set in Calcutta in the mid-1980s, Truth/Untruth is a fast-paced thriller built around the death of the pregnant Jamuna—a maid in a newly affluent residential apartment complex—and Arjun, the upwardly mobile businessman who seduced her. Packed with a cast of colourful characters, this novel is a trenchant, darkly humorous, and unsentimental look at the different segments of Calcutta society: from the middle-class culture vultures to the unscrupulous ‘promoter’ class and the domestic helpers and slum goons who form an intrinsic part of the city’s life. All are implicated in a complex web of guilt and bizarre twists and turns. Sex, lies, death—the great modernist themes—run like a thread through this book, exposing societal greed, lust, corruption, and moral hypocrisy with a sardonic tone that spares none. An unusual novel by an author who is otherwise known for her hard-hitting activist-feminist stories, Truth/Untruth underlines the exploitative vicious cycle that defines urban relations between the haves and have-nots.

‘Although not of the margins herself, Devi was accomplished in writing from the margins [ . . . ] However, it is indeed worth it if you are looking for an exhilarating social commentary and biting satire that remains relevant today. Devi also reflects the jargon and dialects of the lower classes as deftly as the peculiarities of upper-class speech patterns. A feat of this work is Katyal’s ability to mediate these multiple registers, rewarding the reader with sharp writing that is at once funny, sardonic, and darkly pleasurable to read.‘—Jack Greenbert, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.