Fiction

Somewhere in England, confined to a room with empty chairs and an old telephone, is I. I wasn’t born here. English is their second language. They’ve given up writing. England With Eggs depicts the psychological aftermath of migration through a personal vortex of foreign experiences. Oscillating between narrator and character, Franz Kafka and long-distance calls, I spends sleepless nights drawing eggs, rearranging the chairs and talking to an uncanny voice on the phone. The isolated protagonist’s inner life is fractured: notions of place and history grow ever more fragile, language ever less certain. Torn between stubborn expectations and the reality of a foreign country, England With Eggs unfolds against a silent backdrop of austerity, colonialism and xenophobia. It is a study of acceptance, a reminder that sometimes the things we flee from are the ones we carry along on our journey.

This publication is limited to 100 copies, which are signed and numbered by the author.

Edited by Angie Harms

Known and celebrated in Brazil and abroad for his novel Resistance, Julián Fuks returns to his auto-fictional alter ego Sebastián in a narrative alternating between the writer’s conversations with refugees occupying a building in downtown São Paulo, his father’s sickness, and his wife’s pregnancy. With impeccable prose, the author builds associations that go beyond the obvious, not only between glimpsing a life's beginning and end, but also between the building’s occupation and his wife's pregnancy — showcasing the various forms of occupation while exposing the frailty of life, the risk of solitude and the brutality of not belonging.

Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them. An Inuk girl grows up in Nunavut, Canada, in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents’ love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us.

When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this.

In this acclaimed debut novel – haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once – Tanya Tagaq explores the grittiest features of a small Arctic town and the electrifying proximity of the worlds of animals and of myth.

Winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English.

With her novel The Visitors, Jessi Jezewska Stevens has proven herself as our preeminent purveyor of comical, techno-millenarian unease. Now, with this first collection of her acclaimed short fiction – originally appearing in such venues as The Paris Review and Harper’s – some of her very best work is at last readily available to readers.

Stevens’s women throw disastrous parties in the post-party era, flirt through landscapes of terror and war, and find themselves unrecognisable after waking up with old flames in new cities. They navigate the labyrinths of history, love, and ethics in a fractured American present, seeing first-hand how history influences the ways in which we care for – or neglect – one another.

With each story exemplifying Stevens’s ability to examine the big questions through the microscope of a shambolic human perspective, Ghost Pains is a triumphant statement of purpose from one of our greatest young writer-thinkers.

Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who gives her the nickname ‘Boulder’. When Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik and the couple decides to move there together, Samsa decides that she wants to have a child. She is already forty and can’t bear to let the opportunity pass her by. Boulder is less enthused, but doesn’t know how to say no – and so finds herself dragged along on a journey that feels as thankless as it is alien.

With motherhood changing Samsa into a stranger, Boulder must decide where her priorities lie, and whether her yearning for freedom can truly trump her yearning for love.

Once again, Eva Baltasar demonstrates her pre-eminence as a chronicler of queer voices navigating a hostile world – and in prose as brittle and beautiful as an ancient saga.

Shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize.

A classic of Brazilian literature is twinned with an overheated tract in which tropical delirium swallows up Western philosophy. Both attack the decolonial question with poetic ferocity, ignited by the moment when colonialist rationality meets its limits in the "magnificent disorder" of the Amazon jungle. 

Described in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's foreword as "no longer an interpretation of Brazil but an interpenetration with Brazil," Jean-Christophe Goddard's strange theory-fiction plunges Western philosophy into the great American schizophrenia, where its ordered categories are devored by uncontainable contaminations—first and foremost the rainforest itself, a "monstrosity unapproachable by the cogito." 

In 1664, the Portuguese Bento de Espinosa wrote of his terrifying hallucination of "a scabby black Brazilian." But rather than a vision of "the Other," the dream figure was a frightful glimpse of Bento's own duplicity. Upon adopting the "clean white nickname" of Benedict de Spinoza, the philosopher cut ties with his homeland and its colonial misadventures, repudiating this specter that flees along the lines of migration: "Spinoza is American ... the journey is intensive." And in his wake, a cannibalized cast of conceptual personae are sucked into Goddard's Pernambucan delirium: Franny Deleuze, Dina Levi-Strauss, Chaya Ohloclitorispector, Galli Mathias... 

The rainforest also precipitates a deregulation of the senses in Verdant Inferno, Alberto Rangel's classic 1904 work of Brazilian literature. In Rangel's astonishing tales, this "poet-engineer" sent into the dark interior as a state representative records his encounters in a style that shimmers between objective documentary and visionary limit experience.

Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them. An Inuk girl grows up in Nunavut, Canada, in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents’ love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us.

When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this.

In this acclaimed debut novel – haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once – Tanya Tagaq explores the grittiest features of a small Arctic town and the electrifying proximity of the worlds of animals and of myth.

Winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English.

Oostende is a book about displacement and the sometimes-overwhelming internal monologue we live with. In between poetry, diary and novel, the book reflects on Zicari’s life in Buenos Aires and Belgium, as he navigates work fragility, friendship, sex and love, migration and the fiction laying behind everyday actions and life changing decisions.

Zícari's portrayal of his private life is far from the domain of the concrete, instead he ventures into the uncontrollable production of fantasies that sustain his inner discourse. It is around this dichotomy between the real and the imaginary, the tension between the experienced and the illusion, that Martín Zícari builds a book sustained in orality and proximity.

Martín Zícari, PhD, is a writer and producer based in Brussels. He has published poetry collections such as "Oostende" (Paripé Books, Madrid, 2023), "Del Príncipe Azul al Hombre Invisible en una Semana" (Editorial Municipal de Rosario, Argentina, 2018), and "Pequellpu" (LUMA Foundation, Switzerland, 2015), as well as the short novel "Scalabritney" (Entropia, Argentina, 2014), among others. His research has been featured in scientific journals such as Performance Research, Memory Studies, and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.

Set against a backdrop of 1950s New York, this experimental novel follows an ensemble cast of all-singing, all-dancing butch dykes and Yiddish anarchists through eternal Friday nights, around the table, and at the bar. 

In one of many bars, Frankie Gold sings while Sammy Silver plays piano after a day job at the anarchist newspaper. The Butch Piano Players Union meets in the corner next to the jukebox. Laur smokes on the back steps, sweaty thigh to thigh with Vic. Frankie's childhood sweetheart, Lily, turns up at yet another bar to see a second Sammy play every Friday night. And before all that, there's always dinner at Marg's. Fabulated out of oral histories, anthologies, as well as the fiction of the butch-femme bar scene and Yiddish anarchist tradition, Greasepaint is a rollicking whirlwind of music and politics—the currents of community embodied and held inside the bar.

The first book devoted to the late African American writer and actress, Dorothy Dean, one of the few prominent African American women of New York City's bohemian heyday, close to Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe.

This second release from Éditions 1989 features Dorothy Dean's unpublished writing and selected correspondence with Edie Sedgwick, Rene Ricard, and Taylor Mead, among other friends and artists. This volume also includes Dean's transcendent script of an unrealized film starring Factory actor, Ondine.

Lyrical, humorous, political, and brutally honest, Who Are You Dorothy Dean? is a tribute to one of the few prominent African American women of New York City's bohemian heyday.

Dorothy Dean (1932-1987) was an African American writer and actress. She entered the 1960s New York underground scene and quickly became one of its key, if overlooked, figures, starring in six of Andy Warhol's films and inspiring the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Robert Creeley. Presumably the first woman ever hired as fact-checker at The New Yorker, Dean held brief editorial and proofreading positions at publications such as Vogue before launching her very own bulletin of film reviews, the All-Lavender Cinema Courier, in 1976.

Edited by Anaïs Ngbanzo.
Texts by Dorothy Dean, Edie Sedgwick, Robert Creeley, Gerard Malanga, Rene Ricard, Taylor Mead, et al.
Translated from the English (American) by Rachel Valinsky.

The Singularity is a study of grief, migration, and motherhood from one of Sweden's most exciting new novelists. 

In an unnamed coastal city filled with refugees, the mother of a displaced family calls out her daughter's name as she wanders the cliffside road where the child once worked. The mother searches and searches until, spent from grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to the suicide is another womanon a business trip, with a swollen belly that later gives birth to a stillborn baby. In the wake of her pain, the second woman remembers other losses—of a language, a country, an identity—when once, her family fled a distant war.

An ode to mad love, awarded the Prix de Flore in 1999. 

Published in 1999 and awarded that year's Prix de Flore, Nicolas Pages marks a departure from the Sadean preoccupations of Guillaume Dustan's first three novels; it is, in essence, a love story. Inspired by a failed romance with the Swiss artist-writer Nicolas Pages and collaging texts that Dustan initially produced for a wide variety of other occasions (magazine articles, short stories, project notes, shopping lists, and more), the "auto-/bio-/porno-graphic" prose of Nicolas Pages is by turns trashy and encyclopedic, corporeal and philosophical. Here Dustan inaugurates a "gay literature" that is no longer painful or shameful, but epicurean and cheerful without ever lapsing into idealism. A vibrant plea for gay rights and a tapestried text that is more than the sum of its many styles, Nicolas Pages is a call to explore the body, sexuality, and writing in all their variety; it is a hymn to life, humanity, pleasure, and desire.

First published in 1994, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe is one of the most provocative, poignant, and inventive American novels of the last quarter century.

The book tells two stories of romantic obsession. One, based on the first autobiography in English, the medieval Book of Margery Kempe, is about a fifteenth-century woman from East Anglia, a visionary, a troublemaker, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and an aspiring saint, and her love affair with Jesus. It is complicated. The other is about the author’s own love for an alluring and elusive young American, L. It is complicated. Between these two Margery Kempe, the novel, emerges as an unprecedented exploration of desire, devotion, abjection, and sexual obsession in the form of a novel like no other novel.

Robert Glück’s masterpiece bears comparison with the finest work of such writers as Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. This edition includes an essay by Glück about the creation of the book titled "My Margery, Margery's Bob."

At once dreamlike and tough, hilarious and melancholic, Motion Sickness is a contemporary picaresque in which a young woman drifts and reinvents herself with every new encounter.

For the narrator of Motion Sickness life is an unguided tour, populated with hotels and strangers, art, books, and films. Adrift in Europe, her life becomes a carousel of unusual encounters, where coincidences and luck shape la vita nuova.

In London our narrator is befriended by an expatriate American Buddhist and her mysterious husband. In Paris she meets Arlette, an art historian obsessed with Velazquez’s painting ‘Las Meninas’. In Barcelona she meets two generations of Germans. She tours the hill towns of Italy in a London taxi with two surprising Englishmen in pursuit of art and Henry Moore. She buys postcards to send, but often tears them up, not sure of what the pictures mean.

This edition restores to print a central text of the New Narrative movement, founded in San Francisco by Boone and Robert Gluck in response to the stagnation of contemporary experimental poetry of the late 1970s. Wishing to bring the vigor and energy of the gay rights and feminist movements, Bruce Boone’s writing of the late 1970s is as fresh, funny, witty, and self-reflexive as it was thirty years ago. First published in 1980, Century of Clouds, based on Boone’s experiences at the summer meeting of Marxism and Theory Group in St. Cloud, Minnesota, takes up issues of sexuality, political and theoretical identity, religion, and friendship in the characteristically rich and varied writing of the New Narrative movement.

History and literature seem to be losing ground to the brave new world of electronic media and technology, and battle lines are being drawn between the humanities and technology, the first world and the third world, women and men. Narrator Mira Enketei erases those boundaries in her punning monologue, blurring the texts of Herodotus with the callers to a talk-radio program, and blending contemporary history with ancient: fairy-tale and literal/invented people (the kidnappers of capitalism, a girl-warrior from Somalia, a pop singer, a political writer), connected by an elaborate mock-genealogy stretching back to the Greek gods, move in and out of each other's stories. The narrator sometimes sees herself as Cassandra, condemned by Apollo to prophesy but never to be believed, enslaved by Agamemnon after the fall of Troy. Brooke-Rose amalgamates ancient literature with modern crises to produce a powerful novel about the future of culture.

Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her later, experimental novels. 

First published in 1994, Camino Road is artist Renée Green’s debut novel—a short, ruminative work infused with semantic ambiguity and the dreamy poetry of the quotidian. Republished here in a facsimile edition, the book ostensibly traces its protagonist Lyn’s journeys to Mexico and her return to attend art school in 1980s New York, but what emerges is more an intertextual assemblage of the moments between drives, dreams, and consciousness. Lyn does her Spanish homework and makes note to read Anna Kavan and Cortázar; she watches Fellini; she dreams about the Mediterranean Sea. Much like Green’s multimedia installations encompassing the sonic, spatial, and visual, Camino Road is richly layered—part intellectual genealogy, part fictional personal memory, and part cultural criticism.

Green has described the book as a “self-conscious homage to or parody of the ‘road novel,’ ‘bohemia,’ and artist-rebels.” “I’d been thinking about the beat generation, figures like Jack Kerouac, Burroughs, etc.—the mythic construction of the artist personality as rebel and how females, and myself in particular, entered into that,” she said. “These ‘beat’ sources seemed to form a typical American introduction to the idea of bohemia and of being an artist.”

Originally created as part of Green’s contribution for the group exhibition Cocido y crudo/The Cooked and the Raw at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, the text is written in both English and Spanish, and accompanied by an appendix of photographs and ephemera tracing Madrid’s La Movida, a Spanish countercultural moment from the 1980s. The book was published through Green’s production company, Free Agent Media (FAM), which since 1994 has been circulating and exhibiting media, printed matter, and time-based projects.

A unique treatise on the circuits of exchange in gender, politics, and art, Camino Road can also be read as a variation on the classic Bildungsroman genre. “I don’t feel developed in any area,” thinks Lyn at one point. “It’s very difficult being young and incomplete.” Importantly, she also muses, “I want to be swallowed by another language.”

Originally written as letters from enclosure, In the Jungle There Is Much to Do came out of the words and drawings sent by Mauricio Gatti, a young anarchist, to his three-year-old daughter, while he was imprisoned in military barracks in Montevideo. In 1972 the compiled letters were made into a book published by his comrades from the commune Comunidad del Sur. It tells the story of an elephant, a snail, a turtle, a seal, and a bird. They are all trapped by a hunter, who understands nothing of the jungle and who locks them up in the city zoo, where they miss their home and little ones. This fable for all ages about political prison was republished by different small organizations associated with the international solidarity movement supporting Latin American political refugees in the 1970s and 1980s.

Among these editions was a coloring book published in the GDR, which we used as a basis for a new German edition. The original text by Gatti was translated into English for the first time. Both language editions were published by the 11th Berlin Biennale in the fall of 2019. The curatorial team of the Berlin Biennale has decided to make these publications freely accessible on the website. The book is available for download and print-out, and a special black-and-white version has been created for free coloring.

The early writings of renowned poet and critical theorist Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog. 

Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang's trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping out of an MFA program, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and writing her trenchant book Carceral Capitalism. Alien Daughters charts the dream-seeking misadventures of an "odd girl" from Florida who emerged from punk houses and early Tumblr to become the powerful writer she is today. Anarchic and beautifully personal, Alien Daughters is a strange intellectual autobiography that demonstrates Wang's singular self-education: an early life lived where every day and every written word began like the Tarot's Fool, with a leap of faith.

Here, in a work of trans pessimism, amy etherington asks what love and grief mean in a world that wants you dead. Speaking to a structural, architectural violence, I love you forever is murder imagines transness as an exit, which then implies a reentry. Understanding love and grief as inextricably entangled, etherington examines how trans people are often met with grief by those who claim they love them.

Part break-up text, part grief-oriented trans theory, part whispering, pricking, ghostly presence-from-beyond-the-grave, etherington calls upon Lacan through Edelman, Freud, Derrida, and the voices of friends, writing with an aching warmth and confessional intimacy that seeks to live, write, go on, after your own passing.

About the Author
amy etherington is an educator–researcher–writer, exploring grief, death and transness and how they sit by the edges of things. Her writing feels through/with a pessimism that there might only be no place for transexuals in this World, itself an imagining wrought from our violent unmaking. Her teaching work seeks ways to resist the institution a little longer from within its grounds, through collaborative investigation of care and caring practices with students. @amy.ether

About a Series of Attempts:
This new series published by Sticky Fingers Publishing explores the essay form through the etymological root of essay: to try, trial or attempt. In 1508, French theorist Michel de Montaigne published a collection of 107 texts called Essais, described by his contemporaries as ‘self-indulgent and embarrassingly confessional.’ It is through these roots we find the attitude and intentions at the heart of this series; that through thinking together, through trying to figure it out on the page, we can reach new and increasingly nuanced ways to understand each other and the worlds we inhabit.

Sticky Fingers Publishing is an intra-dependant press based in London. We are a feminist, queer, disabled-led publisher producing work at the intersection of design, academia, art, visual culture and performance.

Tenth and final FDBN...* publication.

Featuring zack mennell, Biogal, James Sunderland, Fiona Glen, Jessie McLaughlin, Dan Schapiro, A Lyons, Stephanie Lones, Julian Konuk and Ioulitta Triantafyllou.

Guest edited by amy etherington.

Risograph and Thermography cover with flourecent green sticker black and white inners throughout.

*Fragile-Disorienting-Breakable-Naive-Hesitant-Loving-Lusting-Leaking-Trembling-Terrifying-Fucking-Mourning

The first novel by Swiss artist and writer Johana Blanc: haunted by woman figures having voluntarily ended their artistic career in the early 70', and fascinated by their radicality, a young artist asks herself how to carry on with her artistic practice without betraying her idols. Over the course of one evening, during which she attends a series of openings, the story follows her attempt to find her position among a fantasized art world, caught between a paradoxical reality and thwarted ambitions.

Johana Blanc (born 1990 in Paris), a graduate of the Head in Geneva, directs several micro-publishing projects such as the magazine Escalier and Éditions Cacahuète. Her artistic practices include installation and performance art. She also writes and has published several texts, whether collaboratively or not (Wages For Wages Against, Woman Cave).

A moving story about love, AIDS, grief, and memory by one of the most adventurous writers to come out of San Francisco's LGBTQ+ scene.

Bob Glück met Ed Aulerich-Sugai in 1970. Ed was an aspiring artist; Bob wanted to write. They were young men in San Francisco at the high tide of sexual liberation and soon, and for eight years, they were lovers, after which they were friends. Ed was an explorer in the realms of sex. He was beautiful, fragile, exasperating, serious, unassuaged. In 1994 he died of HIV. His dream notebooks became a touchstone for this book, which Glück has been working on for some two decades, while also making his name as a proponent of New Narrative writing and as one of America's most unusual, venturesome, and lyrical authors. About Ed is about Ed, who remains, as our dead do, both familiar and unknowable, faraway and close. It is about Bob too.

The book is a hybrid, at once fiction and fact, like memory, and it takes in many things through tales of political activism and domestic comedy and fury to questions of art and love and experiences of longing and horror. The book also shifts in register, from the delicate to the analytic, to funny and explicit and heartbroken. It begins in the San Francisco of the early 1980s, when Ed and Bob have been broken up for a while. aIds is spreading, but Ed has yet to receive his diagnosis. It follows him backward through his life with Bob in the 1970s and forward through the harrowing particulars of death. It holds on to him and explores his art. It ends in his dreams.

"It's the best one," Clarice Lispector remarked on the occasion of the publication of The Apple in the Dark: "I can't define it, how it is, I can only say that it's much better constructed than the previous ones."

A book in three chapters, with three central characters, The Apple in the Dark is in fact highly sculpted, while being chiefly a metaphysical book, and in this stunning new translation, the novel's mysteries and allegories glow with a fresh scintillating light.

Martim, fleeing from a murder he believes he committed, plunges into the dark nocturnal jungle: stumbling along, in a state of both fear and wonder, eventually he comes to a remote, quiet ranch and finds work with the two women who own it. The women are tranquil enough before his arrival, but are affected by his radical mystery. Soaked through with Martim's inner night (his soul is in the darkness where everything is created), the novel vibrates with his perpetual searching state of vigil. Often he feels close to an epiphany: "for the first time he was present in the moment in which whatever is happening is happening." Yet such flashes flicker out, so he's ever on the watch for "life to take on the dimensions of a destiny."

In an interview, Lispector once said: "I am Martim." As she puts it in The Apple in the Dark: "All I've got is hunger. And that unstable way of grasping an apple in the dark-without letting it fall."