Skip to main content
rile*books

Search books

Search books by title, author, publisher, keywords...

Explore

Categories
Visit
Collections
Publishers
Back in stock
Any books

Translations

Translations

Cover of Strangers in Light Coats

Seagull Books

Strangers in Light Coats

Ghassan Zaqtan, Robin Moger

Poetry €21.00

Strangers in Light Coats is the third collection of Zaqtan's poetry to appear in English. It brings together poems written between 2014 and 2020 drawn from six volumes of poetry. Catching and holding the smallest particles of observation and experience in their gravity, the poems sprout and grow as though compelled, a trance of process in which fable, myth, and elegy take form only to fall apart and reconfigure, each line picked apart by the next and brought into the new body. 

Ghassan Zaqtan is not only one of the most significant Palestinian poets at work today, but one of the most important poets writing in Arabic. Since the publication of his first collection in 1980, Zaqtan's presence as a poet has evolved with the same branching and cumulative complexity as his poems—an invisible system of roots insistently pushing through the impacted soil of political and national narratives. 

Cover of Family Lexicon

New York Review of Books

Family Lexicon

Natalia Ginzburg, Jenny McPhee

Fiction €17.00

An Italian family, sizable, with its routines and rituals, crazes, pet phrases, and stories, doubtful, comical, indispensable, comes to life in the pages of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon. Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking—when he isn’t provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, politics. It is all very ordinary, except that the background to the story is Mussolini’s Italy in its steady downward descent to race law and world war. The Levis are, among other things, unshakeable anti-fascists. That will complicate their lives.

Family Lexicon is about a family and language—and about storytelling not only as a form of survival but also as an instrument of deception and domination. The book takes the shape of a novel, yet everything is true. “Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy [it],” Ginzburg tells us at the start. “The places, events, and people are all real.”

Cover of Nest

Falschrum Books

Nest

Gregory Carlock, Christina Atik

Poetry €18.00

“Ishtar said goodbye to the elephants, goodbye to the clowns, waved to a group of admirers who had gathered on East 43rd Street, and was ushered into a shiny new Escalade, which the NYPD reserved for such occasions. ‘I am the earth,’ she said, as the cops forced her head through the doorframe. The motorcade, fit for heads of state, went 40 down the West Side Highway, past rollerblading homosexuals and New School undergraduates, who held signs with slogans like ‘ISHTAR WE LOVE YOU!’ ‘ARREST ERESHKIGAL AND GILGAMESH,’ and ‘DOWN WITH CAPITALISM.’” 

Nest is Gregory Carlock’s vision of Manhattan razed to the ground by Ishtar—Akkadian goddess of love, sex & war—following her liberation from NYPD arrest. 

This poem, in 31 sections, combines the 4000-year-old Gilgamesh epic, pre-Islamic poetry, Sufi snippets & Carlock’s own Emily-Dickinsonesque rhymes to vent sulphurous @ New York/Washington’s rape’n plunder of Planetary Mind. Illustrated by the Lebanese artist, Christina Atik.

Cover of Hopscotch

Falschrum Books

Hopscotch

Fatemeh Shams, Armen Davoudian

Poetry €15.00

In Hopscotch, Fatemeh Shams crafts a vivid liminal world of Berlin-based poems, a canvas where home and exile blur into an intimate middle ground. Her work, geographically and metaphorically situated between her birthplace in Iran and her current life in exile, evokes a “third space”—a realm of creative liberation and a sanctuary for the play of memories, language, and place. Shams frames this space with tangible metaphors—airports, suitcases, the thresholds of nightclubs. Her poems, like the game of hopscotch itself, leap over borders with a childlike agility, contrasting against the harsh reality of exile. They invite us to consider our own places of belonging and the potential spaces we inhabit—those rich intersections of language and lived experience. 

Fatemeh Shams is the author of 88 (Gardoon, Berlin), Writing in the Mist (H&S Media, London), and When They Broke Down the Door (Mage, Washington D.C). Her poems and translations have been published in Poetry magazine, the Michigan Quarterly Review, The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, and elsewhere. Fatemeh grew up in Mashhad, Iran and is an Associate Professor of Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

Armen Davoudian is the author of The Palace of Forty Pillars, published by Tin House (US) and Corsair (UK). His poems and translations from Persian appear in Poetry magazine, the Hopkins Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. Armen grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.

Cover of The Gangsters

Magic Hour Press

The Gangsters

Hervé Guibert, Iain White

Fiction €20.00

Hervé Guibert’s novel The Gangsters opens at the front door of a Paris townhouse inhabited by the narrator’s elderly great-aunts, Suzanne and Louise. The narrator, distracted by a health crisis and his pursuit of an ambivalent lover, arrives to find suspicious renovation work taking place. But even after the great-aunts confess to being intimidated and extorted, neither he nor the incompetent police can stop the ongoing larceny. 

Readers of Guibert’s writing may already recognize the narrator (also named Hervé) and his great-aunts from the groundbreaking photo-novel Suzanne and Louise. As Guibert explained in a 1988 interview, “I started The Gangsters three days after discovering the events of which my great-aunts were victims, and I wrote the book in ten days. The story continued while I was writing and after I had finished.”  

Like his other books, The Gangsters is a work of autofiction. Here, he uses the crime-novel format to explore universal motifs, such as cruelty, desire, and mortality. “When I disappear,” Guibert continued, “I will have said it all. I will have striven to reduce this distance between the truths of experience and writing.”

Cover of The Literary Workshop

Verso Books

The Literary Workshop

Monique Wittig, Ann Jefferson

A bold, revelatory argument for the power of language by leading radical lesbian feminist and author of The Straight Mind. 

The Literary Workshop takes readers inside Monique Wittig’s creative process, unlocking the practice of writing both in material and political terms. Wittig provides her most com­plete account of how literature and politics work together. Part of the generation that revolutionized French literature, Wittig reveals the secret of her craft: that the work a writer does with language is itself a form of resistance. 

Born and raised in France, Monique Wittig (1935–2003) was a driving force in second-wave feminism and one of the most brilliant authors of her generation. A provocative thinker, she famously declared that lesbians are not women and in­troduced women into a materialist framework by treating them as a class. Wittig is the author of, among other titles, The Straight Mind, Les Guérillères, and The Lesbian Body. Her debut novel, The Opoponax, won Le Prix Medicis. 

Cover of The fruitfull sence

Leaky Press

The fruitfull sence

Titus Lucretius Carus, Lucy Hutchinson

Poetry €15.00

The fruitfull sence is an excerpt from Lucretius’s masterwork De rerum natura, in which the poet marvels at the sensory world. Optical illusions, the drift of smell, the juicy mechanics of taste. All animated by Lucy Hutchinson’s gorgeous 1640 translation, which renders the original Latin into bouncy English pentameter. The first publication in our new series, Sensory Dispatches.

Cover of Traces of Enayat

And Other Stories

Traces of Enayat

Iman Mersal, Robin Moger

Non-fiction €17.00

Cairo, 1963: Enayat al-Zayyat’s suicide becomes a byword for talent tragically cut down, even as Love and Silence, her only novel, languishes unpublished. Four years after al-Zayyat’s death, the novel will be brought out, adapted for film and radio, praised, and then, cursorily, forgotten. For the next three decades it’s as if al-Zayyat never existed.

Yet when poet Iman Mersal stumbles across Love and Silence in the nineties, she is immediately hooked. Who was Enayat? Did the thought of her novel’s rejection really lead to her suicide? Where did this startling voice come from? And why did Love and Silence disappear from literary history? To answer these questions, Mersal traces Enayat’s life, interviews family members and friends, reconstructs the afterlife of Enayat in the media, and tracks down the flats, schools, archaeological institutes, and sanatoriums among which Enayat divided her days. Touching on everything from dubious antidepressants to domestic abuse and divorce law, from rubbish-strewn squats in the City of the Dead to the glamour of golden-age Egyptian cinema, this wide-ranging, unclassifiable masterpiece gives us a remarkable portrait of a woman artist striving to live on her own terms.

Winner of the 2024 James Tait Black Prize – Biography 
Longlisted for the 2024 Jan Michalski Prize 

Cover of Murder

Litmus Press

Murder

Danielle Collobert, Nathanaël

Murder is Danielle Collobert’s first novel. Originally published in 1964 by Éditions Gallimard while Collobert was living as a political exile in Italy, this prose work was written against the backdrop of the Algerian War. Uncompromising in its exposure of the calculated cruelty of the quotidian, Murder’s accusations have photographic precision, inculpating instants of habitual violence.

Born in Rostrenen in 1940, Danielle Collobert left Bretagne for Paris at the age of eighteen where she worked in an art gallery and self-published her first poems in a book entitled Chants des guerres (1961). Both of Collobert’s parents, and her aunt, who survived deportation to Ravensbrück, were members of the Résistance during World War II. Herself a supporter of Algerian independence, Collobert joined the FLN (the Algerian National Liberation Front), precipitating her exile in Italy, during which time she completed work on Meurtre, first published in 1964 by Éditions Gallimard with the unwavering support of Raymond Queneau. She worked for Révolution africaine, a short-lived journal created at the end of the Algerian war. Collobert’s extensive travels, to Czechoslovakia, Indonesia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Mexico, Spain, Greece, Egypt, etc., did not prevent her from becoming a member of the group formed around Jean-Pierre Faye and the journal, Change. Her other works include Dire I et II (1972), a radio play the following year, Polyphonie, aired by France Culture, Il donc (1976) and Survie (1978). Upon her return from a trip to New York, Danielle Collobert took her own life in a hotel in Paris on her thirty-eighth birthday. Her complete works, in two volumes, edited by Françoise Morvan, augmented by several unpublished texts, were published by P.O.L. in 2005. Collobert’s works available in English include In the Environs of a Film (Litmus Press, 2019), Notebooks, 1956-1978 (Litmus Press, 2003) and It Then (O Books, 1989).

Cover of Tigris Vol. 1

CUNY Center for the Humanities

Tigris Vol. 1

Sargon Boulus

Poetry €16.00

In 1971, the great Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus (1944-2007) published a single issue of an English-language literary anthology that he called Tigris. The magazine—a whisper on the literary landscape that appeared three years after Boulus’s arrival in the US—brings together work by Boulus and several of his literary friends, in translation by Boulus and Etel Adnan.

Tigris was not an end in itself, but rather a temporary solution to the lifelong problem of how to devote oneself to poetry across different countries, eras, and styles: how to live poetry. Yet, in so doing, the small anthology includes significant work: Etel Adnan’s “Jebu,” translated by Adnan, and poetry by Boulus, Fouad Rifkah, Yusuf al-Khal, Mouayad al-Rawi, and Riadh Fakhouri, all in Boulus’s translations, as well as a work by Ankido, a “street-activist poet-café worker of importance to the Palestinian Liberation Movement.”

Cover of This Death is Not One

Bilna'es

This Death is Not One

Jasbir K. Puar, Nasser Abourahme and 1 more

The publication of The Right to Maim by Jasbir K. Puar in 2017 was critical to advancing studies on disability and to further articulating how the body figures in the nexus of capacity and debility across racializing and extractive neoliberal lines. It offered a complex and rigorous anti-capitalist account of disability that is useful to both scholarly work and political and social organizing. However, despite its paramount contribution to scholarship on Palestine, delivered by its scathing analysis of the Israeli biopolitical policy—its right to maim—in how the injured Palestinian body is produced and reproduced, its reception was difficult, and hard to stomach. It cohered a political logic in writing before it was visibly evident on the ground. In the moment and aftermath of the Great March of Return (2018-19), Puar’s offerings became much harder to ignore, as the event crystallized a mass maiming campaign of Palestinian protesters inside the edges of the militarized borders of Gaza.

The occasion of this publication by Bilna’es marks the first translation into Arabic of the chapter “Will Not Let Die”: Debilitation and Inhuman Biopolitics in Palestine, alongside the postscript of The Right to Maim. Not simply a reissue of previously published work or a translation, This Death is Not One includes a new preface from Jasbir K. Puar revisiting the right to maim from within this moment of genocide in Gaza that interrogates the new vectors of living and dying under settler-colonialism, and how maiming, in fact, speaks of extermination; an introduction by Nasser Abourahme reflecting on the book’s stakes in the present and its reception in the past, alongside searing analysis of genocide in excess of the law, and what this reveals and forecloses in how we understand the juridical body and militancy in the wake of Zionism; and original drawings by Xaytun Ennasr that inscribe a relation between land and body mapped through cosmological patterns tracing the relation between martyrs, who are referred to as moons, and the moon, a symbol for martyrdom in Palestine.

Jasbir K. Puar is Distinguished Faculty of Arts Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, Extraordinary Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, and Professor Emerita at Rutgers University where she was faculty in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department for 23 years. Puar is the author of the award-winning books: The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007).

Nasser Abourahme is a writer and teacher, and is currently assistant professor at Bowdoin College. He’s the author of The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony (Duke University Press, 2025), which was awarded the 2025 Palestine Book Award.

Xaytun Ennasr is an artist and designer. She works across experimental video games, paintings, prints, ceramics, installations, and text. She often uses science fiction, folklore, and radical softness as affective tools for revolutionary cultural production, specifically Palestinian liberation and sovereignty. Her work often deals with questions of land, cartography, transness, gender, and the living environment.

Drawings by Xaytun Ennasr

Translation to Arabic:

“Living in Genocide” by Jasbir K. Puar, translated by The Archilogue

“Our names, our remains” by Nasser Abourahme, translated by The Archilogue

The Right to Maim, Chapter 4: “Will not let die: Debilitation and Inhuman Biopolitics in Palestine ” and the The Right to Maim Postscript by Jasbir K. Puar, translated by Bekriah Mawasi

Cover of The History of the Vertebrate

Peninsula Press

The History of the Vertebrate

Mar García Puig, Mara Faye Lethem

Mothering €19.00

‘On 20 December 2015 I became a mother and I went mad.’ 

On a single day, Mar García Puig gives birth to twins and becomes elected to the Spanish Parliament as a member of the insurgent left-wing party Podemos. What might have been the best day of her life becomes the start of a terrifying ordeal; García Puig’s grip on reality begins to slip as she grapples with uncertainty, the weight of expectation, and misogyny in both of her new roles. 

In defiance of a culture that tells her the problem lies within, García Puig chooses to look outwards, examining the imbrication of madness and motherhood across centuries of science, myth, and politics while dissecting the ways in which women have been pathologized and banished from public life. 

At once intimate and epic, The History of the Vertebrate is a searing account of postpartum madness. Moving between memory, culture, and the history of medicine, García Puig transforms her experience into a story about the countless women who have felt that sanity was leaving them, and about the patriarchal forces that have silenced them. 

MAR GARCÍA PUIG is an editor and author. From 2015 to 2023 she was a member of the Spanish Congress of Deputies for Podemos, where she served on the Culture Committee and the Equality Committee. Her books include The History of the Vertebrate and This Thing of Darkness.

Cover of Truth / Untruth

Seagull Books

Truth / Untruth

mahasweta devi, Anjum Katyal

Fiction €22.00

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.

Cover of The Villain’s Dance

And Other Stories

The Villain’s Dance

Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Roland Glasser

Fiction €19.00

Full of wit, music, and a rollicking cast of characters, The Villain’s Dance shows Fiston Mwanza Mujila is back with a bang.

Zaire. Late nineties. Mobutu’s thirty-year reign is tottering. In Lubumbashi, the stubbornly homeless Sanza has fallen in with a trio of veteran street kids led by the devious Ngungi. A chance encounter with the mysterious Monsieur Guillaume seems to offer a way out . . . Meanwhile in Angola, Molakisi has joined thousands of fellow Zairians hoping to make their fortunes hunting diamonds, while Austrian Franz finds himself roped into writing the memoirs of the charismatic Tshiamuena, the “Madonna of the Cafunfo Mines.” Things are drawing to a head, but at the Mambo de la Fête, they still dance the Villain’s Dance from dusk till dawn.

Cover of Season of the Swamp

And Other Stories

Season of the Swamp

Yuri Herrera, Lisa Dillman

Fiction €19.00

New Orleans, 1853. A young Zapotec exile from Mexico named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city.

Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the stark trade in human beings.

With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.

Cover of Autobiography of Cotton

And Other Stories

Autobiography of Cotton

Cristina Rivera Garza, Christina MacSweeney

Fiction €19.00

A novel about how cotton workers transformed the Mexico-US borderlands, by a Pulitzer Prize–winning author.

In 1934, a young José Revueltas traveled to Tamaulipas to support the cotton workers’ strike in Estación Camarón, which became the basis of his landmark novel, Human Mourning. In her own groundbreaking novel, Autobiography of Cotton, Cristina Rivera Garza recounts her grandparents’ journey from mining towns to those same cotton fields as it intersects with Revueltas’s life in a vivid and evocative history of cotton cultivation along the Mexico-US border.

Through archival research and personal narrative, Rivera Garza chronicles the way cotton transformed the borderlands by reconstructing the cotton workers’ strike and reveals how cycles of deprivation and ecocide persist across generations. Deeply personal and politically acute, Rivera Garza crafts a new kind of border novel that tells how a brittle land radically altered her grandparents’ lives and the territories they helped develop. An intimate fictionalization, Autobiography of Cotton reveals a rich social history of agricultural colonization, labor activism, environmental degradation, and cross-border migration.

Cover of A Letter from a Tehran Prison

Self-Published

A Letter from a Tehran Prison

Wu Qin

Zines €24.00

This story was written by a Chinese activist/writer about her arrest and detention during the waves of resistance in China in late 2022. To evade censorship, she disguised it as a translation—told through the voice of an Iranian Kurdish woman amid the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising happening at the same time. 

After fleeing China, the author reclaimed the story through footnotes—uncovering hidden meanings and restoring its Chinese context. What first read as an Iranian story became, on re-reading, a coded Chinese narrative. Iran stood as both real and metaphorical—a displaced symbol, through which the interconnected struggles in different movements echoed.

The two waves of reading, months apart, became part of the story’s form. This “non-nonfiction” reveals a paradox: in China, truth must appear as fiction or elsewhere to be told—making the fiction more real than reality itself. 

Two years later, the piece was translated “back” into Persian by an Iranian Kurdish activist. And now, it arrives here, in this zine of tripped, layered languages. 

Author: Wu Qin
English Translation: Aaris WOO and Yixi
Farsi Translation: Somayeh Rostampour
Visual & Layout: Maoyi, If A, Hu Jiamin
Interior illustrations: Hu Jiamin
Published by Tofu Stand (Tofulogy 002)

Cover of Ovid's Metamorphoses

University of California Press

Ovid's Metamorphoses

Ovid, C. Luke Soucy

This fresh translation revives the politics and power at play in classical mythology’s foremost source

Centuries of conservative translators have robbed the Metamorphoses of its subversive force. In this boldly lyrical translation, C. Luke Soucy revives the magnum opus of Rome’s most clever and creative poet, faithfully matching the epic’s wit and style while confronting the sexuality, violence, and politics so many previous translations have glossed over.

Soucy’s powerful version breathes new life into Ovid's mythic world, where canonical power dynamics are challenged from below to drain heroes of their heroism, give victims their say, and reveal an earth holier than heaven. Incorporating the latest scholarship alongside annotations, illustrations, and glossary, this edition brings fresh insights to both returning and new readers.

Cover of Brickmakers

Graywolf Press

Brickmakers

Selva Almada, Annie McDermott

Fiction €16.00

Oscar Tamai and Elvio Miranda, the patriarchs of two families of brickmakers, have for years nursed a mutual hatred, but their teenage sons, Pájaro and Ángelito, somehow fell in love. Brickmakers begins as Pájaro and Marciano, Ángelito's older brother, lie dying in the mud at the base of a Ferris wheel. Inhabiting a dreamlike state between life and death, they recall the events that forced them to pay the price of their fathers' petty feud. 

The Tamai and Miranda f-amilies are caught, like the Capulets and the Montagues, in an almost mythic conflict, one that emerges from stubborn pride and intractable machismo. Like her heralded debut, The Wind That Lays Waste, Selva Almada's fierce and tender second novel is an unforgettable portrayal of characters who initially seem to stand in opposition, but are ultimately revealed to be bound by their similarities. 

Almada enlarges the tradition of some of the most distinctive prose stylists of our time. In Brickmakers, she furthers her extraordinary exploration of masculinity and the realities of working-class rural life. This is another exquisitely written and powerfully told story by a major international voice. 

Cover of  The Book of Sleep

Seagull Books

The Book of Sleep

Haytham El-Wardany, Robin Moger

Non-fiction €17.00

What is sleep? How can this most unproductive of human states—metaphorically called death's shadow or considered the very pinnacle of indolence—be envisioned as action and agency? And what do we become in sleep? What happens to the waking selves we understand ourselves to be?

Written in the spring of 2013, as the Egyptian government of President Mohammed Morsi was unraveling in the face of widespread protests, The Book of Sleep is a landmark in contemporary Arabic literature. Drawing on the devices and forms of poetry, philosophical reflection, political analysis, and storytelling, this genre-defying work presents us with an assemblage of fragments that combine and recombine, circling around their central theme but refusing to fall into its gravity.  

"My concern was not to create a literary product in the conventional sense, but to try and use literature as a methodology for thinking," El Wardany explains. In this volume, sleep shapes sentences and distorts conventions. Its protean instability throws out memoir and memory, dreams and hallucinatory reverie, Sufi fables and capitalist parables, in the quest to shape a question. The Book of Sleep is a generous and generative attempt to reimagine possibility and hope in a world of stifling dualities and constrictions.

Cover of Terra Nova

Jan Van Eyck Academie

Terra Nova

Esther De Soomer, Rudolph Glitz

Zines €25.00

Terra Nova combines fragments from a novel in the making by Esther De Soomer, in which she explores the parallels between the loss of language and forest dieback, between climate grief and linguistic mourning. Reflecting on her own relationship with language and multilingualism, she traces the feelings of grief that accompany the loss of German, one of her mother tongues. Drawing on existing narratives — such as fairy tales and family stories — she examines the critical state of the disappearing Hambacher Wald in Western Germany and presents language as a means to name and hold on to things.

Cover of Winter Night Rabbit Worries

Ugly Duckling Presse

Winter Night Rabbit Worries

Yoo Heekyung, Stine An

Poetry €20.00

Winter Night Rabbit Worries is Yoo Heekyung’s fifth poetry collection, published in Korean in 2023. Structured as a series of stories, the book presents narrative and linguistic architectures that dissolve the opposition between those materials that construct the this and the that side of life—past and future, truth and falsehood, memory and fantasy. As readers move from one story to another, they will encounter a dizzying yet tender experience in which the boundaries between self and other unravel, and new stories begin to take shape.

“The story arrives like an overcoat emerging from a blizzard, its shoulders heavy with worries piled like snow. You shake off the snow, remove your wet coat, and pause to warm yourself by the stove. That pause is where Yoo Heekyung’s poems come into being: a moment when a kind heart stands quietly by the stove with its back turned to us.” —Kim So Yeon

Yoo Heekyung (b. 1980) is an acclaimed Korean poet, playwright, and essayist. He is the author of over ten collections of poetry and prose, including Today’s Morning Vocabulary (『오늘 아침 단어』), Photography and Poetry (『사진과 시』), and And Next Spring We Will (『이다음 봄에 우리는』). He is a playwright with the theater company dock (독) and a member of the poetry collective jaknan (작란). A recipient of Today’s Young Artist Award from the South Korean Ministry of Culture and Hyundae Munhak Literary Award (2020), Yoo lives in Seoul where he runs the poetry bookshop and project space wit n cynical.

Stine An is a poet, translator, and performer in New York City. Her poems and translations appear in Best Literary Translations 2024, Poem-a-Day, Best Experimental Writing 2018, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and elsewhere. A 2024 NEA Translation Fellow and 2022–2023 Emerge—Surface—Be Fellow, Stine is the author of SMMER CRSH (Sarabande Books) and the translator of Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (Zephyr Press).

Cover of Velvetyne Saved My Life, Libre Fonts for Everyone Since 2011

Surfaces Utiles

Velvetyne Saved My Life, Libre Fonts for Everyone Since 2011

Sandra Chamaret, Velvetyne and 1 more

Since 2011, the Velvetyne collective has been dedicated to creating and distributing typefaces under open-source licenses. Its members advocate and promote an uninhibited typographic practice, guided by political principles and aesthetic risk-taking.

This monograph celebrates a generous collective creation—pioneering and recognized on the international scene—that continually questions and reinvents itself. Velvetyne Saved My Life reveals the distinctive workings of this unconventional structure within the contemporary type foundry landscape, its commitment to free-culture and open-source principles, its singular editorial policy, and its pedagogical practice.

The book is structured around a polyphonic interview conducted by Sandra Chamaret with the members of the collective, a series of in-depth articles on emblematic typefaces from the foundry, as well as an exhaustive catalogue of the more than 70 fonts published by nearly as many international authors. 

Halfway between text and type specimen, this book is both a story to read and a manifesto to see.

Cover of Les Diaboliques Parlures

Les Solitaires Intempestifs

Les Diaboliques Parlures

Alberto Cortés, Marion Cousin

Performance €17.00

Les Diaboliques Parlures rassemble trois textes qui nous font découvrir une voix contemporaine majeure de la poésie et du théâtre queer. Ces œuvres, à la croisée du poétique, du politique et de l’intime, explorent le désir, la vulnérabilité, la marginalité et l’identité masculine et queer. 

L’Ardeur déploie une langue brûlante pour interroger le désir, la passion et la communauté des outsiders, transformant l’ardeur en force vitale et émancipatrice. 

One Night at the Golden Bar offre une écriture intimiste où le romantisme kitsch devient vecteur de poésie et de réflexion sur la vulnérabilité, l’amour et la monstruosité de l’humain.

Analphabet, quant à lui, questionne le langage, l’expression et les limites de la communication, confrontant le lecteur à la puissance de la langue et à sa capacité à révéler l’identité.