Books

A collection of political, philosophical, and literary essays from the acclaimed novelist and French feminist writer Monique Wittig. Monique Wittig's first collection of essays centering on women's struggle for liberation from sexism and classism. These nine essays comprise a thoughtful and unique approach to the study of historical materialism and dialectics, and transverse philosophical, political, and literary theory.

Monique Wittig describes this collection as a focus on "lesbian materialism," in which she examines men and women as distinct classes rather than as "essentialist" categories. "Lesbians are not women," writes Monique Wittig, and she presents powerful ideas about how the idea of "woman" is socially constructed and used to convey certain images. It is not enough, she argues, to transform economic oppression because not all oppression is, at the source, economic.

Sexism will continue to exist even in a society where all people have equal economic opportunities. Only by transforming our thought processes, and in turn, our language, can we transform our society into one in which there is no longer the dominant and the dominated: "In other words, this means there cannot any longer be women and men, and that as classes and categories of thought or language they have to disappear, politically, economically, ideologically." Controversial and abstract, these are essays that challenge and provoke on both intellectual and emotional levels.

Sinister Wisdom and Inanna Publications & Education Inc. are proud to present a new volume of the work of Native American writer Beth Brant, edited by Janice Gould.

A Generous Spirit: Selected Work by Beth Brant collects the writing of Beth Brant, Mohawk lesbian poet, essayist and activist. During her life, Brant’s work gave voice to an often unacknowledged Two-Spirit identity, and today, her words represent continued strength, growth, and connection in the face of deep suffering.

A Generous Spirit is Brant’s portrait of survival and empathy at the intersection of Native American and lesbian experience. A Generous Spirit recounts and enacts the continuance of her people and her sisters with distinct, organic voices and Brant’s characteristic warmth. Her work is a simultaneous cry of grief and celebration of human compassion and connection in its shared experience. Through storytelling, her characters wrest their own voices from years of silence and find communion with other souls.

With a substantial introduction by Janice Gould situating Brant in a broader political and literary context, a foreword by acclaimed Canadian poet Lee Maracle, and a moving afterword by scholar and poet Deborah Miranda, A Generous Spirit is a tribute to the influence of Brant on a generation of Indigenous writers.

Be Here Now, or Remember, Be Here Now, is a 1971 book on spirituality, yoga and meditation by the American yogi and spiritual teacher Ram Dass. The core book was first printed in 1970 as From Bindu to Ojas, while the title of the 1971 publication comes from a statement his guide, Bhagavan Das, made during Ram Dass's journeys in India. The cover features a mandala incorporating the title, a chair, radial lines, and the word "Remember" repeated four times.

For Wallace Stevens, “Poetry is the scholar’s art.” Susan Howe—taking the poet-scholar-critics Charles Olson, H.D., and William Carlos Williams (among others) as her guides—embodies that art in her 1985 My Emily Dickinson (winner of the Before Columbus Foundation Book Award). Howe shows ways in which earlier scholarship had shortened Dickinson’s intellectual reach by ignoring the use to which she put her wide reading. Giving close attention to the well-known poem, “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” Howe tracks Dickens, Browning, Emily Brontë, Shakespeare, and Spenser, as well as local Connecticut River Valley histories, Puritan sermons, captivity narratives, and the popular culture of the day. “Dickinson’s life was language and a lexicon her landscape. Forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she pulled text from text….”

Flusser introduces an infernal creature from the oceanic abysses, who slowly emerges, not from the oceans, but from man's own depths to gaze spitefully into his eyes and reflect back at his own existence.

Originally published only in German in 1987, this version has been edited and translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, Ph.D. candidate at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Siegfried Zielinski, from the original, unpublished and extended Brazilian-Portuguese version of the manuscript recently found at the Vilém Flusser Archive at the Universität der Kunst, Berlin. This edition is also accompanied by a selection of previously unpublished excerpts from Flusser's correspondence with Milton Vargas and Dora Ferreira da Silva, with whom he discussed the development of the present text.

In What’s the Use? Sara Ahmed continues the work she began in The Promise of Happiness and Willful Subjects by taking up a single word—in this case, use—and following it around. She shows how use became associated with life and strength in nineteenth-century biological and social thought and considers how utilitarianism offered a set of educational techniques for shaping individuals by directing them toward useful ends.

Ahmed also explores how spaces become restricted to some uses and users, with specific reference to universities. She notes, however, the potential for queer use: how things can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended. Ahmed posits queer use as a way of reanimating the project of diversity work as the ordinary and painstaking task of opening up institutions to those who have historically been excluded.

Borrowing its name from the notorious '60s Ed Sanders magazine, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, the editors have figured a way to rehone its countercultural and frictional stance with style and aplomb. A unique and provocative anthology of lesbian writing, guaranteed to soothe the soulful and savage the soulless. Includes Adele Bertei, Holly Hughes, Sapphire, Laurie Weeks, and many more.

In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

With an introduction by Eileen Myles and afterword by Frances Morgan.

Including essays about Barbara Hammer, Agnès Varda, Camille Billops, Jane Arden, Penny Slinger, Ana Mendieta, Hito Steyerl, Mati Diop, Catherine Breillat, Carol Morley, Ulrike Ottinger, Charlotte Prodger, Charlotte Pryce, Rosalind Nashashibi & Lucy Skaer, Gloria Camiruaga, Margarethe von Trotta, Astra Taylor, Lina Wertmüller, and more.

Including essays about Lucrecia Martel, Alice Rohrwacher, Cecilia Mangini, Chantal Akerman, Mika Rottenberg, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Agnès Varda, Barbara Hammer, Laida Lertxundi.

The first issue contains interviews with women including Carolee Schneemann, Mania Akbari, Laura Mulvey, Alice Diop, Bette Gordon, and Lis Rhodes. It contains pieces on the films of women including Kathleen Collins, Sally Potter, Chantal Akerman, Moyra Davey, Camille Henrot, Naomi Kawase, Germaine Dulac, Alice Guy-Blaché.

On Pillow Talk, or, How I dance Solo While Logos Watches from Our Bed, Smoking a Cigarette

If winning can only occur in a competition between equal opponents, someone who isn’t equal will need to adopt a different strategy and let go of the promise, or the curse, of victory. Anna Zett takes up the challenge in this collection of personal science fiction, registering the traces systems of power leave in the body, in its locomotory, nervous and digestive systems. Zett’s voice appears in several textual guises, addressing authority, resistance, trauma and the physicality of language. Dedicated to the feminist revolution, the post-socialist subject of Artificial Gut Feeling questions logocentric and capitalist beliefs about the economy of meaning. This book gathers together fists, guts and brains to gain a deeper understanding of the non-verbal roots of dialogue.

"This being is able to transform movement into speech. It winds itself about inside me like a thick snake and I have to use all my strength to let it spin and do what it does. When I wilfully try to stop it, it begins to whisper words to me and that is even more unpleasant. If I were to associate this gut feeling with an emotion, I would say disgust. But this disgust is not directly linked to your name."—Anna Zett

Composed in the direct, accessible, consciousness-piercing style readers of Ariana Reines' first two books are wildly enamored of, Mercury comprises a group of long poems. These interlocking works speak to the substance and essence of what is said, transmitted, transacted, "communicated" between persons. Reines proposes that substance and essence are opposites, and explores this in contexts including commercial cinema and internet porn.

The only collection of Rattray's prose: essays that offer a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition. Since its first publication in 1992, David Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible has functioned as a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition running through Western civilization from Pythagoras to In Nomine music to Hölderlin and Antonin Artaud. Rattray not only excavated this tradition, he embodied and lived it. He studied at Harvard and the Sorbonne but remained a poet, outside the academy. His stories "Van" and "The Angel" chronicle his travels in southern Mexico with his friend, the poet Van Buskirk, and his adventures after graduating from Dartmouth in the mid-1950s.

Eclipsed by the more mediagenic Beat writers during his lifetime, Rattray has become a powerful influence on contemporary artists and writers. Living in Paris, Rattray became the first English translator of Antonin Artaud, and he understood Artaud's incisive scholarship and technological prophecies as few others would.

As he writes of his translations in How I Became One of the Invisible, "You have to identify with the man or the woman. If you don't, then you shouldn't be translating it. Why would you translate something that you didn't think had an important message for other people? I translated Artaud because I wanted to turn my friends on and pass a message that had relevance to our lives. Not to get a grant, or be hired by an English department."

Compiled in the months before his untimely death at age 57, How I Became One of the Invisible is the only volume of Rattray's prose. This new edition, edited by Robert Dewhurst, includes five additional pieces, two of them previously unpublished.

A selection of 22 texts that were written between 1989-2019 that problematize Creischer's constant struggle for a vocabulary to analyze and criticize, to comment and intervene in the social fabric she finds herself surrounded by. Rather than neatly discriminating between form and content, between emancipation and information, Creischer's lessons suggest various ways of inscribing one into the other of juxtaposing opposing poles.

Alice Creischer is a German artist, writer and theorist. Her artistic practice and theoretical work focuses on issues of economic and institutional critique, globalization and the history of capitalism.

A book on reading, writing, memory and forgetting in a library of living books.

This publication documents a project inspired by Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, in which performers memorize a book to form a collection of living books to be read in libraries by visitors. The publication brings together eighteen text contributions from artists and theoreticians, and a visual essay.

The project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine starts as a group of people who dedicate themselves to memorizing a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. The “books” pass their time in libraries reading, memorizing, talking to each other, going for walks outside, prepared to be read by a visitor. The readings take place as intimate one-to-one encounters where the “book” recites its content to the reader. Over time the project grew into a library collection of more than eighty living books in twelve different languages across Europe and beyond. The project developed into a bookshop, a publishing house and an exhibition format, and hosted workshops, lectures and talks and, eventually, a book.

The publication brings together eighteen text contributions from artists and theoreticians with a varying degree of proximity to the project. Their reflections touch on memory and forgetting; on the practice of learning by heart and its corporeality; on reading, re-reading, reading aloud, reading for oneself and for others; on writing, re-writing and translating; on invisible and impossible literatures; on alternative temporalities and their respective economies; on archives, libraries, bodies and other sites for conservation; on the problems of authorship and originality; on immateriality and its discontents; on the equivocal borders between reality and fiction; and on the strange and unforeseeable dynamics of people and stories coming together, disseminating and unexpectedly crossing paths again. The second part of the book is a visual essay that documents the processes of memorizing, reading and re-writing.

Contributions by: Mette Edvardsen, Kristien Van Den Brande, Johan Sonnenschein, Bruno De Wachter, Lizzie Thompson, Sébastien Hendrickx, Victoria Pérez Royo, Jon Refsdal Moe, Bojana Cvejić, Melanie Fieldseth, Jeroen Peeters, Lara Khalidi, Emiliano Battista, Thomaz Bîrzan, Susanne Christensen, Olivia Fairweather and Laurence Rassel.

Clairvoyant Journal 1974 by Hannah Weiner (1928-1997) is based on the typescripts Early and Clairvoyant Journals and includes the entries dated February 23 to June 10.

This new edition of Clairvoyant Journal features an “Afterword” by Patrick Durgin, dealing with Hannah Weiner’s “clair-style” writing. With Clairvoyant Journal, Hannah Weiner writes a specific form of diary, using the characteristics of typographic styles (roman, italic and CAPITAL) to present an inner discussion between three separate voices. Clairvoyant Journal also gives an insight into the daily life of a writer living in New York in the 1970s, evoking a poetic, musical, and artistic scene, yoga and a poetical experience.

Retrospective is a comedy-science-fiction novelette about “faggotry” and the art world; depicting a retour-au-passé in contemporary painting and waving to some of the most beautiful homosexuals on Earth. Flaunting otherness, the alert reader can follow a clerk of The Land of Sculptures whilst he encounters the pretty faces of The Painter, The Foreign Painter, The Tyrolese Painter and other people doing art and drugs.

Retrospective includes “Thumbs-Up”, a superficial analysis of the normalisation of gayness; “Why Homos Are Better”, a masterpiece of investigative journalism in two parts, that originally appeared in Agony 2 (circa 1988–93), a zine edited by B. Boofy and William Bonifay; a drawing by Jurgen Ots; a photograph by César Segarra; and a poem by Lars Laumann.

Alberto García del Castillo writes genre fiction and nonfiction about communities and queer, performs his own and other people's writings, and collaborates in multiple configurations. He has published his writing in Girls Like Us, co-edited Midpoint (Théophile's Papers, 2016) and his two novels Merman (2017) and Retrospective (2014) were published by Shelter Press. Alongside Marnie Slater, is co-curator of Buenos Tiempos, Int.

This light, pocketbook format publication by After 8 Books gathers works by French artist Julie Beaufils, and three short stories commissioned for the occasion, dealing altogether with social tensions and emotional explosions.

The ink drawings by Julie Beaufils that form the core of the book, follow a logic of editing, accumulation and narrative incompleteness: the figures come from memories of films or TV series, as sediments of mass culture, or sometimes from personal observations and experiences crystallized in images. Shapes and figures develop as an ambivalent collection, informed by the weight and the vibration of lines and strokes.

This book aims at triggering the interpretation of these works, and at making their “reading” more complex, more playful too. Graphic designer Scott Ponik composed a visual story close to a manga, part abstraction, part emotion. The narrative and affective potential of the drawings is further activated by their free association with three short stories by Michael Van den Abeele, Buck Ellison, and Reba Maybury. Van den Abeele tells about the inner thoughts of a donor at the sperm bank; Buck Ellison’s story follows a few hours in the life of some girls in the San Francisco area, dealing with the cruelty and the naïvety of their relationships; while Reba Maybury proposes an erotic analysis of the connection between desire and capitalism.

Fade the Lure is a collection of poems and photographs created between 2014 and 2017, during Dena Yago’s experience working and living alongside emotional support dogs in Los Angeles. In Yago’s words, poetry is sometimes “a form of communication created out of the desire to avoid, and an inability to engage in other forms of direct communication” with animals or humans. Fade the Lure explores the possibility for the poem to account for relationships that materialize and live beyond words, while being embedded in a consumerist society’s confined structures.

Dena Yago (born 1988, lives & works in NYC) is an artist, a writer and a poet. She was one of the founding members of K-HOLE, a trend forecasting group active from 2010 to 2016. Recent publications include Ambergris (Bodega) and Esprit Reprise (Pork Salad Press). Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and at Bodega in New York.

NXS #4 Algorithmic Anxiety explores the spectrum of algorithmic authority over our lives (whether perceived or not). The contributors question or reveal the inconspicuous influence of algorithms, in their various forms, on our behavioral patterns, emotions, and self perceptions of our position in the world.

NXS issue #3 Viral Bodies investigates the changing concepts of gender and identity norms in the digital space, and open the discussion to many possible speculations and to their real world implications.

Kicking off the issue with a starting piece by Reba Maybury, over 20 fellow contributors explore social conventions, share intimate moments and experiences of pain, love, hate and fear. They delve into authenticity in the non-human sphere, they code accidental bigotry on the internet. Science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster blurs the lines of reality, transmitting what is real and what not in a dystopian society. Political art critic Penny Rafferty unravels the minds of tech giants while artistic researcher Addie Wagenknecht questions the diffusing lines between virtual technology and working bodies in reality.

Following in the tradition of Sara Ahmed (the originator of the concept “feminist killjoy”), Wunker brings memoir, theory, literary criticism, pop culture, and feminist thinking together in this collection of essays that take up Ahmed’s project as a multi-faceted lens through which to read the world from a feminist point of view.