Books

Lebanese writer and editor Mirene Arsanios meditates on the relationships between mother tongues, motherhood, and colonialism. In this pamphlet, she investigates the historical and personal circumstances that led to the loss of her native language.

Written as a fictional essay, NOTES ON MOTHER TONGUES explores language as a field shaped by diasporic histories, class relations, and broken familial legacies. It strives to imagine mother tongues and motherhood beyond the labor of reproduction, languages that exist in troubled ecosystems where lack does not preclude repair.

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, Guernica, among others. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. Arsanios currently lives in New York where she was a 2016 LMCC Workspace fellow, and an ART OMI resident in Fall 2017. With Rachel Valinsky, she coordinated the Friday night reading series at the Poetry Project from 2017-19. 

A book-length visionary poem from a writer whose poems are among the major astonishments of contemporary poetry.

Alice Notley has become one of the most highly regarded figures in American poetry, a master of the visionary mode acclaimed for genre-bending, book-length poems of great ambition and adventurousness. Her newest book, For the Ride, is another such work.

The protagonist, One, is suddenly within the glyph, whose walls project scenes One can enter, and One does so. Other beings begin to materialize, and it seems like they (and One) are all survivors of a global disaster. They board a ship to flee to another dimension; they decide what they must save on this Ark are words, and they gather together as many as are deemed fit to save. They sail and meanwhile begin to change the language they are speaking, before disembarking at an abandoned future city.

Compiled by Courtisane and Sabzian on the occasion of the Out of the Shadows programme, originally conceived for Courtisane festival 2020 but rescheduled to Courtisane festival 2021.

This program and publication was developed with the support of The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), CINEMATEK and KASK / School of Arts, in collaboration with Reem Shilleh and Mohanad Yaqubi (Subversive Film).

Personae is an unpublished book by Scottish filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait (1918-1999), edited by Sarah Neely with a foreword by Ali Smith

Margaret Tait (1918-1999), filmmaker and poet, is one of Scotland’s most extraordinary talents, and yet she was largely overlooked during her lifetime. Born in Orkney, she trained first as a medical doctor and served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War, before studying film at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematographia in Rome in the early 1950s. After returning to Edinburgh, Tait established her film studio, Ancona Films, before eventually returning to Orkney in the 1960s, where she lived and continued to make films until her death in 1999.

While best known as a filmmaker, she was also a prolific writer and during her lifetime she self-published three books of poetry and two collections of short stories. Personae is her unpublished manuscript written over a number of years from 1945 onwards and painstakingly reconstructed by Sarah Neely from drafts found in the Tait archive. It is an undefinable work, part-memoir, part-experimental non-fiction; a meditation on the aftermath of war, the healing potential of the creative process, medicine, culture, relationships and an attempt to think towards a future born out of chaos. The book also offers a unique insight into the voice, mind and creative process of a singular Scottish artist whose work did not receive significant attention until after her death in 1999.

Bricks from the Kiln is an irregular journal edited by Andrew Lister and Matthew Stuart, sometimes with guest editors, that presents graphic design and typography as disciplines activated by and through other disciplines and lenses such as language, archives, collage, and more. It borrows its title from the glossary notes of Ret Marut’s "Der Ziegelbrenner," which was the ‘size, shape and colour of a brick’, and ran for 13 issues between 1917 and 1921.

The latest installment, "#4: On Translation, Transmission & Transposition," was published as an event (and now) a publication, with events at London College of Communication, Burley Fisher Books & Pig Rock bothy, Socttish National Gallery of Modern Art, and Inga (in November, 2019).

GREENING
Helen Marten
(front / back flaps)

JOY & HAPPINESS, FIDELITY
& INTIMACY IN TRANSLATION
Sophie Collins
(pp.4–13)

PLANETARY TRANSLATION
Don Mee Choi
(pp.15–19)

TRANSLATION AND A LIPOGRAM:
OR, ON FORMS OF AGAIN-WRITING
AND NO- (OR NOT THAT-) WRITING
Kate Briggs
(pp.23–33)

UNHOMING (1 of 4):
FOLLOWING HÖLDERLIN’S ‘HEIMAT’
Phil Baber
(pp.35–47)

SNOW WHITE AND THE WHITE
OF THE HUMAN EYEBALLS
Joyce Dixon
(pp.51–62)

ALTAMIRALTAMIRALTAMIRA
Florian Roithmayr
(pp.65–116)

LEVEL UP, LEVEL DOWN
Jen Calleja
(pp.119–124)

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE]:
A JAVASCRIPT FOR THREE VOICES
J.R. Carpenter
(pp.127–134)

THE MECHANISATION OF ART
Edgar Wind
(glosses / annotations / insertions by
Natalie Ferris & Bryony Quinn)
(pp.137–144)

UNHOMING (2 of 4)
Phil Baber
(p.147)

COMMISSION FOR A NOIR MOVIE
B IN THE BAY OF BISCAY
Rebecca Collins
(pp.151–157)

UNHOMING (3 of 4)
Phil Baber
(pp.150–162)

EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE;
TRANSCRIBING OSTEON
Naomi Pearce
(pp.165–170)

HOW DOES A WORK END?
Karen Di Franco
(pp.173–193)

METONYMY Op.1 & Op.2
James Bulley
(pp.197–201)

AFRIKAN ALPHABETS EXTENDED
Saki Mafundikwa
(pp.204–207)

SUSAN HILLER: 1983
Natalie Ferris
(pp.209–217)

EVERY TELLING HAS A TALING /
EVERY STORY HAS AN ENDING
Matthew Stuart
(pp.220–233)

GRAPHIC PROPRIOCEPTION
James Langdon
(pp.235–254)

UNHOMING (4 of 4)
Phil Baber
(pp.257–263)

TUNNELLING AND AGGREGATING
FOR DESIGN RESEARCH
Bryony Quinn (text) &
Peter Nencini (images)
(pp.265–272)

LET IT PERCOLATE:
A MANIFESTO FOR READING
Sophie Seita
(pp.275–280)

288 pgs, 22.4 × 17 cm, Softcover, 2020

The first standalone title on the BFTK imprint, ‘As Celebration, As Critique, As Play’ pulls together selected writings by Ron Hunt across his varied career as a writer, librarian, curator, critic and self described ‘lapsed anarchist’. Structured as a ‘biographic bibliography’ supplemented with annotations and contextual notes, ‘As Celebration, As Critique, As Play’ combines commissioned writing and previously unpublished texts that range from exhibition catalogue essays and détourned Q&As, to A–Z indexes and cherry-picked readers. Writings reproduced in full include:

Francis Picabia: Introduction (1964)
Yves Klein: A Mythopoeic of the Plurisignative (1967)
The Arts in Our Time (1968)
We Are Revealing New Pages of Art in Anarchy’s New Dawns (1968)
Interview with Brigitte Bardot (1969) (preview)
Poetry must be made by all! / Transform the world! (1969)
An Interview with Pontus Hultén, Stockholm 1981 (1971)
For Factography! (1976)
Andreas Gursky (1999)
Kalf: A Late Perspective (2000)
Dreams of / Fears of …… Flying (2009)
Fourier / Breton / Cherries (2017)
Hélène Cixous or Waiting for Tears (2018)
Some Books of Barbara Bloom (2019)
A Very Brief Dictionary in the Vicinity of Situationism (2019)
‘Recovery’ / Is Recovery Possible (2020)
with photographs by Tom McCaughan
typeset in Janson Max Neue by Dinamo & Sam de Groot

224 pgs, 21 × 15 cm, Softcover

‘Arno Van Vlierberghe makes an impressive entrée into the poetry scene in the Low Countries with his first collection Vloekschrift, nominated for the C. Buddingh’-prize for the best debut volume of verse.’ (Patrick Peeters on Poetry International Web)

Arno Van Vlierberghe (1990) is dichter. Hij leeft, woont en werkt in Gent. Zijn werk verscheen her en der, offline en online. Vloekschrift is zijn debuutbundel.

Once more, an astonishing issue of OEI – a thrilling, compelling, stimulating feast of ideas regarding publishing and the book: the perfect big companion to read and hug in bed while the virus spreads outside.

Bringing together contributions from circa 130 publishing structures, publishing communities, magazines, small press endeavors, artists, poets, writers, editors, theoreticians, curators, scholars, and art bookstores, OEI # 86–87 reflects upon the challenges, pressures and possibilities of publishing and creating publics in different contexts and places in a time of far-reaching – economical, medial, political, social, technological – transformations.

The potential and the versatility of publishing open it to a diversity of practices and approaches in the arts, but as an eminently social form of art, a collective or micro-collective work with shared responsibilities, it is also a never-ending process of “crafting a variegated approach to how you create, publish, distribute, and build a social ecosystem around your efforts”, of trying to “build up and strengthen the community around these printed forms” (Temporary Services).

It is the conviction of OEI #86–87 that print has the power to play an important part in the construction of social spaces, of a social world. As Benjamin Thorel puts it in one of the essays in the issue, “conceiving of the dynamics of publishing as making publics as well as making things public is not a pun – insofar as the artists/publishers encompass, beyond the book itself, its possible ‘lives’, imagining the different spaces, and the different people, amongst whom a publication will circulate.” This is what Michael Warner has called “a public [as] poetic worldmaking”, implying “that all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and livable shape, and attempting to realize that world through address.”

This is also, as stressed by Annette Gilbert and others, what can make publishing such an active force, a force co-constituting texts and publications and publics. Indeed, with Michalis Pichler, it is tempting to say that in publishing as practice – perhaps more than in any other art field – “artists have been able to assert the aesthetic value of their own socio-politically informed concerns and to engage, often under precarious conditions, in cultural activities fully aligned with their political values.”

OEI #86–87 also includes sections on and with contemporary poetry from Canada; Fluxus publishing; Krister Brandt/Astrid Gogglesworth; Kalas på BORD (Öyvind Fahlström); Lars Fredrikson; Claude Royet-Journoud’s poetry magazines; Carl Einstein; Gail Scott; Ållebergshändelser; OEI #79: edit/publish/distribute!; “det offentligas försvinnande” and many many other things. [publisher’s note]

Design by Konst & Teknik

Meggy Rustamova’s (b. 1985) practice explores films and spatial installations, in which she incorporates photographs, essays and audio material; often the work has a performative character. Concerned with the relations between individual and collective memory, language and human behaviour, her works look for ways to translate the current matters and phenomena in the world.
The title of the book and the exhibition, HORAIZON, refers to the phonetic pronunciation of the English word ‘horizon’, the boundary line on which the earth’s surface and the sky seem to touch. The horizon, interpreted as ‘boundary’ or ‘line’, is equally perceptible in language, when reading between the lines, or when travelling between international borders. The contours of the land, trees or buildings, which contrast with the sky, but also the contours of shadows can be observed in many of the images in the exhibition. The works also suggest a longing for what lies behind the horizon and invite the viewer to make an imaginary journey.

On the occasion of Rustamova’s exhibition at the Vrienden v/h S.M.A.K. and the book ‘Horaizon’, the artist created a multiple. The multiple is entitled 1000 km in Vogelvlucht — 621.371 miles at Bird’s Eye View and unfolds as a storyboard, with a collection of sky views and birds the artist has captured over the past two years. From a condor in Arizona to the black-backed gulls in Iceland in the North Atlantic Ocean all through the Sea of Marmara, the book seeks to create a tale that reflects on a person’s daily need for freedom, travel and nature.

The chant of 'Azadi!' — Urdu for 'Freedom!' — is the slogan of the freedom struggle in Kashmir against what Kashmiris see as the Indian Occupation. Ironically, it has also become the chant of millions on the streets of India against the project of Hindu nationalism. Just as Arundhati Roy began to ask what lay between these two calls for freedom — a chasm or a bridge? — the streets fell silent. Not only in India but all over the world.

The coronavirus brought with it another, more terrible understanding of azadi, making nonsense of international borders, incarcerating whole populations, and bringing the modern world to a halt like nothing else ever could.

In a series of essays, Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism

Les diagrammes, cartes et visualisations de données ont conquis le domaine de la recherche en arts, lettres et sciences humaines. Pour certains chercheurs, ces formes graphiques consistent à exploiter des données quantitatives jusqu’ici délaissées, pour d’autres, elles offrent la possibilité d’explorer les relations discrètes qu’entretiennent des corpus hétérogènes. Mais sur quels fondements épistémologiques reposent ces opérations techniques et intellectuelles ? Dans le cadre de la production du savoir et de son interprétation en régime numérique, est-il possible de dépasser le simple effet d’affichage des données, certes bluffant au premier abord, et d’envisager autrement les interfaces et les logiciels ?

Considérée aujourd’hui comme l’une des plus importantes théoriciennes des humanités numériques, Johanna Drucker livre dans cet ouvrage, spécialement rédigé pour la collection, une alternative aux formes dominantes de la visualisation de l’information. Héritière de la tradition humaniste, elle propose une approche qui réhabilite l’idée d’un sujet situé et incarné qui expérimente et conceptualise les connaissances par le prisme de la représentation graphique.

Dans cet essai au verbe acéré, Paul Gilroy dénonce la pathologie néo-impérialiste des politiques mises en œuvre dans les pays occidentaux, sclérosés par les débats sur l’immigration, et propose en retour un modèle de société multiculturelle. De la création du concept de « race » à la formation des empires coloniaux, le sociologue britannique soulève quelques grandes questions de notre époque, et vise à faire émerger une réelle alternative aux récits édulcorés de notre passé colonial. En choisissant de mettre en avant la convivialité et le multiculturalisme indiscipliné du centre des grandes métropoles, Paul Gilroy défend une vision cosmopolite inclusive et plaide pour l’avènement d’une société qui refuse de céder aux discours de la peur et à la violence.

En examinant l’invention de catégories hiérarchisantes fondées sur la notion de race, et ses terribles conséquences, il démontre comment les écrits de penseurs tels que Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois ou George Orwell peuvent encore faire avancer les réflexions sur le nationalisme, le postcolonialisme et les questions raciales. Mélancolie postcoloniale fait écho aux luttes postcoloniales d’aujourd’hui, en quête d’une pensée critique exigeante.

Edited by Maria Sledmere and Rhian Williams, the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene is an edited anthology of poetry by contemporary UK writers, whose work manifests ecology in the body, in language, in lyric and colour and play. A book that arrives with its own weather, an acid-bright sense of urgency, detail and care; a book that speaks to a nowness that slides between crisis and the everyday arts of noticing which bear us through massive scalar change, survival and sorrow.

As Bernadette Mayer writes in 'The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica': 'Do not be afraid of your own heart beating / Look at very small things with your eyes / & stay warm'. Riffing on the etymology of 'anthology' as a gathering of flowers, this book samples from a luminous range of poets responding to 'the anthropocene' as a kind of thought device for grasping extinction, global heating and climate breakdown.

'Poems are the future sliding against the past', writes Timothy Morton in the book's foreword; these works perform the shimmering art of recognising the multiple temporalities, tenses and agencies, problems and potentials of this fraught term, 'the anthropocene'.

The weird folds intervenes in more traditional canons of nature and ecopoetry to offer a poetics of the anthropocene which is thoroughly generous, queer, sensuous, formally innovative, relational, occult, fugitive and critically sensitive to the mediations of technology and culture which shape our encounters with the more-than-human.

Strangling vines and meat-hungry flora fill this unruly garden of strange stories, selected for their significance as the seeds of the "killer plant" trope in fiction, film, and video games.

Before the Demogorgon of Stranger Things and the appearance of Mario's iconic foe the Piranha Plant, writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries were exploring the lethal potential of vegetable life, inspired by new carnivorous species discovered on expeditions into the deep jungles of the world and breakthroughs in the grafting and genetics disciplines of botany. Suddenly, the exotic orchid could become a curiously alluring, yet unsettlingly bloodthirsty menace; the beautifully sprawling wisteria of the stately home could become anything but civilized, and the experimentation of botanists weening new shoots on their own blood could become fuel for a new genre of horticultural nightmare.

Every strain of vegetable threat (and one deadly fungus) can be found within this new collection, representing the very best tales from the undergrowth.

Daisy Butcher is a Gothic and Horror scholar attached to The Open Graves, Open Minds project. Her research focuses on the monstrous feminine and body horror from the 19th century Gothic short story to modern film and TV.

Published 2020

In Beyond the World's End T. J. Demos explores cultural practices that provide radical propositions for living in a world beset by environmental and political crises.

Rethinking relationships between aesthetics and an expanded political ecology that foregrounds just futurity, Demos examines how contemporary artists are diversely addressing urgent themes, including John Akomfrah's cinematic entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees in work by Forensic Architecture and Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, and moving images of Afrofuturist climate justice in projects by Arthur Jafa and Martine Syms.

Demos considers video and mixed-media art that responds to resource extraction in works by Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann, as well as the multispecies ecologies of Terike Haapoja and Public Studio. Throughout Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetics and politics, as exemplified in the Standing Rock #NoDAPL campaign and the Zad's autonomous zone in France, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future.

Writing in Space, 1973-2019 gathers the writings of conceptual artist Lorraine O'Grady, who for over forty years has investigated the complicated relationship between text and image.

A firsthand account of O'Grady's wide-ranging practice, this volume contains statements, scripts, and previously unpublished notes charting the development of her performance work and conceptual photography; her art and music criticism that appeared in the Village Voice and Artforum; critical and theoretical essays on art and culture, including her classic "Olympia's Maid"; and interviews in which O'Grady maps, expands, and complicates the intellectual terrain of her work. She examines issues ranging from black female subjectivity to diaspora and race and representation in contemporary art, exploring both their personal and their institutional implications.

O'Grady's writings—introduced in this collection by critic and curator Aruna D'Souza—offer a unique window into her artistic and intellectual evolution while consistently plumbing the political possibilities of art.

Edited by Aruna D'Souza

Reference monograph on the work of one of Belgium's most discreet, yet most important, female artists, with a dozen essays and contributions.

The work of Jacqueline Mesmaeker is intangible, discreet and captivating. Starting from analytical intentions and experimental protocols linked to perception and representation, her practice remains anchored in a literary and poetic universe, including references to Lewis Carroll, Mallarmé, Melville or Paul Willems. Minimal, sometimes even unnoted, her rare and precise work is nonetheless present. It willingly takes over space, playing with the actual and symbolic architecture, revealing the structures and lines of force, but also the errors, by thwarting their perspectives or correcting them with delicate touches.

In the year of 2020, CC Strombeek, BOZAR and Museum Roger Raveel have exhibited new selections of Mesmaeker's fragile ensembles; poetic works that evade every semantic description. CC Strombeek succeeded—in consultation with the artist—to reconstruct the work Enkel Zicht Naar Zee, Naar West (1978) to its original presentation, after 35 years. The work consists of 5 projections captured on transparent, natural silk scrims. They show a flock of flying birds, circulating and mingling in space, appearing and disappearing through the veils.

This book forms a catalogue of Mesmaeker's trilogy of solo-exhibitions in 2020: Ah, Quelle aventure ! at Bozar (May–July 2020) and CC Strombeek (January–March 2020) and De page en page at Museum Roger Raveel (December 2020–March 2021). 

Jacqueline Mesmaeker (born 1929 in Brussels) started her career as fashion designer from 1962 till 1972, before she turned to visual and artistic issues. Drawing, an art form she teached in several art schools (ERG, La Cambre...), runs throughout her rich work that includes installation, video, photography, writing and design. She won the Norwich East Award, in 1996.

Texts by Luk Lambrecht, Lieze Eneman, Michel Baudson, Jean-Michel Botquin, Saskia De Coster, Anne Pontégnie, Melanie Deboutte, Sophie Lauwers, Philippe Van Cauteren.

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind...

Olga Tokarczuk has won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Book International Prize, among many other honors. She is the author of a dozen works of fiction, two collections of essays, and a children's book; her work has been translated into fifty languages.

Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz's brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: "Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden." In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.  

Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: "I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible." Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.

WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY 

FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY 

Challenges the ableism of fairy tales and offers new ways to celebrate the magic of all bodies. In fairy tales, happy endings are the norm - as long as you're beautiful and walk on two legs. After all, the ogre never gets the princess. And since fairy tales are the foundational myths of our culture, how can a girl with a disability ever think she'll have a happy ending? By examining the ways that fairy tales have shaped our expectations of disability, Disfigured will point the way toward a new world where disability is no longer a punishment or impediment but operates, instead, as a way of centering a protagonist and helping them to cement their own place in a story, and from there, the world.

Through the book, Leduc ruminates on the connections we make between fairy tale archetypes - the beautiful princess, the glass slipper, the maiden with long hair lost in the tower - and tries to make sense of them through a twenty-first-century disablist lens. From examinations of disability in tales from the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen through to modern interpretations ranging from Disney to Angela Carter, and the fight for disabled representation in today's media, Leduc connects the fight for disability justice to the growth of modern, magical stories, and argues for increased awareness and acceptance of that which is other - helping us to see and celebrate the magic inherent in different bodies.

Amanda Leduc's essays and stories have appeared in publications across Canada, the US, and the UK. She is the author of the novels The Miracles of Ordinary Men and the forthcoming The Centaur's Wife . She has cerebral palsy and lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where she works as the Communications Coordinator for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD), Canada's first festival for diverse authors and stories.

This artist's book is the book-form of a work by Matt Mullican, "The Meaning of Things (who feels the most pain?)" (2014), consisting of 676 collages and texts on sheets of standard printing paper.

At the approximate center of each collage is a small image that appears to be a printout of an image procured from the Internet. Around the images are hand-drawn, quasi-calligraphic marks (in black only), curved, giving the impression of an "organic" form in the manner of ornate, rococo frames. The series develops a narrative of interests, practices and collective representations that suggest and disavow each other. Mullican deftly challenges this simple to-and-froing of "virtual" and "real" by suspending the idea that only through the material/physical printing out of the digital images, the content of the images is "restored" back into the "real"—to grasp the "meaning of things" comes at the price of "feeling the most pain".

Working in the fields of performance, installation, digital technology and sculpture, Matt Mullican (born 1951 in Santa Monica, lives an works in New York) is seeking to develop a cosmological model based on a personal vocabulary combining the formal and the symbolic. Hypnosis and cartography are his principal modes of operation. He explores functional sign systems of his own devising through activities under hypnosis, in a permanent oscillation between the real and its schematization, between fiction and its physical reality.

Born amidst tragedy and implacable hatreds, the young Peter McCutcheon is denied his freedom, his birthright, and the fruits of his labors by cruel masters, and by a society and history which denies the truth.

THE WAGES is a monument to individual courage and to the ongoing injustices caused by the suppression of memories and the oppression of people. It is also a powerful document of America's entanglement in slavery and vicious myths of race. The wages of sin, according to the Bible, is death. Fanny Howe's novel demonstrates that the wages of hate are pain, and a cost not always borne by the perpetrator, or even the current generation.

A blend of searing social commentary and speculative fiction, Chana Porter's fresh, pointed debut explores a strange new world in the wake of a benign alien invasion.

Trina Fast Horse Goldberg-Oneka is a fifty-year-old trans woman whose life is irreversibly altered in the wake of a gentle, but nonetheless world-changing, invasion by an alien entity called The Seep. Through The Seep, everything is connected. Capitalism falls, hierarchies and barriers are broken down; if something can be imagined, it is possible. Trina and her wife, Deeba, live blissfully under The Seep's utopian influence, until Deeba begins to imagine what it might be like to be reborn as a baby, which will give her the chance at an even better life. Using Seeptech to make this dream a reality, Deeba moves on to a new existence, leaving Trina devastated. Heartbroken and deep into an alcoholic binge, Trina follows a lost boy she encounters, embarking on an unexpected quest. In her attempt to save him from The Seep, she will confront not only one of its most avid devotees, but the terrifying void that Deeba has left behind. A strange new elegy of love and loss, The Seep explores grief, alienation, and the ache of moving on.

A 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist.

Chana Porter is a playwright, teacher, MacDowell Colony fellow, and co-founder of the Octavia Project, a STEM and fiction-writing program for girls and gender non-conforming youth from underserved communities. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is currently at work on her next novel.

Published Dec 2020

A definitive selection of prose and poetry from the self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," for a new generation of readers. Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. Her incisive essays and passionate poetry-alive with sensuality, vulnerability, and rage-remain indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies.

This essential reader showcases twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems, selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.

The essays include "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," "I Am Your Sister," and excerpts from the National Book Award-winning A Burst of Light. The poems are drawn from Lorde's nine volumes, including National Book Award nominee The Land Where Other People Live. As Gay writes in her astute introduction, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde celebrates "an exemplar of public intellectualism who is as relevant in this century as she was in the last."