Shae wants to stop shagging other women's husbands and be a proper queer. Plus, she's bored of only ever getting to use her new strap on a pile of cushions. The answer seems simple enough: come out, go out, and finally get it on with the fit bird at Dyke Night. Or it would be if Evaline, a wayward silicone mistress from the future, wasn't jealous...

A surreal, dirty little book that falls somewhere between Derek McCormack, David Cronenberg, and the tentacle porn you 'accidentally downloaded', Silicone God is for those who like it very, very weird.

New edition of Steve Cannon's riotous 1969/71 erotic novel Groove, Bang and Jive Around, "an underground classic of such legendary stature that New York's black cognoscenti have transmogrified the work into urban myth," with a foreword from Darius James and an afterword by poet Tracie Morris.

Despite decades of notoriety as one of the "filthiest books in the world," Steve Cannon's first and only novel, Groove, Bang and Jive Around, has hardly been read since first being published by the Paris- based Ophelia Press in 1969.

Due to its scarcity, the New York Press deemed it "an underground classic of such legendary stature that New York's black cognoscenti have transmogrified the work into urban myth." This debut, revised for release by Olympia Press in 1971, cemented Cannon's place as a stalwart of the East Village and key figure in New York's black avant-garde—inspiring a generation to break with staid literary modernism, according to Cannon's friend and collaborator Ishmael Reed, for whom its release "signaled a resurfacing of the irreverent, underground trickster tradition of black orature." Seeped psychedelia and hoodoo, this erotic farce follows Anette, a fourteenyear- old runaway, from the outhouse of a New Orleans juke joint to the land of Oo-bla-dee, a realm of bacchanalian self-determination founded by Dizzy Gillespie. Inspired equally by Chester Himes and Women's Liberation, the author claims—as Ophelia put it, Groove, Bang and Jive Around is an absolute necessity "for everyone who wants to know where and how the action takes place in Sex and Soul."

"If there's a dirty prayer, this is it. Groove, Bang and Jive Around will invariably piss people off, that's the plan and its delight. It's gorgeously uneven, like a country road, it's squawking & sonorous like great live music, indeed, it is that. Groove, Bang is poetry and a novel out loud, and Steve Cannon, who wrote it was a huge heckler and a funny man and I wish I could thank him for this wonderful disturbing, deeply wrong (hot) and light-footed book that somehow fell out of reading history he has given us and now it has fallen back in."—Eileen Myles, author of a Working Life

Steve Cannon (1935-2019) was a writer who shaped the literary history of Manhattan's Lower East Side. He was the founder and executive director of A Gathering of the Tribes, an East Village nonprofit and exhibition space, and the publisher of a magazine of the same name. Tribes, which operated from Cannon's Alphabet City townhouse, functioned as a salon where artists and musicians such as David Hammons, Sun Ra, and Butch Morris could reliably be found among a cohort of younger poets emerging from the Nuyorican Poets Café scene. Born to a preacher in New Orleans, Cannon relocated to New York from England in 1962, where, alongside such luminaries as Amiri Baraka and Calvin C. Hernton, Cannon joined the Umbra Workshop, a cornerstone of the 1960s African American avant-garde poetry and publishing. In 1973 he, Ishmael Reed, and Joe Johnson cofounded the influential literary and audio/visual imprint Reed, Cannon, and Johnson. As a poet, playwright, and professor, Cannon mentored a generation of writers including Eileen Myles and Paul Beatty, and taught across the City University of New York system for more than three decades.

Can critical thinking spring from both a fortune cookie and Jacques Lacan’s most obscure seminar footnote? Estelle Hoy says yes. In saké blue, overpriced cheesecakes are the starting point for an essay on art writing; shoplifting in Berlin opens to a reflection on the economies of activist practices; fiction allows us to discuss the legacy of institutional critique, queer mélanges, or quiet melancholy. To her, the story of art becomes more nuanced in light of lyrics by Arthur Russell, the posthumous sorrow of Sylvia Plath, or a poem by Yvonne Rainer.

saké blue gathers critical essays, art reviews, and poetic fiction. Written in dialogue with the work of Martine Syms, Marlene Dumas, Hervé Guibert, or Camille Henrot, these texts combine the subjective and analytic, addressing power relations and the force of affect. Hoy spares nothing—and no one, exposing cultural clichés and urgent political issues through fast-paced acerbity. She advocates the work of women artists, mocks stereotypes, questions myths, and champions desire, sadness, and boredom. Simultaneously beautiful, lyrical, and cutthroat, her writing echoes to the reader like l’esprit d’escalier—we think of the perfect reply just a little too late.

“Estelle Hoy practises philosophy as an unsettled but deeply committed query into existing together. She reads, she looks, she writes, to find out something essential about the future and living for it.”
—Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal

“Estelle Hoy's prose slap and bite, saké blue is a sharp pleasure to read.”
—Calla Henkel, author of Scrap

“Hoy’s renditions of all-too familiar scenes are made more visceral than life with sparkling prose and a sly attention to life’s many shifting values that feels more than appropriate for anyone truly interested in art.”
—Natasha Stagg, author of Artless

Edited by Antonia Carrara
With an introduction by Lisa Robertson

En sortant de l’école d’art, Élise Legal parcourt un monde de crises économiques, d’absurdités politiques et d’angoisses écologiques. Un monde dans lequel elle doit désormais légitimer sa démarche artistique dans des dossiers qui en font une fiction.

Problèmes de localisation contient sept textes, composés d’analyses critiques, de récits personnels et de poèmes, qui racontent cette entrée dans un environnement où circulent les corps, les marchandises, les informations et les capitaux. Élise Legal s’y déplace en voiture, en co-voiturage, en train, en bus ou en avion, découvrant ce que ce monde de transaction et de fluidité fait au langage. Elle cherche à comprendre comment il est incarné, échangé et habité dans les voix des pilotes d’avion, des startupers ou du président de la République, dans les textes de loi, les formulaires de demandes de bourses, la parole de ses enseigant·es, dans les textes de théorie critique comme dans la poésie des banquiers.

Élise Legal est artiste et autrice. Elle a étudié à l’École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon et au Sheffield Institute of Arts. À travers une approche pluridisciplinaire qui mêle images trouvées, dessin et poésie, elle porte une attention particulière à la manière dont le langage et les corps coexistent. Elle poursuit également une thèse de recherche-création à Paris 8 qui porte sur l’agir politique de la poésie.

Graphisme : Olivier Lebrun

What it means to be sexually promiscuous in contemporary American culture, edited by cult-favorite author Michelle Tea.

SLUTS, the first publication from vulgarian queer publisher DOPAMINE BOOKS, is an exploration of what it means to be sexually promiscuous in contemporary American culture. Featuring personal essays, spilled secrets, fiction, memoir, and experimental works, SLUTS asks writers and readers to investigate the many ways the notion of the slut impacts our inner and outer lives, as a threat or an identity, a punishment or an aspiration, a lifestyle, an aesthetic, a philosophy and rallying cry. From hideous and terrifying first encounters to postapocalyptic polyamory, from unionizing sex workers to backstage tableaux of sex and drugs and rock and roll, SLUTS's stories probe the liberating highs and abject lows of physical abandon. Featuring work from performer Miguel Gutierrez, hailed by the New York Times as “an artist of ordered excess”; former Nylon magazine editor in chief Gabrielle Korn; award-winning author Brontez Purnell; Whore of New York author Liara Roux; National Book Critics Circle Award winner Jeremy Atherton Lin; and a host of additional artists and writers, SLUTS reveals the knowledges provoked by a dalliance with desire.

Contributors
DL Alvarez, Vera Blossom, Chloe Caldwell, Cristy Road Carrera, Sam Cohen, Tom Cole, Lydia Conklin, jimmy cooper, Lyn Corelle, Jenny Fran Davis, Cyrus Dunham, Hedi El Kholti, Robert Gluck, Miguel Gutierrez, Gary Indiana, Taleen Kali, Cheryl Klein, Gabrielle Korn, Jeremy Atherton Lin, Nate Lippens, Meredith Maran, Carta Monir, Amanda Montell, Carely Moore, Bradford Nordeen, Baruch Porras-Hernandez, Kamala Puligandla, Brontez Purnell, Liara Roux, Andrea Sands, Daviel Shy, Jen Silverman, Anna Joy Springer, Laurie Stone, McKenzie Wark, Zoe Whittall

A dreamy and experimental portrait of young Black artists in the 1990s London underground scene, whose existence is threatened by the rise of state surveillance.

Twentysomething and restless, Skye flits between cities and stagnant relationships until she meets Scottie, a disarming and disheveled British traveler, and Pieces, an enigmatic artist living in New York. The three recognize each other as kindred spirits—Black, punk, whimsical, revolutionary—and fall in together, leading Skye on an unlikely adventure across the Atlantic. They live a glorious, subterranean existence in 1990s London: making multimedia art, throwing drug-fueled parties, and eking out a living by busking in Tube stations, until their existence is jeopardized by the rise of CCTV and policing.

In fluid and unrelenting prose, Jamika Ajalon's debut novel explores youth, poetry, and what it means to come terms with queerness. Skye Papers is an imaginative, episodic group portrait of a transatlantic art scene spearheaded by people of color—and of the fraught, dystopian reality of increasing state surveillance.

Sometimes I pretended not to notice it (the black hole), but I knew it was always there. To tell the truth, I started to like having it around. I stuck quite close to it. Not too close, mind you. But it was useful, above all, to have somewhere to put things. Unwanted things. I am attracted to your attraction, he said. (I put it in the hole.) Night by night it got a little bigger.

Holes splices forms of fiction and nonfiction. The narrator, a researcher of limits at an unidentified university, figures her entanglement with an unobtainable love object as the descent into a black hole. Everything she reads seems to shed light on the non-events that comprise their relationship, and study collapses into life as she struggles to separate events and forms, reality and ideation. Holes is a study in thematic fixation, engaging a range of ‘obsessional artists’ (including Yayoi Kusama, from whom the term is borrowed, Lee Bontecou, and Carolee Schneemann) for whom holes—as idea, imagery, philosophy—have proved evocative, inviting, and occasionally obliterative.

Hilary White is a writer and researcher, currently an IRC postdoc at Maynooth University, Ireland, working on a project entitled Forms of Sleep. She co-ran the experimental poetry reading and commission series, No Matter, in Manchester, and co-edited the zine series, Academics Against Networking. Her writing appears in MAP, Banshee, zarf, and The Stinging Fly. Holes is her first novel.

Thune Amertume Fortune raconte la possibilité d’une révolution. Eva Sig est pauvre. Elle vit en Vendée. Ses journées sont organisées autour de la nécessité de ne pas exercer de travail salarié. Elle met en place toutes sortes de stratégies d’évitement : de la pensée magique à la privation. Laura et Marine sont ses amies. Marine est obsédée par les maisons, Laura par le bien-être. La voyante gagne sa vie en comblant le désir libéral capitaliste de réponses (elle le sait) de ses clientes. Andrea Quem est rencontrée par Eva Sig dans un NOZ, quelque chose change. La coach sportive dont le monde est réduit à une estrade devant un miroir raconte sa vie en détail avant de donner son cours de Zumba. Eva Sig meurt. Andrea Quem disparaît. La révolution a lieu. 

"Cascada s'écoute à fond ou ne s'écoute pas". C'est la phrase qu'enfant déjà, Théophylle Dcx se répètait quand ses parents lui demandaient de baisser le son, de l'autre côté de la porte de sa chambre. De ses danses de survie sur ses tubes d'adolescence jusqu'à l'écoute collective et festive de leurs remix versions nightcore des années plus tard, Théophylle Dcx nous fait le récit de son histoire.

Il écrit ce que peut être la vie d'une jeune personne queer séropo, aujourd'hui travailleur du sexe ; les violences qui la traversent, tout comme les moments de jouissance qui la rendent flamboyante. Son texte est surtout un puissant hommage à son amitié avec Alexandre, son camarade de vie et de danse, décédé une année plus tôt.

L'écriture de Théophylle Dcx, rythmée, découpée, évoque un besoin urgent de retracer les affects qui le parcourent. Ce texte à la première personne, sensible et enflammé, est un précieux geste de partage et d'émancipation.

Originally self-released in 1976 through A.I.R. Gallery, New York, the five short unpublished manuscripts collected in 5 Prose Fictions offer an abbreviated introduction to curator Lucy R. Lippard’s largely under-examined fictional work.

The republication of these pieces follows the recent rerelease of I See / You Mean and provides further context for the released of Brimstone this Fall, an anthology compiling over 50 of Lippard’s experimental and narrative fiction works from the early 1950s through the 1980s.

When the dead begin speaking to sixteen-year-old Kim Nguyen, her peaceful childhood is over.

A delicate meditation on the nature of ghosts, belief, and how the future is shaped by the past. When the dead begin speaking to sixteen-year-old Kim Nguyen, her peaceful childhood is over. Suddenly everyone wants to exploit her new talent—her family, the Vietnamese government, and even the spirits themselves.

Hoa Pham is the author of several books and two plays. Her most recent publication is Empathy, also published by Goldsmiths Press under the Gold SF imprint. She is also the founder of Peril Magazine, an Asian-Australian online arts and culture magazine. Hoa lives in Melbourne, Australia.

The prequel to Love Me Tender, narrating Debré's transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian and writer.

I see all her beauty, I see the beauty of women. I see my own body, new. I tell myself there are so many things that are possible.

First published in France in 2018, Playboy is the first volume of Constance Debré's renowned autobiographical trilogy that describes her decision, at age forty-three, to abandon her marriage, her legal career, and her bourgeois Parisian life to become a lesbian and a writer.

The novel unfolds in a series of short, sharp vignettes. The narrator's descriptions of her first female lovers—a married woman fifteen years older than her, a model ten years her junior—are punctuated by encounters with her ex-husband, her father, and her son.

As Debré recently told Granta: “It was a bit like Saint Augustine and his conversion. In the same week, I had sex with a girl and I had the feeling that I could write. I had this incredible feeling that I could catch things, that life was there to be caught.”

Looking at the world through fresh eyes, the narrator of Playboy questions everything that once lay beneath the surface of her well-managed life. Laconic, aggressive, and radically truthful, she examines gender and marriage, selfishness and sacrifice, money and family, even the privilege inherent in her downward mobility.

Writing her way toward her own liberation, Debré chronicles the process that made her one of the most brilliant, important French writers today.

Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, among others.

A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, "I," and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters, Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language.

Sphinx is a landmark text in the feminist and LGBT literary canon appearing in English for the first time.

Anne Garréta (b. 1962) is a lecturer at the University of Rennes II and research professor of literature and Romance studies at Duke University. She joined the Oulipo in 2000, becoming the first member to join born after the Oulipo was founded. Garréta won France's prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002, awarded each year to an author whose "fame does not yet match their talent," for her novel Pas un jour.

Emma Ramadan is a graduate of Brown University and received her master's in literary translation from the American University of Paris. Her translation of Anne Parian's Monospace is forthcoming from La Presse. She is currently on a Fulbright Fellowship for literary translation in Morocco.

Two girls are bound by red string and canine heritage in this vivid tale about female companionship and loyalty, from the National Book Award "5 Under 35" honoree and author of Gods of Want.

Best friends Anita and Rainie have made countless visits to their home base: an old sycamore tree and its neighboring lot of stray dogs who have a mysterious ability to communicate with humans. The girls learn that they are preceded by generations of dog-headed women and women-headed dogs whose bloodlines knot them together like thread. Anita convinces her best friend Rainie to become a dog with her, tying a collar of red string around each of their necks to preserve their kinship forever. But when the two girls are separated, Anita sinks into her dreams and lands herself in a coma that only Rainie knows how to rouse her from. As Anita’s body begins to rot, her mind straying farther and farther away from the waking world, it is up to Rainie to rebuild her friend’s body and keep Anita from being lost forever.* Tasked with gathering new organs from the mythical landscape of their shared childhood, Rainie must return to the past and ask herself how far she is willing to go to reunite with the girl who has haunted her and hunted her in equal measure.

In rhythmically poetic and visceral lore, K-Ming Chang veers away from the ordinary and into the macabre. Filled with ghosts and bodily entrails, this is a story about the horror and beauty of intimacy, being tethered to another person across time and space, and transforming our origins.

Co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, this incredible life-after-death novel asks us to consider how much of our memory, of our bodies, of the world as we know it ― how much of what we love can we lose before we are lost? And then what happens?

The heroine of the spare and haunting It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known―where she loved and was loved.

Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another.  A bracing writer of great nerve and verve, Anne de Marcken bends reality (and the reader’s mind) with throwaway assurance.

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Delivering a near-Beckettian whopping to the reader’s imagination, this is one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times.

From the International Booker Prize-winning translator and Women's Prize finalist, an utterly beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest.

Eight translators arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.

The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets-and deceptions-of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.

This hilarious, thought-provoking debut novel is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe's last great wildernesses.

From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.

A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.

Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

An urgent, propulsive novel about a woman learning to negotiate her ailment and its various aftereffects via the simulacrum of a perfect romantic relationship.

In Catherine Lacey’s ambitious second novel we are introduced to Mary, a young woman living in New York City and struggling to cope with a body that has betrayed her. All but paralyzed with pain, Mary seeks relief from a New Agey treatment called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia, PAKing for short. And, remarkably, it works. But PAKing is prohibitively expensive and Mary is dead broke. So she scours Craigslist for fast-cash jobs and finds herself applying for the “Girlfriend Experiment,” the brainchild of an eccentric actor, Kurt Sky, who is determined to find the perfect relationship—even if that means paying different women to fulfill distinctive roles. Mary is hired as the “Emotional Girlfriend”—certainly better than the “Anger Girlfriend” or the “Maternal Girlfriend”—and is pulled into Kurt’s ego-driven and messy attempt at human connection.

Told in her signature spiraling prose, The Answers is full of the singular yet universal insights readers have come to expect from Lacey. It is a gorgeous hybrid of the plot- and the idea-driven novel that will leave you reeling.

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.