Books

Sonnets, first published in 1989 as Tender Buttons Number 1 is widely considered to be one of the most generative and innovative works of contemporary American poetry, radically rethinking the traditional sonnet form. This expanded 25th Anniversary edition includes a new preface by Bernadette Mayer, an editor's note by Tender Buttons Press publisher Lee Ann Brown, and a selection of previously unpublished archival material including the Skinny Sonnets, described as "Hypnogogic Word Playing in Reporters' Notebooks" which further expand our map of Bernadette Mayer's ground-breaking works of writing consciousness.

Edited by Lee Ann Brown. Cover art by Sophie. Book design by Wayne Smith.

The legendary 1975 "Schizo-Culture" conference, conceived by the early Semiotext(e) collective, began as an attempt to introduce the then-unknown radical philosophies of post-'68 France to the American avant-garde. The event featured a series of seminal papers, from Deleuze's first presentation of the concept of the "rhizome" to Foucault's introduction of his History of Sexuality project. The conference was equally important on a political level, and brought together a diverse group of activists, thinkers, patients, and ex-cons in order to address the challenge of penal and psychiatric institutions. The combination proved to be explosive, but amid the fighting and confusion "Schizo-Culture" revealed deep ruptures in left politics, French thought, and American culture.

The "Schizo-Culture" issue of the Semiotext(e) journal came three years later. Designed by a group of artists and filmmakers including Kathryn Bigelow and Denise Green, it documented the chaotic creativity of an emerging downtown New York scene, and offered interviews with artists, theorists, writers, and No Wave and pre-punk musicians together with new texts from Deleuze, Foucault, R. D. Laing, and other conference participants.

This slip-cased edition includes The Book: 1978, a facsimile reproduction of the original Schizo-Culture publication; and The Event: 1975, a previously unpublished and comprehensive record of the conference that set it all off. It assembles many previously unpublished texts, including a detailed selection of interviews reconstructing the events, and features Félix Guattari, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Michel Foucault, Sylvère Lotringer, Guy Hocquenghem, Gilles Deleuze, John Rajchman, Robert Wilson, Joel Kovel, Jack Smith, Jean-François Lyotard, Ti-Grace Atkinson, François Peraldi, and John Cage.

David J. Melnick published the first book of Men in Aida, a homophonic, but also homoeroticized translation of Homer's epic Iliad, in December 1983 in an edition of 450 at Tuumba Press. After appearing in many guises and fragments, Book Two was published online in 2002 as part of the Eclipse Archive. Book Three appears for the first time in the present publication, which brings together all three books of one of the most important American avant-garde poems. 

According to Sean Gurd, who wrote the introduction to this unified edition: "The labor of more than 20 years, Men in Aïda filters the sound of Homer's Iliad through the words and phraseology of English. Far more than an exercise in homophonic translation, David J. Melnick's epoch-marking poem packs thousands of years of linguistic history into three riotous books."

Inspired by visionaries like Moses, William Blake, and Joseph Smith, Bellamy spent five months in 2009 receiving transmissions from her television set and writing brief commentaries on each. The sutras and commentaries in the present volume are the beginning of an intensive investigation into the nature of religious experience. What are cults? Are they limited to wacko marginal communities, or do we enter one every time we go to work or step into a polling place? What is charisma and why are we addicted to it? Bellamy speaks candidly and intimately to her own experience as a woman, a writer, and former cult member. This commingling of memoir, fiction, collage and essay makes room for horny gurus, visitors from outer space, the tenderness of group life, and maybe the beginnings of a hard-won individualism.

An autobiographical documentary, a fiction that's also an essay and an extended poetic meditation on the ability of the image to represent experience. Sarah Turner's film is a ghost story that explores what we forget and how we remember. The stunning imagery comes solely from the window of the Trans-Siberian train, shot first in 1987-8 and then again in 2007-8. The re-enactment of the journey is a memory work, a re-enactment of the past in the present through the process of filming. But the return journey is haunted by the voices of two dead friends that dominate the soundscape of the 'archive' footage. The film culminates at the haunting expanse of Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world.

Perestroika: Reconstructed re-mixes and extends Perestroika, into two sequences. Sequence one constitutes the 2009 version of the film, whilst the second sequence constructs a new framing narrative that reinterprets and reconfigures both the imagery and the experience of the first. Part psycho-geography, part dream and part environmental allegory, both sequences of Perestroika : Reconstructed conclude at Lake Baikal, contrasting experiences of terror and apocalypse with those of beauty and tranquility, the one contaminating the other. In this uncanny return, form stages thee through twinning the instability of memory and re-enacting that within the projective experience of cinema. This extended work delves further into ideas of momentary truth, identity, and how an uncontaminated experience of landscape is literally and metaphorically something that only exists in memory.

Publication contains DVD of Perestroika, which was released theatrically, blu-ray of Perestroika:Reconstructed, first exhibited as a gallery installation at London's Carroll/Fletcher Gallery April-May 2013, and a booklet of three essays by Elizabeth Cowie, Sophie Mayer, and Paul Newland.

Since the late 1970s Matt Mullican has developed a practice of performing under hypnosis that extends from his investigations into representation and subjective projection, and from his efforts to “enter the image” and embody a fictional character, a body of work that offers an exceptional perspective on repetition and renewal in performance practice.

This book is the outcome of an extensive research project into Mullican’s hypnosis performances, undertaken within the frame of If I Can’t Dance’s Performance in Residence programme with invited researcher Vanessa Desclaux, and a two-day Class of Masters with Mullican on character construction. Desclaux takes up the question of personification in light of her analysis of Mullican’s hypnosis performances. A selection of Mullican’s photographs and works on paper are reproduced in this book.

In Film Poems, readers find themselves with author Redell Olsen on the cutting-room floor of discourse, weaving together a manifesto of conceptual poetry that demonstrates the skipping and scratch of language. Just as really "seeing" a film is to experience our own vision—the technology that is always mediating our sight—really "reading" (a particular form of seeing) is to experience our own language as a constantly shifting medium; meanings emerge through ceaseless splicings and cuts.

Film Poems brings together Olsen's "Film Poem" works written for performance and installation in relation to films made and appropriated by her between 2007-2011. The five sequences splice together a range of contextual references from London landmarks, lace manufacturing, synchronized swimming, and the history of camouflage. Words unfold on the page as a film unspools from a reel, with particular attention paid to etymologies and polyvalences, to the process and performance of meaning-making and its relationship to physical manufacturing. "Words are the film between what is said and seen," writes Olsen, "and also the means of writing that something burning in the projector called language."

Redell Olsen's publications include FILM POEMS (Les Figues Press, 2014), PUNK FAUN: A BAR ROCK PASTEL (Subpress, 2012), Secure Portable Space (Reality Street, 2004), Book of the Fur (rem press, 2000), and the collaboratively produced Here Are My Instructions (Redell Olsen / Susan Johanknecht) (Gefn, 2004). Her film poems, and texts for performance and film, include: Bucolic Picnic (or, toile de jouy camouflage) (2009), Newe Booke of Copies (2009-10), Lost Pool (2010), and SPRIGS & spots (2011-12). From 2006-2010 she was the editor of How2, the international journal for modernist and contemporary poetry and poetics by women writers. She is the director for the MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.

‘the she’ compares texts by Virginia Woolf with their French translation, reproducing parts of the novelles ‘The String Quartet' & ‘Blue and Green’ and the novel ‘The Years’. Of the novellas, she kept only the articles the in English and le, la, les in French, exactly as they appear in the editions. Of the novel, only the pronouns she in English and elle in French remain.

The publication includes identical two booklets, one bound and one unbound, both uncut, referring to old books which were often sold bound but uncut.

Offset printing. Printed by Cultura, Wetteren

Edition of 123 numbered copies

The authoritative biography of the 60s countercultural icon who wrote SCUM Manifesto, shot Andy Warhol, and made an unforgettable mark on feminist history.

Breanne Fahs is an associate professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University, where she specializes in studying women's sexuality, critical embodiment studies, radical feminism, and political activism. She has a BA in women's studies/gender studies and psychology from Occidental College and a PhD in women's studies and clinical psychology from the University of Michigan. She has published widely in feminist, social science, and humanities journals, as well as the books Performing Sex with SUNY Press (2011) and The Moral Panics of Sexuality (2013). She is the director of the Feminist Research on Gender and Sexuality Group at Arizona State University, and also works as a private practice clinical psychologist specializing in sexuality, couples work, and trauma recovery. 

"Laughter" is a collection of three essays by French philosopher Henri Bergson, first published in 1900. In a short introduction, Bergson announces that he will try to define the comic, but he does not want to give a rigid definition of the word; he wants to deal with the comic as part of human life. His ambition is also to have a better knowledge of society, of the functioning of human imagination and of collective imagination, but also of art and life.

Bergson begins to note three facts on the comic: 1] the comic is strictly a human phenomenon. A landscape cannot be a source of laughter, and when humans make fun of animals, it is often because they recognize some human behavior in them. Man is not only a being that can laugh, but also a being that is a source of laughter. 2] laughter requires an indifference, a detachment from sensibility and emotion: 3] it is more difficult to laugh when one is fully aware of the seriousness of a situation. It is difficult to laugh alone, it is easier to laugh collectively. One who is excluded from a group of people does not laugh with them, there is often a complicity in laughter. Thus the comic is not a mere pleasure of the intellect, it is a human and social activity, it has a social meaning.

2014 Reprint of Original 1912 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software.

“We were not claiming European influences, as concrete poetry did. Europe would not accept a visual culture born in Brazil, so this claiming was necessary for concrete poetry, but not for poema/processo as it had pan-Latin-American connections” (Wlademir Dias-Pino)

Already a classic, this issue of OEI presents the Brazilian avant-garde movement Poema/Processo through a huge selection of images, poems, and short essays, showing the different strategies this movement used between 1967 an 1972 in order to survive and develop under the pressure of the militarian regime. Are also featured three other less-known Brazilian movements from the 60s, 70s and early 80s: poesia práxis, poesia marginal, pornismo.

With Wlademir Dias-Pino, Wlademir Dias-Pino, Moacy Cirne, Álvaro de Sá, Fernanda Nogueira, Priscilla Guimarães Martins, João Felício dos Santos, Rogerio Camara, Neide de Sá, Eduardo Kac, Antonio Sergio Bessa, Décio Pignatari, Luis Ângelo Pinto, Décio Pignatari, Dailor Varela, Falves Silva, Jota Medeiros, Cristina Freire, Dácio Galvão, Clemente Padín, Almandrade, Mário Chamie, Sergio Cohn, Omar Khouri, Régis Bonvicino, Regina Silveira, Hudinilson Jr.

“In selecting the photographs for this publication, Lisa Spilliaert (b. 1990) was adamant that the image of a sunrise should be among the first in her book. It is, indeed, an emblematic image. For anyone with a camera, such a splendid sunrise is an irresistible trope: a visual motif that simply begs to be captured and fixed on film. In reality, however, the magic of this scene resides in the fleeting, subtle changes in colours and vibrations. This is the dynamic that captivates us.

Photography is usually understood as a technique for ‘stopping’ the flow of time. But as Spilliaert here demonstrates, the impact of photography can also be used to manifest an awareness of time and transience. By accentuating the photographer’s fixed position vis-à-vis the endlessly changing light source, Spilliaert evokes a correlation between stasis and movement, between the cosmic and the mundane. This duality is echoed again in the confrontation of the two equivalent silhouettes: that of the photographer and of his alias or ‘partner’: a life-size technical camera.” — From ‘Time and Tide’ Edwin Carels

The Albertine Workout contains fifty-nine paragraphs, with appendices, summarizing Anne Carson's research on Albertine, the principal love interest of Marcel in Proust's Á la recherche du temps perdu.

Never before available, the unexpurgated last interview with James Baldwin.

“I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only.” When, in the fall of 1987, the poet Quincy Troupe traveled to the south of France to interview James Baldwin, Baldwin’s brother David told him to ask Baldwin about everything—Baldwin was critically ill and David knew that this might be the writer’s last chance to speak at length about his life and work.

The result is one of the most eloquent and revelatory interviews of Baldwin’s career, a conversation that ranges widely over such topics as his childhood in Harlem, his close friendship with Miles Davis, his relationship with writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, his years in France, and his ever-incisive thoughts on the history of race relations and the African-American experience.

Also collected here are significant interviews from other moments in Baldwin’s life, including an in-depth interview conducted by Studs Terkel shortly after the publication of Nobody Knows My Name. These interviews showcase, above all, Baldwin’s fearlessness and integrity as a writer, thinker, and individual, as well as the profound struggles he faced along the way.

Lefebvre's classic analysis of daily life under capitalism in one complete volume.

The three-volume text by Henri Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is now available for the first time in one complete volume. Written at the birth of post-war consumerism, Critique was an inspiration for the 1968 student revolution in France. It is a founding text of cultural studies and a major influence on the fields of contemporary philosophy, geography, sociology, architecture, political theory and urbanism. Lefebvre takes as his starting point and guide the "trivial" details of quotidian experience: an experience colonized by the commodity, shadowed by inauthenticity, yet remaining the only source of resistance and change. This is an enduringly radical text, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.

"In 1968-69 I wanted to die, that is to say, stop living, being killed, but it was blocked on all sides," wrote Hélène Cixous, esteemed French feminist, playwright, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. Instead of suicide, she began to dream of writing a tomb for herself. This tomb became a work that is a testament to Cixous's life and spirit and a secret book, the first book she ever authored. Originally written in 1970, Tombe is a Homerian recasting of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis in the thickets of Central Park, a book Cixous provocatively calls the "all-powerful-other of all my books, it sparks them off, makes them run, it is their Messiah."

Masterfully translated by Laurent Milesi, Tombe preserves the sonic complexities and intricate wordplay at the core of Cixous's writing, and reveals the struggles, ideas, and intents at the center of her work. With a new prologue by the author, this is a necessary document in the development of Cixous's aesthetic as a writer and theorist, and will be eagerly welcomed by readers as a crucial building block in the foundation of her later work .

In collaboration with cross-disciplinary artist Bianca Casady of music duo CocoRosie, 2013 brought the release of a new print magazine entitled Girls Against God (GAG). A boldly feminist exploration and multi-generational endeavor, GAG deploys the arts to illuminate the oppressive, obsolete nature of traditional, male-defined religions and other patriarchal institutions—“We must resist and reinvent,” Casady declares.

The second issue of GAG—a pocket book of practical magic—investigates and celebrates spiritual healing, instinctually tying together the earth and women’s bodies. Through essays, fiction, poetry, interviews and spells GAG Issue 2 delves into the roots of occult earth wisdom passed through generations of women against persecution and patriarchy.  Texts are accompanied by rich black and white images ranging from pen and ink illustrations to enigmatic photography. The issue gathers around a collaborative photographic exploration between Casady and performance artist Melanie Bonajo entitled “Witchunt,” and also includes interviews with notable artists Carollee Schneemann and Suzanne Lacy

Issue #2—Melanie Bonajo / Eve Bradford / Trinie Dalton / Karolina Daria Flora / Mary Hanlon / Julie Higonnet / J.ZarA / Emely Neu / Kara L. Rooney / Jean Marc Ruellan / Minka Sicklinger / Macho Mel Shimkovitz

From interdisciplinary writer and performer Jacob Wren comes Polyamorous Love Song, a novel of intertwined narratives concerning the relationship between artists and the world. Shot through with unexpected moments of sex and violence, readers will become acquainted with a world that is at once the same and opposite from the one in which they live. With a diverse palette of vivid characters - from people who wear furry mascot costumes at all times, to a group of New Filmmakers that devises increasingly unexpected sexual scenarios with complete strangers, to a secret society that concocts a virus that only infects those on the political right - Wren's avant-garde Polyamorous Love Song (finalist for the 2013 Fence Modern Prize in Prose) is great.

Some years ago, Will Holder and Alex Waterman proposed to Robert Ashley that musicians and non-musicians might produce new versions of his operas, by way of typographical scores. The bulk ofYes, But Is It Edible? is a result of that proposal: scores for Dust (1998) and Celestial Excursions (2003). These operas’ characters have, until now, been solely produced by and are the stories exchanged between Ashley and his “band” (singers Sam Ashley, Joan La Barbara, Thomas Buckner, and Jacqueline Humbert); and in landscapes produced by “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Tom Hamilton, David Moodey, Cas Boumans, and Mimi Johnson—the result of a thirty-year relationship.

The scores for Dust and Celestial Excursions are preceded by a selection of Ashley’s work, from 1963 to 2008, drawing attention to the varying relations between instruction and score, and the tones of instructional address. Working with these scores gave us a better sense of how each one produces a specific mode of decision-making, telling us what to put on the pages of the scores, for any reader who follows.

Yes, But Is It Edible? is the fourth in a series of publications produced with or by Will Holder and Alex Waterman that a musicological perspective on scoring speech, and the role of printed matter in collective forms of reading and writing: Agape (Miguel Abreu Gallery, 2007); Between Thought and Sound (The Kitchen, 2008); and The Tiger’s Mind (with Beatrice Gibson; Sternberg Press, 2012).

Andy ‘Chubz’ Wilson is just another NEET on the street, spending his summer days sucking dick and chilling in the park, one hand on his touchscreen, the other down his pants. That is, until he meets charming left-wing journalist and cute crypto-twink Owen whilst trawling Grindr for sex. But what starts as a quick, breathless hookup ends up changing Chubz — and London — forever. Whilst Owen battles poppers-mad PM Nigel ‘Nige’ Farage, our cock-hungry comrade wages his own 'ass war', and is left wondering: just what exactly is it he’s fighting for? Socialism? Barbarism? Or just cheap kicks?

YOUTH RAGE! YOUTH VIOLENCE! YOUTH ORGASMS! FEAR OF A GAY UNDERCLASS – ARMED – DANGEROUS - SICK FUCKS.

Ghost Image is made up of sixty-three short essays—meditations, memories, fantasies, and stories bordering on prose poems—and not a single image. Hervé Guibert's brief, literary rumination on photography was written in response to Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, but its deeply personal contents go far beyond that canonical text. Some essays talk of Guibert's parents and friends, some describe old family photographs and films, and spinning through them all are reflections on remembrance, narcissism, seduction, deception, death, and the phantom images that have been missed.

Both a memoir and an exploration of the artistic process, Ghost Image not only reveals Guibert's particular experience as a gay artist captivated by the transience and physicality of his media and his life, but also his thoughts on the more technical aspects of his vocation. In one essay, Guibert searches through a cardboard box of family portraits for clues—answers, or even questions—about the lives of his parents and more distant relatives. Rifling through vacation snapshots and the autographed images of long-forgotten film stars, Guibert muses, "I don't even recognize the faces, except occasionally that of an aunt or great-aunt, or the thin, fair face of my mother as a young girl." In other essays, he explains how he composes his photographs, and how—in writing—he seeks to escape and correct the inherent limits of his technique, to preserve those images lost to his technical failings as a photographer.
With strains of Jean Genet and recurring themes that speak to the work of contemporary artists across a range of media, Guibert's Ghost Image is a beautifully written, melancholic ode to existence and art forms both fleeting and powerful—a unique memoir at the nexus of family, memory, desire, and photography.

Hervé Guibert (1955-91) was born and worked in Paris. A noted photographer, he also contributed articles on culture to the French newspaper Le Monde and wrote works of fiction and books on photography.

This publication presents a survey of the work of Els Dietvorst from 2010 to 2014. This is also the period in which she left Brussels to live in a village on the south-east coast of Ireland, where she focused on projects such as The Black Lamb. The audio piece One was killed for beauty, another one was shot, the two others died naturally is included on an audio CD.

Els Dietvorst E.D. (2010–2014), Rolf Quaghebeur, Eva Wittocx, Katleen Weyts, Els Dietvorst, Brussels, 2014.

"Some years ago I wrote a book about a boy named Geryon who was red and had wings and fell in love with Herakles. Recently I began to wonder what happened to them in later life. Red Doc> continues their adventures in a very different style and with changed names. To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing." Anne Carson

Anne Carson was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.

Published 2014.

The Mausoleum of Lovers comprises Guibert's journals, kept from 1976-1991. Functioning as an atelier, it forecasts the writing of a novel, which does not materialize as such; the journal itself — a mausoleum of lovers — comes to take its place. The sensual exigencies and untempered forms of address in this epistolary work, often compared to Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, use the letter and the photograph in a work that hovers between forms, in anticipation of its own disintegration.

HERVÉ GUIBERT (1955-1991) was a French writer and photographer. A critic for Le Monde, he was the author of some thirty books, most notably To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which presents an intimate portrait of Michel Foucault and played a significant role in changing public attitudes in France towards AIDS. NATHANAËL is the author of a score of books written in English or French, including Sisyphus, Outdone. Her translations include books by Édouard Glissant and Danielle Collobert, among others. Nathanaël lives in Chicago.