New in translation

An exploration of eroticism in extremism.

Published in Icelandic in 1994, Under the Wings of the Valkyrie is the work that established Sjón's literary career. Short and intense, the story unfolds through a letter from Icelandic architect Fridjón B. Fridriksson to his wife, revealing his lifelong obsession with German militant Gudrun Ensslin, of the Baader-Meinhof gang. He first glimpsed her on TV as a child and now Ensslin lingers in his dreams and has become the defining fixture of his psyche. To break free from Ensslin, and salvage his marriage, Fridjón resorts to drastic measures. Disturbing yet captivating, Under the Wings of the Valkyrie blurs the lines between passion and madness, fantasy and reality.

Sjón (Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson, born 1962 in Reykjavik) is a celebrated novelist, poet, and lyricist, who has become a central figure in Icelandic culture. Junot Diaz hailed him as "the trickster who makes the world" and the late, great A.S. Byatt regarded him as "a Magus of the North." He is known also for his collaborations with singer Björk, receiving an Oscar nomination for lyrics to Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, and his screenplays for critically acclaimed films The Northman and Lamb. His works have been translated into 30 languages.

Translated from the Icelandic by Brian Fitzgibbon.

Trash interweaves the voices of three women with lived connections to the municipal garbage dump of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. 

Aguilar Zéleny's Trash shows the complexities of survival and joy, love and violence for three women: a teenager abandoned by her guardian at the dump, a scientist doing research on the residents of the dump, and a transwoman living nearby who is the matriarch of a group of sex workers. 

Each one of the characters navigates family, abandonment, power, jealousy, greed, and multiple taboos around sexuality and gender violence. Their stories are linked by geography and by ideas of waste and abandonment. 

As Aguilar Zéleny explores these territories in her book, she asks crucial questions: who is seen as disposable and why? How do women find their own means of survival and joy in the midst of a perilous sociopolitical context? What does it mean to live a life in a time of austerity and extreme violence? Trash is a critical intervention in Mexican literature.

Translated by J.D. Pluecker
Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transgender Fiction

Last poems from the national poet of Palestine.

Mural is the testimony of one of the most important and powerful poets of our age.

Mahmoud Darwish was the unofficial laureate of Palestine. One of the greatest poets of the last half-century, his work evokes the loss of his homeland and is suffused with the pain of dispossession and exile. Here, his close friends John Berger and Rema Hammami present a beautiful new translation of two of Darwish’s later works: his long masterpiece Mural, a contemplation of his life and work written following life-threatening surgery, and his last poem, The Dice Player, which Darwish read in Ramallah a month before his death.

Illustrated with original drawings by John Berger.
Introduction by John Berger
Translated by John Berger and Rema Hammami

An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel.

Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth's rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is "hard of hearing" but "full of life."

A daring novel, once widely censored, about the scrappy, harrowing, and inventive lives of Rome's unhoused youth by one of Italy's greatest film directors.

Boys Alive, published in 1955, was Pier Paolo Pasolini's first work of fiction and it remains his best known. Written in the aftermath of Pasolini's move from the provinces to Rome, the novel captures the. hunger and anger, waywardness and squalor of the big city. The life of the novel is the life of the city streets; from the streets, too, come its raw, mongrel, assaultive language. Here unblinkered realism and passionate lyricism meet in a vision of a vast urban inferno, blazing with darkness and light.

There is no one story to the book, only stories, splitting off, breaking away, going nowhere, flaming out, stories in which scenes of comic debacle, bitter conflict, wild joy, and crushing disappointment quickly follow. Pasolini's young characters have nothing to trade on except youth, and the struggle to live is unending. They loot, hustle, scavenge, steal. Somehow money will turn up; as soon as it does it will get spent. The main thing, in any case, is to have fun, and so the boys boast and vie, the desperate uncertainty of their days and nights offset by the fabulous inventiveness of their words. A warehouse heist, a night of gambling, the hunt for sex: The world of Boys Alive is a world in convulsion where at any instant disaster may strike.

Tim Parks' new translation of Pasolini's early masterpiece brings out the salt and brilliance of a still-scandalous work of art.

This tale about seduction, obsession, family, and the confines of capitalism is one of director Pier Paolo Pasolini's most fascinating creations, based on his transcendent film of the same name.

Theorem is the most enigmatic of Pier Paolo Pasolini's four novels. The book started as a poem and took shape both as a work of fiction and a film, also called Theorem, released the same year. In short prose chapters interspersed with stark passages of poetry, Pasolini tells a story of transfiguration and trauma.

To the suburban mansion of a prosperous Milanese businessman comes a mysterious and beautiful young man who invites himself to stay. From the beginning he exercises a strange fascination on the inhabitants of the house, and soon everyone, from the busy father to the frustrated mother, from the yearning daughter to the weak-willed son to the housemaid from the country, has fallen in love with him. Then, as mysteriously as he appeared, the infatuating young man departs. How will these people he has touched so deeply do without him? Is there a passage out of the spiritual desert of modern capitalism into a new awakening, both of the senses and of the soul? Only questions remain at the end of a book that is at once a bedroom comedy, a political novel, and a religious parable.

Silvia Federici pré­sente une his­toire cri­ti­que de la poli­ti­que des com­muns dans une pers­pec­tive fémi­niste. De son vécu au Nigeria et de ses ren­contres avec des mili­tan­tes d’Amérique latine et du monde entier, Federici révèle les luttes quo­ti­dien­nes des femmes contre la spo­lia­tion de leur terre, de leur loge­ment et nour­ri­ture. De ses recher­ches his­to­ri­ques, elle com­pare les enclo­su­res, qui ont permis la nais­sance du capi­ta­lisme par la des­truc­tion des com­muns et la pro­lé­ta­ri­sa­tion des popu­la­tions rura­les, aux « nou­vel­les enclo­su­res » au cœur de la phase actuelle d’accu­mu­la­tion capi­ta­liste mon­diale. Cet ouvrage sou­tient que les luttes autour de la repro­duc­tion sociale sont cru­cia­les à la fois pour notre survie économique que pour la cons­truc­tion d’un monde libéré des hié­rar­chies et des divi­sions que le capi­tal a implan­tées dans le corps du pro­lé­ta­riat inter­na­tio­nal.

Federici consi­dère que les com­muns ne doi­vent pas être com­pris comme des îlots de par­tage dans un océan de rela­tions d’exploi­ta­tion, mais plutôt comme des espa­ces auto­no­mes à partir des­quels défier l’orga­ni­sa­tion capi­ta­liste de la vie et du tra­vail.

Essai traduit de l’anglais par Noémie Grunenwald.

Silvia Federici (née en 1942 à Parme en Italie) est une uni­ver­si­taire amé­ri­caine, ensei­gnante et mili­tante fémi­niste révo­lu­tion­naire. Elle est pro­fes­seure émérite et cher­cheuse à l’Université Hofstra à New York.

The collected manifestos of Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau: for a postcolonial response to planetary crisis.

Manifestos brings together for the first time in English the manifestos written by Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau between 2000 and 2009. Composed in part in the aftermath of Barack Obama's election in 2008, the texts resonate with the current context of divided identities and criticisms of multiculturalism. The individual texts grapple with concrete historical and political moments in France, the Caribbean, and North America. Across the manifestos, as well as two collectively signed op-eds, the authors engage with socio-political aspects of climate catastrophe, resource extraction, toxicity, and neocolonialism.  

Throughout the collection, Glissant and Chamoiseau engage with key themes articulated through their poetic vocabulary, including Relation, globalization, globality (mondialité), anti-universalism, métissage, the tout-monde (“whole-world”) and the tout-vivant (“all-living,” including the relationship of humans to each other and “nature”), créolité and the creolization of the world, and the liberation from community assignations in response to individualism and neoliberal societies.  

Translated as the first volume in the Planetarities series with Goldsmiths Press, the themes of Manifestos resonate with the planetary as they work in response to contemporary forms of (economic) globalization, western capitalism, identity politics, and urban, digital and cosmic ecosystems, as well as the role of the poet-writer. A distinguishing feature of this publication is its interventional aspect, which prioritizes engaged scholarship and practice while demonstrating the relevance of the poetic in response to the urgencies of planetary crisis. 

Translated by Betsy Wing and Matt Reeck

Afterword by Edwy Plenel

La philosophe Sara Ahmed se présente parfois comme « une rabat-joie féministe, une alienne affective, une femme queer racisée en colère ». Depuis plus de dix ans, elle tient un blog, feministkilljoys.com, où elle publie des morceaux de ses livres et de ses conférences. Dedans, on trouve des bouts de rages - contre le harcèlement sexuel à la fac où elle enseigne, contre le racisme institutionnel, contre le capitalisme carcéral... — mais aussi des célébrations des solidarités et des activismes transféministes. De là sont extraits les trois textes rassemblés dans ce court recueil, « Vandalisme queer », « Usage queer» et « La plainte, méthode queer»; des textes qui ont tous pour point commun de réfléchir aux potentiels d'interruption du mot queer. Queer, oblique, pas droit.e.s, déviant.e.s : des termes pour se mettre en travers des chemins trop bien tracés. Des textes comme autant d'appels à multiplier les existences vandales.

Un tuyau percé peut mener à un autre; il peut le faire et il le fait. Il suffit parfois de desserrer un écrou, un petit peu, juste un tout petit peu, pour que l'explosion ait lieu. Et nous avons besoin de plus d'explosions. Les usages queers, les usages obliques, décrivent ce potentiel d'explosion. Ils décrivent la manière dont les petites déviations, les petits desserrements, la création d'une issue de secours, l'ouverture d'une échappée, peuvent aider à multiplier toutes sortes de fuites et de sorties.

Temporary Services et PrintRoom ont invité dix-sept artistes éditeurices à répondre à la question suivante: En réfléchissant aux échelles locale, régionale, nationale et internationale, quels sont les problèmes sociétaux, politiques, économiques et écologiques que les artistes éditeurices sont équipées à aborder et à résoudre en utilisant leurs connaissances, leurs compétences et leurs ressources?

PrintRoom est un espace de présentation et de vente basé à Rotterdam, et dédié aux éditions d'artistes. Depuis 2012, PrintRoom gère un atelier de risographie où artistes, designers et autres curieux ses peuvent prendre part à des workshops ou imprimer leurs propres projets. PrintRoom est né en 2003 à partir d'une collection itinérante, encore en développement, d'éditions d'artistes. En 2010, l'initiative se dota d'une adresse fixe à Rotterdam (au 17 Schietbaanstraat), où elle devint une plateforme palpitante pour promouvoir et vendre des éditions faites par des artistes, des designers et des éditeurices venant de partout dans le monde. La collection PrintRoom comprend divers types de documents allant de l'édition en couleur savoureusement conçue au modeste flipbook ou au zine photocopié. L'espace accueille des discussions, des présentations, des lancements de livre et des workshops qui questionnent les méthodes des artistes de l'édition indépendante.

Temporary Services est composé de Brett Bloom et de Marc Fischer. Nous sommes basés à Auburn (dans l'Indiana) et à Chicago (dans l'Illinois). Nous existons, bien qu'il y eut plusieurs changements d'équipe et de structure, depuis 1998. En 2008, nous avons fondé les éditions et la boutique en ligne Half Letter Press. Nous produisons des expositions, des évènements, des projets et des éditions. La distinction entre une pratique artistique et d'autres projets créatifs menés par des humains n'est pas pertinente pour nous.

First published in 2018, Prayers Manifestos Bravery is a collection of Verity Spott’s “Trans* Manifestos”. Written from 2011 and originally published on her blog, the book’s content ranges from concrete poetry to long-form dispatches, confessions and manifestos touching on questions of identity, gender, justice and society. 

“This is a collection of attempted manifestos whose composition began in 2011. It does not pretend to be completed and any life it has is in its capacity for change, movement and instability. These manifestos are described as such because at the time of their composition they felt like attempts of preservation; of life and of the capacity to struggle against life. They are all improvisations. They have not been heavily edited, and they are untidy. We're unsure what we are." — preface by the author

Verity Spott is a poet, teacher and care worker from Brighton, England. She is the author of the books Gideon, Click Away Close Door Say, We Will Bury You, The Mutiny Aboard the RV Felicity, Prayers Manifestos Bravery, Poems of Sappho (in translation), Hopelessness, Coronelles Set 1 and 70 Sonnets. Verity's poetry has appeared in The New York Times and has been translated into French, German and Greek. 

No other figure embodies revolutionary politics and radical chic quite like Ulrike Meinhof, who formed, with Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, notorious for its bombings and kidnappings of the wealthy in the 1970s. But in the years leading up to her leap into the fray, Meinhof was known throughout Europe as a respected journalist, who informed and entertained her loyal readers with monthly magazine columns.

Everybody Talks ABout the Weather... We Don't asks: What impels someone to abandon middle-class privilege for the sake of revolution? In the 1960s, Meinhof began to see the world in increasingly stark terms: the United States was emerging as an unstoppable superpower, massacring a tiny country overseas despite increasingly popular dissent at home; and Germany appeared to be run by former Nazis. Never before translated into English, Meinhof's writings show a woman increasingly engaged in the major political events and social currents of her time. In her introduction, Karin Bauer tells Meinhof's mesmerizing life story and her political coming-of-age; Nobel Prize winning author Elfriede Jelinek provides a thoughtful reflection on Meinhof's tragic failure to be heard; and Meinhof's daughter—a relentless critic of her mother and of the Left—contributes an afterword that shows how Meinhof's ghost still haunts us today.

Edited, with an introduction by Karin Bauer
Preface by Elfriede Jelinek
Afterword by Bettina Röhl
Translated by Luise von Flotow

A Toast to St Martirià is an improvised speech given by the cult Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra at the St Martirià fiesta in Banyoles, the town of his birth. Transmitting his subversive attitude and impulsive lust for life, it is a journey through his formative years and early relationships – established in the nightlife of his hometown – that have shaped his particular conception of cinema, art and life. ‘Cinema should be this, making perception of time and space more intense.’

Translated by Matthew Tree
Afterword by Alexander García Düttmann

The Catalan artist and filmmaker Albert Serra was born in 1975. His films usually depict European myths and literature. In 2001, he co-founded the production company Andergraun Films. His Honor of the Knights was selected by Cahiers du Cinéma as one of the ten best films of 2007. For Story of My Death, Serra was awarded the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2013. For The Death of Louis XIV, Serra received the Prix Jean Vigo in 2016. Pacifiction was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022.

Matthew Tree was born in London in 1958. He taught himself Catalan in 1979 and moved to Catalonia in 1984. Since then he has published nine works of fiction and non-fiction written in Catalan, and five written in English. He writes regular columns for Catalonia Today magazine in English and El Punt Avui newspaper in Catalan. He has translated works by Jordi Puntí, Maria Barbal, Monika Zgustová, Joel Joan, Marta Marín-Dòmine and Albert Serra, among others. Two of his English novels, Just Looking and Almost Everything, will appear in Catalan translation at the start of 2025.

The first book devoted to the late African American writer and actress, Dorothy Dean, one of the few prominent African American women of New York City's bohemian heyday, close to Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe.

This second release from Éditions 1989 features Dorothy Dean's unpublished writing and selected correspondence with Edie Sedgwick, Rene Ricard, and Taylor Mead, among other friends and artists. This volume also includes Dean's transcendent script of an unrealized film starring Factory actor, Ondine.

Lyrical, humorous, political, and brutally honest, Who Are You Dorothy Dean? is a tribute to one of the few prominent African American women of New York City's bohemian heyday.

Dorothy Dean (1932-1987) was an African American writer and actress. She entered the 1960s New York underground scene and quickly became one of its key, if overlooked, figures, starring in six of Andy Warhol's films and inspiring the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Robert Creeley. Presumably the first woman ever hired as fact-checker at The New Yorker, Dean held brief editorial and proofreading positions at publications such as Vogue before launching her very own bulletin of film reviews, the All-Lavender Cinema Courier, in 1976.

Edited by Anaïs Ngbanzo.
Texts by Dorothy Dean, Edie Sedgwick, Robert Creeley, Gerard Malanga, Rene Ricard, Taylor Mead, et al.
Translated from the English (American) by Rachel Valinsky.

A major, career-spanning collection of an Italian master's poetry in English, gathered together for the first time.

Amelia Rosselli is one of the great poets of postwar Italy. She was also a musician and musicologist, close to John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and she waged a lifelong battle against depression. The child of Carlo Rosselli, a significant anti-fascist intellectual who was assassinated with his brother Nello in 1937, Amelia grew up in exile and attended high school in Mamaroneck, New York. English poetry, especially the lyrics and sonnets of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, became a prime reference for her own poetry, which combines modernist experimentation with variations on more traditional forms.

The elaborate, archaic, yet thoroughly modern poems, at once stumbling and singing, that Rosselli composed in English and gathered under the title Sleep are a beautiful and illuminating part of her work. Six of the poems were published by John Ashbery in the 1960s but have otherwise been unavailable to English readers. They are published here for the first time outside of Italy.

The first English language translation of Robert Linhart's The Sugar and the Hunger, originally published in 1980. Includes afterword by Luiz Renato Martins, and other materials.

Widely acclaimed for his engaged social analyses of proletariat and peasant struggles around the world, Linhart's inquiry into the sugar regions of North-Eastern Brazil, juxtaposes heterogeneous traits of the impoverished workers' stories into a vivid cinematic montage.

Alongside the translation, the book also includes 'The Third World, Investigations, Social Analysis', an unpublished interview with Linhart from 1980 made by Jean Copans, giving an insight into the political and theoretical background of his investigation in Brazil.

The afterword by Luiz Renato Martins, an active Brazilian Marxist art historian and journalist, further contextualises the importance of Linhart's book. Renato Martins who recently directed a documentary film Conversations With Robert Linhart discusses The Sugar and the Hunger against the backdrop of today's world where the practices of expropriation of land and food from peasants and urban poor, which Linhart examined in 1980 on a laboratory-like scale, have now become common global practices, endlessly producing legions of uprooted and hungry refugees.

Translated by John M Floyd and Emilio Sauri, the book includes rare photographs taken by François Manceaux in Northeastern Brazil in 1979.

Robert Linhart (born 1944 in Ixelles) is a French sociologist, philosopher and political activist, known as one of the founders of the Maoist movement in France, most famously for his 1978 autobiographic book L'Établi.

A collection of writings by and interviews with Duras about her filmmaking, first published in French by P.O.L. in 2021 and translated into English by Daniella Shreir.

Working chronologically through her nineteen films, made between 1966 and 1985, this collection of reflections by Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) includes non-standard press releases, notes to her actors, letters to funders, short essays on themes as provocatively capacious as ‘mothers’ and ‘witches’, as well as some of the most significant interviews she gave about her cinematic and writing practices (with filmmakers and critics including Jacques Rivette, Caroline Champetier and Jean Narboni).

In Duras's hands, all of these forms turn into a strange, gnomic literature in which the boundary between word and image becomes increasingly blurred and the paradox of creating a cinema that seeks ‘to destroy the cinema’ finds its most potent expression.

Yet, Duras is never concerned only with her own work, or even with the broader project of making cinema: her preoccupations are global, and the global crucially informs her perceptions of the way in which she works. With the audiovisual as a starting point, her encyclopaedic associative powers bring readers into contact with subjects as diverse as the French Communist Party, hippies, Jews, revolutionary love, madness and freedom, across four decades of an oeuvre that is always in simultaneous dialogue with the contemporary moment and world history.

MARGUERITE DURAS (1914–1996) published over forty novels, numerous essays, novellas and plays and made nineteen films. She was part of the French Resistance, joined then left the Communist Party, and actively protested against the war in Algeria. She collaborated repeatedly with actors including Jeanne Moreau, Delphine Seyrig and Gerard Depardieu. Her films speak of her childhood in Indochina and the French colonies, of desire (burning and frustrated), madness and domesticity. Contemporary filmmakers including Claire Denis, Alice Diop and John Waters have cited Duras’ cinema as inspiration for their own work. 

A selection of poems by the Moroccan Marxist, feminist and poet Saida Menebhi, who died in prison on hunger strike in 1977, aged 25, after being imprisoned for her political organising against the Moroccan state. Translated from French to English for the first time, the zine contains a selection of the poems Saida wrote during her time in prison, shortly before her death. It also includes an essay on the Years of Lead in Morocco - specifically the 70s - as well as the conditions of prison, hunger strikes, poetry, and martyrdom (from an internationalist position: including Bobby Sands and the republican hunger strikes).

Originally written as letters from enclosure, In the Jungle There Is Much to Do came out of the words and drawings sent by Mauricio Gatti, a young anarchist, to his three-year-old daughter, while he was imprisoned in military barracks in Montevideo. In 1972 the compiled letters were made into a book published by his comrades from the commune Comunidad del Sur. It tells the story of an elephant, a snail, a turtle, a seal, and a bird. They are all trapped by a hunter, who understands nothing of the jungle and who locks them up in the city zoo, where they miss their home and little ones. This fable for all ages about political prison was republished by different small organizations associated with the international solidarity movement supporting Latin American political refugees in the 1970s and 1980s.

Among these editions was a coloring book published in the GDR, which we used as a basis for a new German edition. The original text by Gatti was translated into English for the first time. Both language editions were published by the 11th Berlin Biennale in the fall of 2019. The curatorial team of the Berlin Biennale has decided to make these publications freely accessible on the website. The book is available for download and print-out, and a special black-and-white version has been created for free coloring.

For so it happens that when the poets speak, objects appear closer to their own shadows. The poet's mouth fills up with horses and marble, and his verses start to shine like rivers. These rivers then turn back to flow through the very palace he is depicting. The poet's own words begin to weigh down on him, as though he were holding up a palace with his palms. Then he travels, and the palace is obliterated. Countries and nations change, and naught remains but what the poets had seen. Of what the poets had seen, naught remains but its image in anthologies. And when the libraries have been flooded or burned to the ground, nothing but the commentaries on those anthologies are left, and all that one finds in these commentaries is that which was appropriated and wrought a thousand times over. 

Hussein Nassereddine is a multidisciplinary artist. His work in installation, writing, video and performance originates from a practice around language that builds fragile monuments - some verbal, some sonic, some tactile - rooted in collective histories and resources of poetry, ruins, construction and image-making.

Translated from Arabic by Ben Koerber.

Avant que Black Lives Matter et #MeToo ne viennent secouer l’Amérique et le monde occidental, bell hooks montrait, dans cet essai incisif, que l’abolition du racisme et l’éradication du sexisme vont de pair. Sans le féminisme, la lutte antiraciste reste une affaire d’hommes. Sans l’antiracisme, le féminisme s’expose à servir de courroie aux logiques de domination raciale. L'autrice insiste sur le bien-fondé de la rage qui anime les masses populaires et la jeunesse noire et sur la nécessité d’en faire un moteur de changement social radical. Elle propose une théorie et une pratique révolutionnaires, dont la fin est une communauté solidaire fondée sur l’égalité réelle et la volonté de tou.te.s de travailler au changement.

Traduit de l'anglais par Ségolène Guinard.

GLORIA JEAN WATKINS, connue sous son nom de plume BELL HOOKS, née en 1952, est une intellectuelle, féministe, et militante étasunienne. Elle a publié plus de trente livres et de nombreux articles, et est apparue dans plusieurs films documentaires. Traduits dans de nombreuses langues, ses ouvrages sont considérés parmi les plus importants sur la question aux Etats-Unis et suscitent un réel engouement en France depuis quelques années. Les éditions divergences ont déjà traduit et publié trois de ses ouvrages dont La volonté de changer et A propos d'amour.

Translated from the French by Naima Rashid, Natasha Lehrer, Lauren Elkin, Ruth Diver, Jessica Spivey, Jennifer Higgins, Clem Clement and Sophie Lewis.

As she tries to collect them for an essay she is planning to write, other women’s words begin interfering in Clara Schulmann’s life — heard on the radio, in podcasts, songs, and films; words of novelists, feminist intellectuals, friends or strangers overheard in the street. They invade her psyche, reshaping the essay that she once had in mind into a picaresque adventure which investigates the fault lines around women’s voices: and in particular those moments of overflow and excess where wayward words take seed.

Chicanes heralds a new French feminism through a meticulously orchestrated chorus of the wildest female voices, from figures in the history of feminist writing to the stranger on the street, blurring the boundaries between body and art; personal and political. A poly-translation, by eight female translators, from established to emerging, Chicanes brings the individual voice of each translator into subtle relief.

Poems presents four unpublished poems by American writer and actress Zoë Lund (1962–1999), written in the 1980s. An incandescent voice emerges, revealing the might, sincerity, and precision of her expression, as well as her vulnerability and defiance in the face of death. This is the first publication dedicated to her work.

Translated into French by Stephanie LaCava and Manon Lutanie, and presented in a bilingual volume (English, French), the poems are introduced by Stephanie LaCava, who retraces their genesis and examines the personality of their author:

"She is unsure of her identity, but hints at certain proclivities: action as the only true form of activism (sustained readiness to strike); a taste for contradictory characters (strength exists where there is also cowardice); romance. [...] Uninterested in mute beauty, Lund wanted to write and produce her own projects. In a news clipping from 1983, titled 'Young Political Filmmaker Shooting at Mount Holyoke,' there is a striking picture of Lund 'working on a film about the radicalization of a young woman,' per the caption. The article talks of her 'uncompromising idealism' and feelings about the naïveté of both American liberals and leftists.

Three years later, in 1986, 'Touchstone Levity' was written, and [...], the same year, "Opium Wars." The latter speaks to Lund's interest in drugs (she had a taste for heroin and would die of heart failure at thirty-seven)."

Printed offset in Italy on a matte, natural paper, stapled, the book also features black-and-white pictures of Lund taken in Paris by the filmmaker, critic, and activist Édouard de Laurot, then the author's partner, in the early 1980s. It's striking to see her in Paris on these images, smoking and posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, disheveled in a nightclub, caught on camera at a shooting range, at such a young age—when we know she would die in Paris fifteen years later. It seemed right to choose these images to accompany the poems, which were written in the same decade, and in the context of this French-American publication.

A wry, cinematic tour through multiple forms: the poem, the vignette, the play—all set in our laughably lamentable contemporary world.

In three poems, one play, and three short stories, Stéphane Bouquet's Common Life offers a lively, searching vision of contemporary life, politics, and sociality. At a moment at which the fabric of everyday social life is increasingly threatened across the globe, this book is a necessary exercise of the literary imagination: what, it asks, does it mean to inhabit the world together today? With humor and sincerity, Common Life imagines the utopias of collectivity, friendship and love that might enable hope for the present and the future.

Translated by Lindsay Turner