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Cover of Adulthood Rites: Xenogenesis Series 2

Aspect Science Fiction

Adulthood Rites: Xenogenesis Series 2

Octavia E. Butler

€17.50

In this sequel to Dawn, Lilith Iyapo has given birth to what looks like a normal human boy named Akin. But Akin actually has five parents: a male and female human, a male and female Oankali, and a sexless Ooloi. The Oankali and Ooloi are part of an alien race that rescued humanity from a devastating nuclear war, but the price they exact is a high one the aliens are compelled to genetically merge their species with other races, drastically altering both in the process. 

On a rehabilitated Earth, this "new" race is emerging through human/Oankali/Ooloi mating, but there are also "pure" humans who choose to resist the aliens and the salvation they offer.These resisters are sterilized by the Ooloi so that they cannot reproduce the genetic defect that drives humanity to destroy itself, but otherwise they are left alone (unless they become violent). 

When the resisters kidnap young Akin, the Oankali choose to leave the child with his captors, for he the most "human" of the Oankali children will decide whether the resisters should be given back their fertility and freedom, even though they will only destroy themselves again. 

This is the second volume in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series, a powerful tale of alien existence.

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER was a renowned writer who received a MacArthur Genius Grant and PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work. She was the author of several award-winning novels including Parable of the Sower, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was acclaimed for her lean prose, strong protagonists, and social observations in stories that range from the distant past to the far future. Sales of her books have increased enormously since her death as the issues she addressed in her Afrofuturistic, feminist novels and short fiction have only become more relevant. She passed away on February 24, 2006

Published April 1997

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Cover of Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989

Sinister Wisdom

Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989

Julie R. Enszer

Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidences through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and video tapes.

Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this correspondence for readers to eavesdrop on Lorde and Parker. They discuss their work as writers as well as intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. Sister Love is a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

Cover of After Sex

Silver Press

After Sex

Alice Spawls, Edna Bonhomme

Essays €18.00

Who decides what happens after sex? The last decade has seen many significant changes to the laws governing women’s reproductive rights around the world, from liberalisation in Ireland to new restrictions in the USA. After Sex offers personal and political perspectives from the mid-20th century to the present day, setting feminist classics alongside contemporary accounts. These essays, short stories and poems trace the debates and tell the stories; together, they ask us to consider what reproductive justice might look like, and how it could reshape sex.

The writers pay special attention to people — both fictional and real — who have sought control over their sexual lives, and the joy, comedy, difficulties and disappointments that entails. But above all, After Sex testifies to the power of great writing to show us why that freedom is worth pursuing — without shame and without apology.

With contributions from: 
Lauren Berlant, Joanna Biggs, Edna Bonhomme, Gwendolyn Brooks, Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, Storm Cecile, Lucille Clifton, Rachel Connolly, T.L. Cowan, ’Jane Does’, Maggie Doherty, Nell Dunn, Andrea Dworkin, Anne Enright, Deborah Friedell, Tracy Fuad, Kristen Ghodsee, Vivian Gornick, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Barbara Johnson, Jayne Kavanagh, Lisa Hallgarten and Angela Poulter, Jamaica Kincaid, Patricia Knight, R.O. Kwon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Natasha Lennard, Sophie Lewis, Audre Lorde, Amelia Loulli, Erin Maglaque, Holly Pester, Adrienne Rich, Denise Riley, Sally Rooney, Loretta J. Ross, Madeleine Schwartz, SisterSong, Sophie Smith, Annabel Sowemimo, Amia Srinivasan, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Alice Walker and Bernard Williams.

Cover of Up Your Ass

Sternberg Press

Up Your Ass

Valerie Solanas

Fiction €12.00

Valerie Solanas's rarely published, legendary play, Up Your Ass, explodes social and sexual mores and the hypocritical, patriarchal culture that produces them through her signature irreverence and wit, incisiveness and camp.

The play, whose full title is Up Your Ass Or From the Cradle to the Boat Or The Big Suck Or Up from the Slime, marches out a cast of screwy stereotypes: the unknowing john, the frothy career girl, the boring male narcissist, two catty drag queens, the sex-depraved housewife, and a pair of racialized pickup artists, among others. At the center is protagonist Bongi Perez—a thinly veiled Solanas—a sardonic, gender-bending hustler who escorts us through the back alleys of her street life. The fictionalized predecessor to SCUM Manifesto, the play shares the same grand, subversive, implicative language, equally spitting and winking, embracing the margins, the scum, and selling a trick along the way.

Valerie Solanas (1936-1988) is an American radical feminist intellectual, known for her SCUM Manifesto—a pamphlet with which she declares the power of women and imagines a political future through the margin—, and for having tried to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Edited by Leah Whitman-Salkin.
With a contribution by Paul B. Preciado.
Graphic design: Roxanne Maillet.

Cover of Little Sisters and Other Stories

Goldsmiths Press

Little Sisters and Other Stories

Vonda N. McIntyre

Sci-Fi €23.00

Selected short stories by one of the most acclaimed voices in post-war US American science fiction.

This volume presents a selection of short fiction by Vonda Neel McIntyre (1948–2019), one of the most acclaimed writers of post-war US American science fiction, and the winner of multiple awards for both novels and short fiction.

These stories, which span the whole of McIntyre's career, show the broad range of her interests and her voice, taking us from bleak dystopian worlds on the verge of environmental collapse to baroque intergalactic civilizations populated by genetically modified humans, from cries for freedom to sharp-eyed satire to meditations on aging. Throughout run her distinctive themes of gender and power dynamics, human and species diversity, and a pragmatic utopianism that emphasises our mutual dependency.

The stories included in the volume are: "Breaking Point," "Thanatos," "Shadows, Moving," "Elfleda," "A Story for Eilonwy," "Malheur Maar," "The Adventure of the Field Theorems," "Little Faces", "Little Sisters," and "XYY" (previously unpublished).

Vonda Neel McIntyre (1948–2019) was one of the most acclaimed voices in US American science fiction from the 1960s onwards. A novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic, she won her first Hugo Award in 1973 for her novella "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand." This formed part of her ground-breaking feminist novel Dreamsnake (1978), which won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award. A later novel, The Moon and the Sun, won the Nebula in 1997. McIntyre contributed extensively to debates within the US sf community over the role of women in science fiction, and was instrumental in founding the Clarion West Writers Workshop for novice sf writers. A final novel, The Curve of the World, was completed shortly before her death.