Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction.

A genre-bending exploration of that most elemental force—water—through Indigenous storytelling, personal memory, and the work of influential artists and writers. 

For many years, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson took solace in skiing—in all kinds of weather, on all kinds of snow across all kinds of terrain, often following the trail beside a beloved creek near her home. Recently, as she skied on this path against the backdrop of uncertainty, environmental devastation, rising authoritarianism and ongoing social injustice, her mind turned to the water in the creek and an elemental question: What might it mean to truly listen to water? To know water? To exist with and alongside water?

So began a quest to understand her people's historical, cultural, and ongoing interactions with water in all its forms (ice, snow, rain, perspiration, breath). Pulling together these threads, Leanne began to see how a "Theory of Water" might suggest a radical rethinking of relationships between beings and forces in the world today. In this inventive work, Simpson draws on Nishnaabeg origin stories while artfully weaving the work of influential writers and artists alongside her personal memories and experience—and in doing so, reimagines water as a catalyst for radical transformation, capable of birthing a new world.

Theory of Water is a resonant exploration of an intricate, multi-layered relationship with the most abundant element on our planet—one that, as Simpson eloquently shows, is shaping our present even as it demands a radical rethinking of how we might achieve a just future.

Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

Palestine is a microcosm of the on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple dignity for the Palestinian.

A manuscript shortlisted for the inaugural edition of the Prototype Prize, 2024, a eulogy to the sonic influence and cultural inferences of the sound of the cicada. A train of thought on the multiform significations and significance of the cicada’s buzz and hum; a dissection and deconstruction of the insect as emblem; a wild and associative suite of fragments on the evocations of background noise when brought to the fore.

Milo Thesiger Meacham’s Audible Heat is a rich, meditative ecotone of ideas; a nimble and associative work of essayism that aims to map a reticulated cultural biography of the sound of the cicada. Equal parts academic argument, travelogue, and critical collage, this synthesis of ideas pulls upon a wide-ranging bibliography of materials to examine the omnipresent sound of the cicada as ‘audible heat’ throughout human history and culture. Herein, this climatic sound acts as a conduit between ecology, identity and mortality, and the cicada’s sonic inference emerges as a codification of the unknown and unfamiliar—as a spiritual weathervane in desert settings—and as a means of teasing out the sensorial limits of human understanding.

Thesiger-Meacham sits himself in a field of enquiry and in dialogue with voices various, ancient, and modern, such as Douglas Yanega of the University of California, folk musician Matthias Loibner, and Gene Kritsky, developer of Cicada Safari, a public app which tracks the mass emergence of periodical cicadas across North America, in a transversal network of interlinked, informational nodes.

Herein, we’ve the sonic-induced anxieties of 17th, 18th and 19th-century colonists in Northeastern America—notably the largely unknown career of entomologist Margaretta Morris—and the apocalyptic premonitions of the indigenous Wampanoag; Greek tongue twisters; the poetry of Ibn Quzmān and Harry Crosby; African American mathematician Benjamin Banneker’s lost wooden clock; Socrates' fear of dehydration; the geopolitical tensions embedded in Southern Spain as Al-Andalus (سُلَدْنَألا); Plato’s Phaedrus; a history of the hurdy-gurdy; Geronimo’s hatred of telegraphy; contemporary and historical entomologies; the slurred, slow body language of Clint Eastwood; insects on the film sets of Sergio Leone's Spanish Westerns; squinting; tanning; metamorphosis; acts of violence in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968); military reenactments of the Battle of Marathon (490 BCE); the botanist Donald C. Peattie’s existential dread; ancient cooking implements; riverside trees hills, and their symmetric reflections in still water…

All ideas emanating from the acoustical atmospherics inherent to the cicada’s song.

Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge.

Now, comedy is characterized by edgy humour and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive cultural warfare in the media and among people. Our comedy is fraught with tension like never before, and so too is our social life. We often hear the claim that no one can take a joke anymore.  But what if we really can’t take jokes anymore?

This book argues that the spirit of comedy is the first step in the building of society, but that it has been lost in the era of divisive identity politics. Comedy flares up debates about censorship and cancellation, keeping us divided from one other. This goes against the true universalist spirit of comedy, which is becoming a thing of the past and must be recovered.

Is it the computerization of the planet
Or a loosening of my fidelity to suffering
I don’t understand the intensity
I’ve hidden here but I know I despaired
Of finding a physical place to keep
My tears. Now what. Seas that go turquoise
When you stop looking at them . . .
 
Wrestling with the mind of war, at times shocking in its self-analysis, Wave of Blood is a furious and sincere essay, an eclipse notebook, a family chronicle, all told in the poetry of witness.

Praise for Ariana Reines:

Ariana Reines is a go-for-broke artist who honors her traditions by being like no one else. Some of us have made a fetish of our stupidity, pretending to forget history, and some of us have made a fetish of despair, congratulating ourselves on melancholia, but Ariana is too brilliant and too alive for either of those sad luxuries... I am convinced of the authenticity of the summonses she receives and the summonses she issues and when I read her I am reminded that all of this is a calling before it's an identity or career. Her voice-which is always more than hers alone is a dialectic between the very ancient and the bleeding edge. - Ben Lerner

Reines's books are works of intellectual commitment and structural sophistication; at the same time, they allow the raw stuff of being, in all its messiness, to enter the page. -The White Review

Mind-blowing. - Kim Gordon

Her writing is queer and raunchy, raw and occult, seemingly never pulling away from her deepest vulnerabilities. Yet Reines simultaneously maintains a feeling of epic poetry, of ancient intention. She moves between worlds in search of the divine and the self. - The New York Times

These are the kinds of poems that reorient you in the world, make you understand how little you know, but how much is inside you. - NYLON

“You run a WHAT?” A small press. Yes, this is the dream of those who don’t give a damn about mainstream literature, major presses and millionfold print runs. It is the nirvana to everyone interested in a mindful and loving acquaintance with books.

“Start out small. Continue smaller if needed. Never end. Dream big. Continue dreaming bigger if needed. Make sure to keep being considered small.”

This is not a basic guide, it is a fun and inspiring glance at the inner depth of a small press. With enthusiasm and distinctness the publisher gives advice on everything from networking to handling the scripts to creating and selling a book.

Kristian Carlsson (b.1978) is published in a number of select small presses following his literary debut in 1996. For a decade he had been engaged as an occasional guest editor and project based publisher, when he in 2009 founded Smockadoll Förlag [Smockadoll Press] and decided to publish contemporary poetry. In 2012 Smockadoll was featured by the news agency TT/ Spektra as one of a handful of today’s unsurpassed Swedish small presses for translated literature. During the years Kristian Carlsson most certainly has had time to break each and every one of the small press guidelines issued in this volume.

The independent British film journal Afterimage published thirteen issues between 1970 and 1987. International in scope, it surveyed the many forms of radical cinema during an extraordinary period of film history. Having emerged in the wake of post-1968 cultural and political change, Afterimage charted contemporary developments with special issues on themes such as the avant-garde, Latin American cinema and visionary animation, and also looked back at early film pioneers. It published many of the leading critics of the period and vitally provided a forum for filmmakers’ writings and manifestos.