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Sticky Fingers' Fortune Teller features wisdom from McKenzie Wark, Octavia E. Butler, Kate Zambreno, bell hooks, Clarice Lispector, Eileen Myles, Kathy Acker, Johanna Hedva, Lou Sullivan, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Anne Boyer.⁣

A3, single colour risograph

Speed Glum Hero. Read it as an instruction: Speed, Glum Hero. Read it as an assertion of life, like, keep living, go on. It takes this kind of serious play to make any sense of this moment we are living through. This is a pamphlet about subjectivity splintering, substance, and legend. This is a pamphlet about complicity, tenderness, and distress. This is a pamphlet about what it takes to stay gripping to the earth. The only way out is through.

D Mortimer is a writer and artist from London interested in the crip unknown. Their first book Last Night a Beef Jerk Saved My Life was published by Pilot Press in 2021. Mortimer is a Techne scholar in trans auto fictions at The University of Roehampton. Their work concerns technologies of madness and their doctoral project is entitled, Beef Journals: Naming the Uncertain in Transgender Subject Formation.

Orbiting around the saddest house in the history of Grand Designs, Sam Moore’s Chesil Cliff House and other failures takes us to North Devon where, standing at the cliff’s edge, we meet Edward Short: a man with a Fred Perry shirt and a dream. Amongst a chorus of characters including Kevin Mcloud as Father Time, Moore by means of Short leads us into a study of creative failure, gender, and, ultimately, the desire to keep writing.

"I struggle to see anyone living here. It feels like a distorted wonder of the world, a cautionary tale. Something that could never have been lived in, but that had to be made."

About the author:
Sam is a writer, artist, and editor. They are the author of All my teachers died of AIDS (Pilot Press), Long live the new flesh (Polari Press), and Search history (Queer Street Press). They are one of the co-curators of TISSUE, a trans reading and publishing initiative based in London.

About A Series of Attempts:
This new series published by Sticky Fingers Publishing explores the essay form through the etymological root of essay: to try, trial or attempt. In 1508, French theorist Michel de Montaigne published a collection of 107 texts called Essais, described by his contemporaries as ‘self-indulgent and embarrassingly confessional.’ It is through these roots we find the attitude and intentions at the heart of this series; that through thinking together, through trying to figure it out on the page, we can reach new and increasingly nuanced ways to understand each other and the worlds we inhabit.

This light, pocketbook format publication by After 8 Books gathers works by French artist Julie Beaufils, and three short stories commissioned for the occasion, dealing altogether with social tensions and emotional explosions.

The ink drawings by Julie Beaufils that form the core of the book, follow a logic of editing, accumulation and narrative incompleteness: the figures come from memories of films or TV series, as sediments of mass culture, or sometimes from personal observations and experiences crystallized in images. Shapes and figures develop as an ambivalent collection, informed by the weight and the vibration of lines and strokes.

This book aims at triggering the interpretation of these works, and at making their “reading” more complex, more playful too. Graphic designer Scott Ponik composed a visual story close to a manga, part abstraction, part emotion. The narrative and affective potential of the drawings is further activated by their free association with three short stories by Michael Van den Abeele, Buck Ellison, and Reba Maybury. Van den Abeele tells about the inner thoughts of a donor at the sperm bank; Buck Ellison’s story follows a few hours in the life of some girls in the San Francisco area, dealing with the cruelty and the naïvety of their relationships; while Reba Maybury proposes an erotic analysis of the connection between desire and capitalism.

For thirty-five years American poet Nathaniel Mackey has been writing a long poem of fugitive making like no other: two elegiac, intertwined serial poems—"Song of the Andoumboulou" and " Mu—that follow a mysterious, migrant "we" through the rhythms and currents of the world with lyrical virtuosity and impassioned expectancy. In a note to this astonishing box set of new work, Mackey writes:

"I turned sixty-five within a couple of months of beginning to write Double Trio and I was within a couple of months of turning seventy-one when I finished it.... It was a period of distress and precarity inside and outside both. During this period, a certain disposition or dispensation came upon me that I would characterize or sum up with the words all day music. It was a period during which I wanted never not to be thinking between poetry and music, poetry and the daily or the everyday, the everyday and the alter-everyday. Philosophically and technically, the work meant to be always pertaining to the relation of parts to one another and of parts to an evolving whole."

Structured in part after the last three movements of John Coltrane's Meditations — "Love," "Consequence," and "Serenity"— Double Trio stretches the explorations and improvisations of free jazz into unprecedented poetic territory.

Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida in 1947. He is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, and has received many awards for his work, including the National Book Award in poetry for Splay Anthem, the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society, and the Bollingen Prize from the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Mackey is the Reynolds Price Professor of English at Duke University, and edits the literary journal Hambone.

Published April 2021.

A landmark feminist poet and critic in her native South Korea, Kim Hyesoon’s surreal, dagger-sharp poetry has spread from hemisphere to hemisphere in the past ten years, her works translated to Chinese, Swedish, English, French, German, Dutch, and beyond. In A Drink of Red Mirror, Kim Hyesoon raises a glass to the reader in the form of a series of riddles, poems conjuring the you inside the me, the night inside the day, the outside inside the inside, the ocean inside the tear. Kim’s radical, paradoxical intimacies entail sites of pain as well as wonder, opening onto impossible—which is to say, visionary—vistas. Again and again, in these poems as across her career, Kim unlocks a horizon inside the vanishing point.

Palestine + 100 poses a question to twelve Palestinian writers: what might your country look like in the year 2048 – a century after the tragedies and trauma of what has come to be called the Nakba? How might this event – which, in 1948, saw the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes – reach across a century of occupation, oppression, and political isolation, to shape the country and its people? Will a lasting peace finally have been reached, or will future technology only amplify the suffering and mistreatment of Palestinians?

Covering a range of approaches – from SF noir, to nightmarish dystopia, to high-tech farce – these stories use the blank canvas of the future to reimagine the Palestinian experience today. Along the way, we encounter drone swarms, digital uprisings, time-bending VR, and peace treaties that span parallel universes. Published originally in the United Kingdom by Comma Press in 2019, Palestine +100 reframes science fiction as a place for political justice and the safekeeping of identity.

Edited by Basma Ghalayini. Featuring  Talal Abu Shawish, Tasnim Abutabikh, Selma Dabbagh, Emad El-Din Aysha, Samir El-Youssef, Saleem Haddad, Anwar Hamed, Majd Kayyal, Mazen Maarouf, Abdalmuti Maqboul, Ahmed Masoud & Rawan Yaghi.

Bringing together thirty authors variously invested in dance, performance and/or choreography; This Container is a zine for texts produced through and alongside dance, performance and choreography. Some write more than dance; others dance more than write. Some practice choreography explicitly; others implicitly. However varied the authors gathered here may be, the expansive field of performance produces all kinds of texts that deserve public recognition, a readership, and an infrastructure for feedback and editing. This issue is another attempt at making this possible.
 
With contributions by: Paula Almiron, Jani Anders Purhonen, Simon Asencio, Mélanie Blaison, Oda Brekke, Juan Pablo Cámara, Laura Cemin, Matt Cornell, Stina Ehn, Emma Fishwick, Lucija Grbic, Sara Gebran, Andreas Haglund, Hugo Hedberg, Alice Heyward, Madlen Hirtentreu, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Nikima Jagudajev, Sonjis Laine, Yoojin Lee, Denise Lim, Theo Livesey, Naya Moll, Caterina Mora, Rhiannon Newton, Zander Porter, Lena Schwingshandl and Stav Yeini.
 
Since its inception, This Container has hoped to contribute to a feminist lineage of textual production. What constitutes this lineage? This is a vast question. The beginning of an answer might start by saying something about genre. If , as Lauren Berlant writes, genre is an “aesthetic structure of affective expectation”, a “formalization of aesthetic or emotional conventionalities”, then genre crafts expectation by pointing to what is recognizable in form.1 If feminism is about wanting the world to be otherwise, the multiplication of genres inducing the multiplication of (imagined) stories helps to recraft expectation toward a less oppressive, less boring, and more just world. Feminist work includes genre work. Poetry, diary, diagram, notes, recipe, critique, the sound file, the epistolary, the essay, the art project: they have all found their way in, sculpting a diverse set of readerly structures of affective expectation. They are to shift your worldly expectations.

More info at http://www.thiscontainer.com