Ill Feelings

A new epic novel about a teenage queer runaway from cult classic author of Black Wave and Valencia Michelle Tea. A Literary Hub Notable Small Press Book of 2025.

In Spencer's fantasies, the breezy, queer streets of Provincetown, MA, are utopia, a place where he can be free. Yet when a violent attack in his suburban Arizona schoolyard sends him to the hospital, he decides queer utopia can't wait. And one night, with the help of his best friend, the teenage witch Joy, he hitches a ride to find it.

The cross-country road odyssey that follows brings Spencer from new moon rituals in Arizona canyons to Texas bus stations, from the luxe drag stages of Houston's Montrose district to the jazz-soaked streets of the French Quarter and beyond. This new novel from Michelle Tea tells the story, by turns raw, romantic, and sweet, of a sheltered boy taking his first leap into queer life, among all the complicated queers who live it.

"Tea's conversational tone and her way of writing deeply personal experience . . . presents a very necessary counter-narrative to mainstream histories of American punk, feminism, and sexual identity." – The Brooklyn Rail

Michelle Tea is the author of over twenty books of fiction, memoir, poetry and children's literature. Her autofiction Valencia, a cult classic, won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Fiction. Her essay collection Against Memoir was awarded the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for The Art of the Essay. Tea is also the recipient of awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. The founder of Drag Queen Story Hour, she has received honors from the American Library Association and Logo Television. Tea curated the Sister Spit Books series at City Lights Publishers and founded the ongoing imprint Amethyst Edition at the Feminist Press.

Originally published in 1984, this classic dystopian trilogy is a testament to the power of language and women's collective action. 

In 2205, the Nineteenth Amendment has long been repealed and women are only valued for their utility. The Earth's economy depends on an insular group of linguists who "breed" women to be perfect interstellar translators until they are sent to the Barren House to await death. But instead, these women are slowly creating a language of their own to make resistance possible. Ignorant to this brewing revolution, Nazareth, a brilliant linguist, and Michaela, a servant, both seek emancipation in their own ways. But their personal rebellions risk exposing the secret language, and threaten the possibility of freedom for all.

Thirteen stories explore domestic horrors and everyday violence, providing an intimate and unflinching portrait of twenty-first-century Latin America.

Named one of the ten best fiction books of 2018 by the New York Times en Español, Cockfight is the debut work by Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero.

In lucid and compelling prose, Ampuero sheds light on the hidden aspects of the home: the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and class struggle. A family’s maids witness a horrible cycle of abuse, a girl is auctioned off by a gang of criminals, and two sisters find themselves at the mercy of their spiteful brother. With violence masquerading as love, characters spend their lives trapped reenacting their past traumas.

A dirty cult-classic put out in a small batch by an underground publisher (Rudos and Rubes) in 2015, Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger recounts the life of an artist and "old school homosexual" who bears a big resemblance to author Brontez Purnell.

Our hero doesn't trust the new breed of fags taking over San Francisco, though. They wear bicycle helmets, seat belts, and condoms. Meanwhile, he sabotages his relationships, hallucinating affection while cruising in late night parks, bath-houses, and other nooks and crannies of a newly-conservative, ruined city.

Furiously original, vital, and messy, this funny "non-memoir" uncovers a revelatory truth for the age: there are things far scarier than HIV.

Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes — and dead calm — of grief. It is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author’s searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of a mother’s death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modelled the book’s formless form on Bourgeois’s Cells sculptures – at once channelling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space.

Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, Book of Mutter is an uncategorisable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. It is a haunted text, an accumulative archive of myth and memory that seeks its own undoing, driven by crossed desires to resurrect and exorcise the past.

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister—a sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, and equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. If only she had found the means to create, argues Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling.

In this classic essay, Woolf takes on the establishment, using her gift of language to dissect the world around her and give voice to those who are without. Her message is a simple one: women must have a steady income and a room of their own in order to have the freedom to create.

With a Foreword by Mary Gordon

‘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

"Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another."

Virginia Woolf described "Orlando" as "an escapade, half-laughing, half-serious; with great splashes of exaggeration, " but many think Woolf's escapade is one of the most wickedly imaginative and sharply observed considerations of androgyny that this century will see.

Orlando is, in fact, a character liberated from the restraints of time and sex. Born in the Elizabethan Age to wealth and position, he is a young male aristocrat at the beginning of the story - and a modern woman four centuries later. The hero-heroine sees monarchs come and go, hobnobs with great literary figures, and slips in and out of each new fashion. Woolf presents a brilliant pageant of history, society, and literature as well as subtle appreciation of the interplay between endings and beginnings, past and present, male and female.

Virginia Woolf(1882-1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando.

Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child’s life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.

Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of autotheory offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. It binds an account of Nelson's relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexuality, gender, and family. An insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival honors the forty-year legacy of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (1976–2015). Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival celebrates this embodiment of radical feminist separatist collaboration, transformational self-defined autonomous spaces, a commitment to sisterhood and matriarchal culture, and a musical city sprung from the earth for one week in the woods.

A collective of five womyn each with a deep connection to Fest operated by consensus to create this issue. Striving to represent a range of womyn’s voices, values, traditions, and experiences of Fest, the collective highlighted what Fest has meant to generations of womyn, documented its chronology, and bore witness to the power of this community. Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival includes womyn from multiple races, geographies, sexualities, generations, and gender and other social identities. Just as Fest brought together womyn from various backgrounds, our collection includes a range of artistic experience, from seasoned authors and photographers to those womyn new to publishing.
Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival remembers the transformations, possibilities, and hopes for spaces cultivating the ongoing empowerment of womyn.

A synthesis of dreamwork and bookwork, combining collaboration with dream-vision report, creative writing, and AI—a “Media Archaeology of Dreams.” Its central character is the author’s voice in this process through ekphrasis. What/where is the separation between the ekphrastic object, the dream, and its description?