Nicolas Pages

A novel of lesbian identity and motherhood, and the societal pressures that place them in opposition. 

The daughter of an illustrious French family whose members include a former Prime Minister, a model, and a journalist, Constance Debré abandoned her marriage and legal career in 2015 to write full-time and begin a relationship with a woman. Her transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian was chronicled in her 2018 novel Play boy, praised by Virginie Despentes for its writing that is at once "flippant and consumed by anxiety."  

In Love Me Tender, Debré goes on to further describe the consequences of that life-changing decision. Her husband, Laurent, seeks to permanently separate her from their eight-year old child. Vilified in divorce court by her ex, she loses custody of her son and is allowed to see him only once every two weeks for a supervised hour. Deprived of her child, Debré gives up her two-bedroom apartment and bounces between borrowed apartments, hotel rooms, and a studio the size of a cell. She involves herself in brief affairs with numerous women who vary in age, body type, language, and lifestyle. But the closer she gets to them, the more distant she feels. Apart from cigarettes and sex, her life is completely ascetic: a regime of intense reading and writing, interrupted only by sleep and athletic swimming. She shuns any place where she might observe children, avoiding playgrounds and parks "as if they were cluster bombs ready to explode, riddling her body with pieces of shrapnel."  

Writing graphically about sex, rupture, longing, and despair in the first person, Debré's work is often compared with the punk-era writings of Guillaume Dustan and Herve Guibert, whose work she has championed. As she says of Guibert: "I love him because he says I and he's a pornographer. That seems to be essential when you write. Otherwise you don't say anything." But in Love Me Tender, Debré speaks courageously of love in its many forms, reframing what it means to be a mother beyond conventional expectations.

The legendary 1975 "Schizo-Culture" conference, conceived by the early Semiotext(e) collective, began as an attempt to introduce the then-unknown radical philosophies of post-'68 France to the American avant-garde. The event featured a series of seminal papers, from Deleuze's first presentation of the concept of the "rhizome" to Foucault's introduction of his History of Sexuality project. The conference was equally important on a political level, and brought together a diverse group of activists, thinkers, patients, and ex-cons in order to address the challenge of penal and psychiatric institutions. The combination proved to be explosive, but amid the fighting and confusion "Schizo-Culture" revealed deep ruptures in left politics, French thought, and American culture.

The "Schizo-Culture" issue of the Semiotext(e) journal came three years later. Designed by a group of artists and filmmakers including Kathryn Bigelow and Denise Green, it documented the chaotic creativity of an emerging downtown New York scene, and offered interviews with artists, theorists, writers, and No Wave and pre-punk musicians together with new texts from Deleuze, Foucault, R. D. Laing, and other conference participants.

This slip-cased edition includes The Book: 1978, a facsimile reproduction of the original Schizo-Culture publication; and The Event: 1975, a previously unpublished and comprehensive record of the conference that set it all off. It assembles many previously unpublished texts, including a detailed selection of interviews reconstructing the events, and features Félix Guattari, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Michel Foucault, Sylvère Lotringer, Guy Hocquenghem, Gilles Deleuze, John Rajchman, Robert Wilson, Joel Kovel, Jack Smith, Jean-François Lyotard, Ti-Grace Atkinson, François Peraldi, and John Cage.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Reynaldo Rivera took personal photos of the Los Angeles that he lived in and knew: a world of cheap rent, house parties, subversive fashion, underground bands, and a handful of Latino gay and transvestite bars: Mugi’s, The Silverlake Lounge, and La Plaza. Most of these bars are long closed and many of the performers have died. But in Rivera’s photographs, these men and women live on in a silvery landscape of makeshift old-style cinematic glamour, a fabulous flight from unacceptable reality. 

As a teenager, Rivera took refuge in used bookstores and thrift stores, where he discovered old  photo books of Mexican film stars and the work of Lisette Model, Brassai, and Bresson. Inspired, he bought a camera and began  photographing people at his hotel. In 1981 he moved to Echo Park and began taking photos for the LA Weekly. 

This book is an ensemble of almost 200 images selected by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler spanning more than two decades in Los Angeles and Mexico. The  book also includes Luis Bauz’s story, “Tatiana,” about one of the  subjects of these photographs; a critical essay on Rivera’s work by Chris Kraus; and a novella-length conversation between Rivera and his  friend and contemporary Vaginal Davis about their lives, work, fantasies, and collective histories.

Edited by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler
With Luis Bauz, Vaginal Davis and Chris Kraus

In Dodie Bellamy's imagined "sequel" to Bram Stoker's fin de siècle masterpiece Dracula, Van Helsing's plain Jane secretarial adjunct, Mina Harker, is recast as a sexual, independent woman living in San Francisco in the 1980s. The vampire Mina Harker, who possesses the body of author Dodie Bellamy, confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four vastly different men through past letters. Simultaneously, a plague is let loose in San Francisco-the plague of AIDS.

Bigger-than-life, half goddess, half Bette Davis, Mina sends letter after letter to friends and co-conspirators, holding her reader captive through a display of illusion and longing. Juggling quivering vulnerability on one hand and gossip on the other, Mina spoofs and consumes and spews back up demented reembodiments of trash media and high theory alike. It's all fodder for her ravenous libido and "a messy ambiguous place where pathology meets pleasure." Sensuous and captivating, The Letters of Mina Harker describes one woman's struggles finding the right words to explain her desires and fears without confining herself to one identity.

McKenzie Wark invents a new genre for another gender: not a memoir but an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.

Another genre for another gender.

What if you were trans and didn't know it? What if there were some hole in your life and you didn't even know it was there? What if you went through life not knowing why you only felt at home in your body at peak moments of drugs and sex? What if you expended your days avoiding an absence, a hole in being? Reverse Cowgirl is not exactly a memoir. The author doesn't, in the end, have any answers as to who she really is or was, although maybe she figures out what she could become.

Traveling from Sydney in the 1980s to New York today, Reverse Cowgirl is a comedy of errors, chronicling the author's failed attempts at being gay and at being straight across the shifting political and media landscapes of the late twentieth century. Finding that the established narratives of being transgender don't seem to apply to her, Wark borrows from the genres of autofiction, fictocriticism, and new narrative to create a writing practice that can discover the form of a life outside existing accounts of trans experience: an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.

Rebecca Rowland is one of the sharpest writers that I know. This little book combines elements of life in the publishing industry, #MeToo, and a literal boogeyman. It’s long been my desire to do more “social horror.” And Shagging the Boss is the stick I use to measure other submissions in that vein. (Back Cover Text) “Lesson number one: don’t get attached to anyone. Being a cannibal is the only way to truly succeed in this business.” He placed one hand on the door handle, then thought a moment and smiled to himself. “The problem is, once you take a bite, it will never be enough.” After a fortuitous encounter at a local book convention, a liberal arts graduate accepts a position at a flashy publishing company under the tutelage of its charismatic owner only to learn that the press is led, and fed, by a literal boogeyman.

“Rowland tells an exceptionally tight and fast-paced tale about a unique legendary creature stalking the modern publishing industry” — Michael Arnzen, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Licker and 100 Jolts

“Rowland’s tale is a transgressive mindf*ck that will leave you irreparably unnerved” — L. Stephenson, author of The Goners

“Rowland has a narrative mastery that makes you feel as if a good friend is pulling you in close to tell you some special secret…You’ll be left shook” —Tim Murr, Stranger With Friction

they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming by dezireé a. brown is a momentous debut, tracking a self-proclaimed anti-hero’s quest for liberation through the transformative ritual of writing through the past, present, and future. Influenced by video game worlds, choose-your-own adventures, and a multifaceted collective of Mesopotamian goddesses, this collection is a conjuring of selves encountered through gender, and they arise to meet one another in all their Black queer joy and rage. 

Communing with an ancestry of writers, healers and found family, brown's collection maps the odyssey of a life lived in transition and serves as an archive of Black transmasc experience, of every burning crucible, and every hard-won survival. “NO SPECTATORS ALLOWED” they/she/he asserts, insisting on our implication in this narrative, inviting us to traverse the intricate worlds crafted through its experimental poetic forms. 

Ben is adrift. A fact-checker at a New York gossip magazine, he is well-versed in the breezy cruelty that makes the modern world go and yet hopelessly drawn to the wonders that world continues to turn up. The hypnotic asymmetry of escalators. A perfectly chilled water fountain. The essential freedom of dogs. Into the stream of this private joy steps a young woman whose general impertinence leads him back to questions about art, ambition, and intimacy he’d misplaced in the scatter that he—when pressed—calls his life.

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Balthus, bildungsroman, BINGO!, bullshit jobs, clumsy beauty, dumb luck, killed time, the lives of others, mundane surrealism, only in New York, rare victory, shaggy dogs, supposedly fun things, unscripted life, vulnerable worlds, young and broke