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?
Looking at pictures, she was reminded of the lack of time. And anyway, where did all the time go?
In Day Book a woman artist looks at time in an address to quotidian events and their unfolding. Exploring motherhood, unpaid labour, childcare, and the time of the artist, she reads the work of contemporary women filmmakers through the earlier works of filmmakers, writers, and photographers, including Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras, Natalia Ginzburg and Christa Wolf, Bertien van Manen and Bernadette Mayer. The inability to capture the accumulation of days emerges—a form without form, day after day after day.
Books in dreams were once made of scrolls and parchments. Once, books in dreams could only manifest themselves as clay. Scratches became meaningful. Books still tumble down. Most rooms are flooded; the waters are generally at ankle height.
Shapes Found for Living offers short tales—rumours and fables coalescing from the uneven experience of living in this century and vivifying the reader’s imagined memory theatre. The collection moves from rude immediacy via questioning forms of language depicting unstable mental states, the near madness of trying to live or love, to the absurd remnants of an (envisioned) ancestral recall.
I acquired Sonia’s copy of Fraser Darlingʼs book in 2010 when my cousins, sister, and I were going through Soniaʼs house following her death. From one of her glassed-in bookshelves, the spineʼs distinctive artwork caught my eye. When I put my hand in to grab it, it was immediately apparent there was something odd. Turning it over, I realised the book contained enclosures. It had been used as a flower press. Between its pages were eleven sheets of specimens, each sheet masked off with two pieces of neatly arranged blotting paper. All the sheets were titled in pencil: ‘Aviemore—May 1961’.
Sonia Campbell Penney was a professional gardener, keen botanist, and the author’s aunt. Her ‘book’ is a copy of Natural History in the Highlands and Islands by F. Fraser Darling, interleaved with eleven sheets of plant specimens, guarded by blotting paper, which Sonia collected around Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands in May 1961. Functionally, if sporadically, annotated with plant names and, occasionally, places of finding, these sheets might be interpreted as a form of nature writing or a holiday diary almost without words. Sixty years on, Bridget Penney asks what a close, though thoroughly unscientific, consideration of these unmediated traces might reveal.
Following the publication of Centrefold in Artforum, November 1974, Benglis says that Penthouse wanted to use the image, but instead she proposed ‘a take-off on a traditional pieta, depicting a beautiful girl as the Madonna with a nude man on her lap’. They refused, ‘we cannot do that, we cannot allow artists to make a centrefold.’
Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of that Centrefold, and shifting between 1970s New York and Los Angeles and the Corbyn years in Tower Hamlets, London, this Centrefold enacts an ambivalent ‘full accounting’ of Lynda Benglis’s Artforum spread, as well as her gender ‘mockeries’ and Secrets series. Taking in nursery privatisation, artworld silencing and censorship, maintenance art, muddled Marxism, performances of motherhood, and masturbation, Louise O’Hare weighs up the various impacts and forms of disciplining at play in both column and dildo inches.
Sometimes I pretended not to notice it (the black hole), but I knew it was always there. To tell the truth, I started to like having it around. I stuck quite close to it. Not too close, mind you. But it was useful, above all, to have somewhere to put things. Unwanted things. I am attracted to your attraction, he said. (I put it in the hole.) Night by night it got a little bigger.
Holes splices forms of fiction and nonfiction. The narrator, a researcher of limits at an unidentified university, figures her entanglement with an unobtainable love object as the descent into a black hole. Everything she reads seems to shed light on the non-events that comprise their relationship, and study collapses into life as she struggles to separate events and forms, reality and ideation. Holes is a study in thematic fixation, engaging a range of ‘obsessional artists’ (including Yayoi Kusama, from whom the term is borrowed, Lee Bontecou, and Carolee Schneemann) for whom holes—as idea, imagery, philosophy—have proved evocative, inviting, and occasionally obliterative.
Hilary White is a writer and researcher, currently an IRC postdoc at Maynooth University, Ireland, working on a project entitled Forms of Sleep. She co-ran the experimental poetry reading and commission series, No Matter, in Manchester, and co-edited the zine series, Academics Against Networking. Her writing appears in MAP, Banshee, zarf, and The Stinging Fly. Holes is her first novel.
Après une campagne militaire fulgurante, l’organisation secrète du redoutable Dr Belsidus a chassé les puissances occupantes du sol africain et s’est rendue maitre de l’ensemble du continent, unifié pour la première fois en un gigantesque empire. L’expansion a démarré et l’édification d’une civilisation d’un genre inédit est en marche. Mais les nations européennes, après s’être fait la guerre, s’apprêtent à revenir. Une course s’engage entre l’Internationale noire et les appétits impérialistes : sabotages, espionnage, guerre technologique ou bactériologique, les héros et héroïnes de L’Internationale noire né reculeront devant rien pour sauvegarder cette indépendance acquise de haute lutte.
Dans ce second volet du roman-feuilleton qui fit la réputation de G. Schuyler, retrouvez les nouvelles aventures de nos personnages, dorénavant contraints à une lutte géopolitique d’une ampleur inégalée, pour garantir à leur Empire noir un avenir radieux !
George Samuel Schuyler, 1895–1977, fut un essayiste, journaliste et romancier de première importance dans le monde culturel africain-américain de l’entre-deux-guerres. Il reste connu pour la férocité de ses critiques. Il est l’auteur d’un seul roman, Black No More, traduit en France en 2016 et d’un essai romancé dénonçant la traite au Liberia, produit de son enquête de terrain dans le pays. Proche des courants socialistes jusqu’à la Seconde Guerre mondiale, il prendra un virage nettement réactionnaire par la suite, tout en demeurant dans les mémoires de toute une génération d’écrivains, tels qu’Ishmael Reed ou Samuel Delany.
In this genre- and gender-breaking work of theory-fiction, legendary writer and cofounder of the 1970s French feminist movement Monique Wittig celebrates the body—lesbian, literary and defiantly political—and challenges the order of heterosexuality in literature.
First published in French in 1973, The Lesbian Body mines the relationship between a lover and a beloved—also a writer and a text—to explore the ideological and historical constructions of the female subject. Organized according to the principle of montage, poetic passages are juxtaposed with anatomic lists that mark lesbian eros. Through expressions of joy, violence, and tenderness, the site of pleasure is celebrated. In her transfiguration of gender and its paradigms, Wittig transformed French vocabulary, feminizing grammar and lesbianizing myths. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig’s groundbreaking work back into circulation for the first time since the mid-1980s, revised according to the author's notes, and with an introduction by Paul B. Preciado.
“The Lesbian Body is a fundamental work of lesbian existence. Wittig's applied vision is a state of natural delirium, a revolutionary excess of utopianism, refusal, and mutual self-creation. Revisiting it reveals how much passionate free thought has been lost, and simultaneously, how many of her tropes and discoveries have integrated into our collective consciousness.” — Sarah Schulman
“In this stunning new rendering of The Lesbian Body by the French author, theorist, activist and teacher, the late Monique Wittig, we are plunged into an imagined world of passionate violence and erotic lesbian mayhem intertwined in strikingly bold poetic images. Wittig, in the reach and volatility of her imagination, stands alongside such important American writers as Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Valerie Solanas, all of whose work deserves to be read again, or for the first time.” — Esther Newton
“To read the book is to be forced by Wittig into another grammar and happily contaminated by its strange forms. You will never think straight again.” — Jack Halberstam
“For me, Wittig opened up a sense of the world that had been, quite literally, unimaginable. She tore us apart.” — Judith Butler
“Together with Ursula Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany, Wittig is the first to design a nonbinary utopia, a world in which the binary categorization of sexes and genders will have ceased to exist.” — Paul B. Preciado
Introduction by Paul B. Preciado
Translated by David Le Vay
Bringing together poetry, essay, and letters to “lovers, friends and in-betweens,” Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch confronts the ways capitalism, fatphobia, ableism, transness, and racializations affect people with chronic pain, illness, and disability. knot body explores what it means to discover the limits of your body, and contends with what those limitations bring up in the world we live in.
knot body was shortlisted for the QWF First Book Prize. Their second collection of poetry, The Good Arabs (Metonymy Press), won the 2022 Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal.
“For me, the power of knot body stems from its courage and unique voice in writing the ache, the ache of chronic pain, the ache of faulty diagnoses and bodily misreadings, and, equally, the ache for honest answers on how to love each other in all our dignity. Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is an artist and philosopher of talent, generosity, and heart.” – David Chariandy, author of Brother (Penguin Random House)
“In this moment, when trans, racialized and disabled bodies are met with violent and polarizing commentary within the public sphere, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch offers us the uninterrupted intimacy of knot body. As self-communional as Kiese Laymon’s Heavy and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, they amplify and queer the epistolary memoir genre. Each letter is emotionally and thematically complete and, too, each letter decidedly speaks to the next. Readers may ruminate on the sharp and sensual inquiry offered by each individual letter, or read cover-to-cover and be present to the gorgeously-engaged, call-and-response quality of knot body as a whole.” – Amber Dawn, author of My Art is Killing Me (Arsenal Pulp Press)
“knot body is such a generous tapestry of tenderness—a collection that brilliantly utilizes the direct address in a way that is not universal, but still beautifully communal. I reached the end of this collection and breathed in a newer, better world.” – Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune for Your Disaster (Tin House)
Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a queer Arab poet living in Tio’tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory (Montreal). Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, GUTS, carte blanche, the Shade Journal, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, Room Magazine, and elsewhere. They participated in the Banff Centre’s ‘Centering Ourselves’ BIPOC residency, and they were longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2019. Their second collection of poetry, The Good Arabs, was published by Metonymy Press in 2021.