Querelle

Written with lyrical fire in a chorus of vividly rendered voices, Dionne Brand's second novel is an epic of the African diaspora across the globe.

It begins in 1824 on Trinidad, where Marie-Ursule, queen of a secret slave society called the Sans Peur Regiment, plots a mass suicide. The end of the Sans Peur is also the beginning of a new world, for Marie-Ursule cannot kill her young daughter, Bola, who escapes to live free and bear a dynasty of descendants who spill out across the Caribbean, North America, and Europe.

Haunted by a legacy of passion and oppression, the children of Bola pass through two world wars and into the confusion, estrangement, and violence of the late twentieth century.

"[Brand has] a lush and exuberant style that may put some readers in mind of Toni Morrison or Edwidge Danticat." — William Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review

"In Eileen Myles's newest book of poetry, Evolution, we encounter an arrival, a voice always becoming, unpinnable and queer. Myles's new poems are transformations, and perhaps a culmination of the poet's previous inquiries into love, gender, poetry, America, and its politics . . . The form of Myles's work rivals its subject matter in intimacy. The lines in Evolution are physical, a body unleashed but not yet comfortable and not without fear. The short lines rush down the page, movement as touch, touch as freedom." — Natalie Diaz, New York Times Book Review

In Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic, Chris Tysh newly translates Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, compressing Jean Genet's disturbing 1943 novel into cuttingly charged verse. In the blue hours of the Parisian underworld, pimps, drag queens, and butchers in bloody aprons are joined by Divine, Mignon Dainty-Feet, and the young assassin Our Lady, three saintly figures in a forbidden realm of the senses.

Tysh cuts Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic into a ghostly song that traces the path from prose to lyric where Divine switches gender and names "as if passing under a scarlet awning." Suturing sexual otherness to an aching of gendered expectations, Tysh's cadences embrace postmodernism's emblematic penchant for all manner of appropriation, and recycling finds a radical iteration in the fashion of fairies, queens, and stool pigeons.

"This volume of verse, played over by a flickering ghostly flame, is perhaps the book that Genet meant to write..."—John Tranter

With an preface by Robert Glück.

The collected writings of artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz, along with the stories behind them told by Alexis Vaillant.

Marc Camille Chaimowicz was an acclaimed visual artist known for his performances, installations and curatorial flair. He was also a writer. This volume, the first comprehensive collection of writings by the artist, includes seminal interviews, chitchats, jokes, performance reports, insightful statements and letters in essay form, as well as rare documents, such as early surviving leaflets, typewriter handouts and hard-to-find articles. Spanning 1971–2023, the book unlocks the work of an artist considered to be a refreshing role model for a new generation of culture mavens and style savants.

Drawing from literature, modernist architecture, interior design, art theory, glam rock and camp culture, the collection reveals the artist's inner self alongside the art, social flânerie and the goings-on of his time. Entertaining and witty, the texts stand out brilliantly with their early acumen and inclusivity, while setting a new template for an expression of queerness through writing. With access to Chaimowicz's personal material and photographs, curator and editor Alexis Vaillant is a guide to the artist's writings. Vaillant provides behind-the-scenes commentary and context—a time capsule of pleasure featuring Andy Warhol, Des Esseintes, Josef Frank, David Bowie, Vito Acconci, Eileen Gray, Alex Kapranos, Jean Cocteau, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jean Genet, Bob Dylan, Emma Bovary and Roger Cook, among others.

Edited by Alexis Vaillant.

Contributors to Starship № 20:

Rosa Aiello, Terry Atkinson, Tenzing Barshee, Gerry Bibby, Mercedes Bunz, David Bussel, Jay Chung, Eric D. Clark, Caleb Considine, Hans-Christian Dany, Albert Dichy, Nikola Dietrich, Martin Ebner, Ruth Angel Edwards, Stephanie Fezer, Jean Genet, Simone Gilges, Julian Göthe, Michèle Graf, Selina Grüter, Ulrich Heinke, Toni Hildebrandt, Beatrice Hilke, Karl Holmqvist, Stephan Janitzky, G. Peter Jemison, Charlotte Johannesson, Julia Jost, Julia Jung, Jakob Kolding, Nina Könnemann, Lars Bang Larsen, Anita Leisz, Norman Lewis, Elisa R. Linn, Sebastian Lütgert, Vera Lutz, Chloée Maugile, Robert McKenzie, Ariane Müller, Christopher Müller, Robert M. Ochshorn, Henrik Olesen, Kari Rittenbach, Nina Rhode, Ulla Rossek, Cameron Rowland, Mark von Schlegell, Ryan Siegan Smith, Philipp Simon, Valerie Stahl Stromberg, Josef Strau, Vera Tollmann, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Camilla Wills, Amelie von Wulffen and Florian Zeyfang.

"This is the 20th issue of Starship and we are proud and very happy to present it, and mainly want to thank all the artists, the contributors, the columnists, and the people who helped us gather images of exhibitions past, and gave us texts from books not yet published. Starship never starts with a clear concept about its future content, or what could be called a theme, but always with a sort of attentive interest. The theme may develop through its columnists—we now think it is easy to distinguish lines of thoughts, images, and texts answering each other. But it surely does so out of this editorial interest that wanders, and finds, and collects, is enthusiastic about artworks, and texts, and people, and then, well, brings this all together in a magazine. This was our working mode during the past year, and the responsiveness of those who regularly write for Starship (the columnists) has shown us that out there others are involved in thoughts that run very much in parallel. It is a strange form, a magazine like this, not getting funded, appearing irregularly, but still following a sort of conventional form that shows its consistency. It is at its core an excess of producing something that might prove itself valuable and liberating in the future."
—Ariane Müller, Henrik Olesen

Aveux non Avenus is considered to be Claude Cahun’s masterpiece. Published in 1930 it defied description (it still does) and also showcased the incredible photomontages that Cahun and her lifelong partner, Marcel Moore, created together.

Cancelled Confessions reveals Claude Cahun to be a major surrealist writer and pioneering queer theorist almost a century ahead of her time.

Cahun and Moore’s appeal is wide and universal. They were adventurers in life as in art. Cahun famously terrified Andre Breton in the 1920s when she appeared in a Paris café with her head shaved and painted gold. Having moved to Jersey in 1938, Cahun and Moore waged a mischievous two-person resistance campaign against the occupying Nazi forces from 1940. Finally caught and imprisoned in 1944, they were sentenced to death in 1945, saved at the very last moment by the armistice.

With Amelia Groom Susan de Muth Claude Cahun Marcel Moore Pierre Mac Orlan François Leperlier

Designed by Joe Hales Sam Eccles

Constance DeJong’s long-neglected 1977 novel, Modern Love, is one thing made up of many: It is science fiction. It is a detective story. It is a historical episode in the time of the Armada and the dislocation of Sephardic Jews from Spain to an eventual location in New York’s Lower East Side. It is a first-person narrator’s story; Charlotte’s story; and Roderigo’s; and Fifi Corday’s. It is a 150-year-old story about Oregon and the story of a house in Oregon. Modern Love’s continuity is made of flow and motion; like an experience, it accumulates as you read, at that moment, through successive moments, right to the end.

An important figure of downtown New York’s performance art and burgeoning media art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, DeJong designed Modern Love herself and published it with help from Dorothea Tanning on the short-lived Standard Editions imprint. Critically acclaimed in its time, Modern Love is now back in print on the 40th anniversary of its original publication.

Constance DeJong is an artist and writer who has worked for thirty years on narrative form within the context of avant-garde music and contemporary art. Considered one of the progenitors of media art, or “time-based media,” DeJong shapes her intricate narrative form through performances, audio installations, print texts, electronic objects, and video works. Since the 1980s, DeJong has collaborated with Phillip Glass, Tony Oursler, and the Builders Association on performances and videos at Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; the Wexner Center, Columbus, OH; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in New York, at The Kitchen, Thread Waxing Space, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Dia Center for the Arts. Her books include I.T.I.L.O.E. and SpeakChamber, and her work is included in the anthologies Up is Up, But So is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974–1991 (NYU Press, 2006); Blasted Allegories (New Museum/MIT, 1987); and Wild History (Tanam Press, 1985).

An epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor. 

In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men "buy him things," lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to see what happens, landlords turn tenants out, and Turner writes poetic tracts to friends about it. Part pornography, part novel, all love letter, A Queen in Bucks County is an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out.

2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST