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Cover of Say Bye to Reason and Hi to Everything

Capricious

Say Bye to Reason and Hi to Everything

Dodie Bellamy, Lynne Tillman, Amy De'Ath, Cecilia Corrigan, Jackie Wang

€35.00

Say Bye to Reason and Hi to Everything is a collection of chapbooks by Dodie Bellamy, Cecilia Corrigan (with illustrations by Jocelyn Spaar), Amy De’Ath, Lynne Tillman, and Jackie Wang. Each chapbook is uniquely designed with an accompanying cover by artist Nayland Blake and features new or previously uncollected works by each writer. The collection is edited by Andrew Durbin.

This box set features the following titles:

Dodie Bellamy, More Important than the Object. Cecilia Corrigan, Cream. Amy De’Ath, ON MY LOVE FOR gender abolition. Lynne Tillman, In These Intemperate Times: 9 Frieze Columns. Jackie Wang, Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb

Dodie Bellamy is an American novelist, nonfiction author, journalist and editor who writes genre-bending works that focus on sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation, challenging the distinctions between fiction, essay, and poetry. Her methods include radical feminist revisions of canonical works. Bellamy is one of the originators in the New Narrative literary movement of the early and mid 1980s, which attempts to use the tools of experimental fiction and critical theory and apply them to narrative storytelling. Bellamy also directed the San Francisco writing lab, Small Press Traffic.  She teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University and California College of the Arts.

Cecilia Corrigan is a writer and performer. She recently starred in the short film Crush, which she co-wrote with director Katherine Bernard, now streaming at Dazed Magazine. She was recently selected as one of Issue Project Room’s Artists in Residence for 2016-17. Her first full-length book, Titanic, won the Plonsker Prize and the chapbook True Beige, (Trafficker Press). She is completing her PhD in Comparative Literature at NYU, writing about social media, makeup, and comedy. Her fiction and essays have been published many places including n+1, Joyland, and Nerve.

Amy De’Ath’s poetry chapbooks include Lower Parallel (Barque 2014), Caribou (Bad Press 2011), and Erec & Enide (Salt 2010). With Fred Wah, she is the editor of a poetics anthology, Toward. Some. Air. (Banff Centre Press 2015). Her criticism has appeared in Women: A Cultural Review, Anguish Language (Archive Books 2015), and Cambridge Literary Review, and is forthcoming in After Objectvism: Reconfiguring 21st-Century Poetry and Poetics (U of Iowa P 2017). She is a PhD Candidate at Simon Fraser University and lives in Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territories.

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer and critic. Her most recent collection of essaysWhat Would Lynne Tillman Do? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism (2014). Her most recent novel is American Genius, A Comedy (2006), on The Millions’ list of Best Novels So Far in the Millennium. Tillman writes frequently for artists books and catalogues, and has a bimonthly column in Frieze art magazine. In fall 2016, Semiotext(e) will publish hernew collection of fiction, The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories. She is currently finishing a novel, Men and Apparitions, due to be pubbed in 2017.

Jackie Wang is a writer, poet, musician, and author of Against Innocence (Semiotext(e)), as well as the zines On Being Hard Femme, Memoirs of a Queer Hapa, The Adventures of Loneberry, and The Phallic Titty Manifesto. In her critical essays she writes about queer sexuality, race, gender, the politics of writing, mixed-race identity, prisons and police, the politics of safety and innocence, and revolutionary struggles. Her blog, Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns, reads like a journal that explores writing as process, the personal as political.

Language: English

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Cover of == #2 (edition)

Capricious

== #2 (edition)

Matt Keegan

First launched in 2012, and published by mfc michèle didier (micheledidier.com), == is a small-run arts publication, edited by Matt Keegan. ==#2, 2015, is designed by Su Barber and published in an edition of 500 by Capricious Publishing. Barber and Keegan worked together on North Drive Press (northdrivepress.com) between 2005-2010, and this publication shares a variety of traits with NDP.

==#2 is a non-thematic arts publication contained in a box with a 96-page bound volume featuring artist-to-artist interviews, texts, and transcriptions. Six loose multiples are also included.

Contributors include: Sam Anderson, Uri Aran, Fia Backström, Darren Bader, Judith Barry, Stefania Bortolami, Daniel Bozhkov, Milano Chow, Anna Craycroft, Lucky DeBellevue, Cristina Delgado, Haytham El-Wardany, Jake Ewert, Vincent Fecteau, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Harrell Fletcher, Rachel Foullon, Aurélien Froment, Kenny Greenberg, Calla Henkel, Leslie Hewitt, Jaya Howey, Adelita Husni-Bey, Iman Issa, Ruba Katrib, Jill Magid, Jo Nigoghossian, Aaron Peck, Max Pitegoff, David Placek, Olivia Plender, Lisa Robertson, Andrew Russeth, Amy Sillman, Diane Simpson, Greg Parma Smith, Jessica Stockholder, Martine Syms, and Anicka Yi.

Cover of Untitled

Capricious

Untitled

Sasha Phyars-Burgess

Photography €40.00

Sasha Phyars-Burgess’ first monograph, Untitled. Spanning three bodies of work, this 200-plus page monograph includes poems by Ser Alida and Aurora Masum-Javed, a conversation between Sasha Phyars-Burgess, Juliana Huxtable and Carolyn Lazard, and essay by Bill Gaskins. Designed by Studio Lin.

As recipient of the second annual Capricious Photo Award, Sasha is a vital, emerging voice in contemporary photography, engaging the charged line between documentary and fine art. Her work ranges from affecting studies on diaspora, family and place to revolving social phenomenons in which energy, beauty and power meet.

The second annual jury panel was helmed by Capricious Founder and Publisher Sophie Mörner and Associate Publisher Anika Sabin alongside Lauren Cornell, Katherine Hubbard, JOFF, Matt Keegan, Guadalupe Rosales, Ka-Man Tse, and Lyndsy Welgos.

Cover of Se Te Subió El Santo (Are You In A Trance?)

Capricious

Se Te Subió El Santo (Are You In A Trance?)

Tiona Nekkia McClodden

Photography €40.00

Se Te Subió El Santo is a collection of self – portraits taken by the artist directly after she awoke every morning while away on a week-long residency in Iowa City, IA at the Center for Afrofuturist Studies in Spring 2016. This daily practice confronts notions of the artist’s interests in rendering a full self implicit of gender, race, sexuality, and spirituality while challenging and collapsing the intersections of each identity as well.

The title of the work is taken from Ana Mendieta, the Iowa Years: A critical study, 1969 through 1977 where Julia Ann Herzberg writes in the dissertation:

Ana and Raquelin Mendieta’s vocabulary contained many Afro-Cuban idiomatic expressions. For example, they would often respond to a friend who was acting in an unruly or hyperactive manner by asking” “Se te subió el santo? (“Are you in a trance?”) In the Afro-Cuban context, the expression “subirse el santo” is used in religious ceremony when the orisha/saint takes possession of the believer.

The monograph also includes an essay by author Akwaeke Emezi.

First edition, 94 page, black and white, leather bound hardcover with white foil embossment 

TIONA NEKKIA MCCLODDEN is an interdisciplinary research-based conceptual artist, filmmaker and curator whose work explores, and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and social commentary. McClodden’s interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Themes explored in McClodden’s films and works have been re-memory and more recently narrative biomythography.

Cover of Mucus in my Pineal Gland

Capricious

Mucus in my Pineal Gland

Juliana Huxtable

Poetry €30.00

Mucus in My Pineal Gland is the debut collection of New York-based artist and writer Juliana Huxtable (born 1987). Gathering poems, performance scripts and essays, this startling volume expands Huxtable's critique of gender, sexuality, politics, whiteness and history while establishing her as a singular poetic voice.

Juliana Huxtable is a New York City-based writer, performer, and artist. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including Artforum, Candy, Tropical Cream, and Mousse. She was included in the 2015 New Museum Triennial, curated by Ryan Trecartin and Lauren Cornell.

Cover of Tuesday or September or the End

Capricious

Tuesday or September or the End

Hannah Black

During a residency on Fire Island, artist and writer Hannah Black decided to tackle a highly daunting project: the 2020 novel.

The result of her efforts, Tuesday of September or the End, is a slim, playful work of speculative fiction. Written in the aftermath of the early months of the pandemic and the uprisings of summer 2020, the novel explores the ruptures of the year with a satirical sci-fi bent. Black chronicles the lives of two characters, Bird and Dog, as they contend with rapidly changing political possibilities during the pandemic while the run of Moley Salamanders (i.e. Bernie Sanders) concludes and aliens finally invade earth. Through a galvanic vision of how the riots of 2020 might have turned revolutionary, Black offers a meditation on collective life. This crucial novel invites readers to consider who we are—and, by extension, what we are here for—when our normal referents are muted, deleted and upended.

Hannah Black (born 1981) is a New York-based visual artist, critic and writer from Manchester, England. Her work spans video, text and performance and draws from communist, feminist and Afro-pessimist theory. She is the author of Life (2017, with Juliana Huxtable) and Dark Pool Party (2016). Black is represented by the gallery Arcadia Missa in London and Isabella Bortolozzi in Berlin.

Cover of Remembering a Dance – Part of Some Sextets 1965/2019

Lenz Press

Remembering a Dance – Part of Some Sextets 1965/2019

Yvonne Rainer

A re-examination of Yvonne Rainer's Parts of Some Sextets, a radical performance and pivotal piece in the American choreographer's career, which led her to theorize her conception of dance in the 1960s, before being revived in 2019.

Parts of Some Sextets, Yvonne Rainer's 1965 performance for ten people and twelve mattresses, represents a turning point in the American choreographer's oeuvre. "My mattress monster," as Rainer calls it, was built in her formative years with the experimental downtown New York group Judson Dance Theater. In this work, she asserted her exploration of "ordinary" actions as well as her disregard for narrative constructions to create an intricate choreography that unfolded with a new scene every thirty seconds.

More than half a century after its premiere, Rainer, in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Emily Coates, directed the 2019 revival of the piece for the Performa 19 Biennial in New York, grappling with the changing contexts of a new presentation of her radical performance. Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 delves into every aspect of this dance, from its original manifestation to its reconstitution.

This book, designed by visual artist Nick Mauss, includes previously unpublished archival images and documents from the 1965 stagings at the Judson Memorial Church in New York and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Texts by Emily Coates, RoseLee Goldberg, Jill Johnston, Kathy Noble, Yvonne Rainer, David Thomson, Lynne Tillman, and Soyoung Yoon, as well as a new interview with Rainer, pose questions about the trajectories of artworks, performers, and audiences, all while tracing the life—and afterlife—of a dance.

Edited by Emily Coates. 
Texts and contributions by Emily Coates, RoseLee Goldberg, Jill Johnston, Kathy Noble, Yvonne Rainer, David Thomson, Lynne Tillman and Soyoung Yoon; conversation between Yvonne Rainer, Emily Coates and Nick Mauss.

Cover of Across the Acheron

Winter Editions

Across the Acheron

Monique Wittig

LGBTQI+ €20.00

In her darkly funny 1985 take on Dante’s Divine Comedy, acclaimed French writer and activist Monique Wittig restages the journey through the circles of hell, limbo, paradise from a lesbian feminist perspective. 

Never-before published in the US, Across the Acheron follows the adventures of “Wittig” and her anti-Virgilian guide through laundromats, billiard parlors, dyke bars, and picnic grounds of a 1980s San Francisco populated by hunters and their prey, lost souls, and fantastical beasts, including a robotic eagle and angelic bikers. Wittig reimagines Dante’s epic poem through a feminist and queer lens, subverting his cosmological order and upending gender identities and literary traditions. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig’s final novel back into print for the first time since the early-1990s, revised according to the author's notes, and with a new introduction by Sophie Lewis.

Across the Acheron is a work of lesbian struggle and triumph across two kinds of hell. The hell of the classic western literary canon—and the hell of San Francisco. Monique Wittig brings all of her writerly powers and political experience to bear here, as witness to the horrors of heterosexual patriarchy and also to the possibility of another world for another life. Her work is a rare combination of deeply felt materialism and radical linguistic freedom. If we're to have another world, we'll need to create another language. She knew that, and she lived it.” McKenzie Wark

“Even in fiction Monique Wittig’s writing is critical, prescient, brilliant, satirical, searing, and way ahead of its time. I’m so glad this work is back in circulation to revisit and revel in.” Pamela Sneed

“In this unendurable yet compelling journey through the circles of patriarchal hell, Wittig encounters hordes of tortured women who do not struggle against their oppressors. Their brainwashing is as difficult to witness as their bloodied flesh. Only through communal activism does the seeker’s soul becomes tough enough to enter Paradise, where bare-breasted angels dismount motorcycles and offer baskets of 'cherries, strawberries, raspberries, apricots, peaches, plums, tomatoes, avocados, green melons, cantaloupes, watermelons, lemons, pawpaws, pineapples and coconuts.’ The bounties of Across the Acheron are lush and many.” Dodie Bellamy

“A Guernica of the human (feminist) condition, a blacker, bleaker, more vengeful Alice’s tea party, this is a novel as graphic as a painting, whose brilliance its translators have creditably preserved.” Publishers Weekly

Introduction by Sophie Lewis
Translated by David Le Vay with Margaret Crosland

Cover of The Sunflower

Nightboat Books

The Sunflower

Jackie Wang

Poetry €17.00

Jackie Wang's magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.

The poems in The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer's waking world with renewed energy and insight.

Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster and PhD candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, specializing in race and the political economy of prisons and police in the United States. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb. In 2018 she published a book, titled Carceral Capitalism on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the US carceral state. She is currently an Arleen Carlson and Edna Nelson Graduate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.