Silicone God

When Jean, a young translator of French and Russian, receives a mysterious commission, she leaps at the chance to escape her current life—and husband—and relocate to Montréal. Marriage has destroyed her sense of self, but work offers a way to rebuild it, as Jean slowly rediscovers her identity via a series of literary encounters (as well as lots of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll). With nods to the Situationists and Oulipo, JEANNE is an experimental yet at the same time intensely readable novel about gender, alterity, and linguistic insecurity. Will translation always be seen as an act of betrayal? Or does one's willingness to speak through and with the other yield its own rewards?

“I wrote (more or less, for promises are always hard to keep, even those made to oneself ) for five days a week for a year. I wrote no more than a page, or rather, I wrote only for the length of the analytic hour, fifty minutes (though I also practiced the variable session at times)… I followed Freud’s model of train travel for his theory of free association, acting ‘as though, for instance, [you were] a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which [you] see outside’. As for my characters, many of their names begin with A. Some of these women exist or existed, others are from fiction, or write fiction. Some are friends or acquaintances. None are credited but a keen reader could recognise many of them. I invented nothing. I am the aleph.”

Malory walks home after an ordinarily gruelling night out, having escaped the company of her associates. Something ripples in the darkness. The shape of a figure. So begins a chain of events with the texture of dream plasma. A story of persecution mania. Professional ignominy. A sudden disappearance. The terror of seeing oneself too clearly...

Part horror story, part tragicomic nightmare, Ghost Driver is a slim shudder of a novel about a woman who has taken every wrong turn available to her.

A collection of portraits by original riot grrrl, filmmaker, and zine queen, G.B. Jones. All of them witches – from the silverscreen, woodlands, and the streets.

Featuring provocative essays by Caroline Azar, Paul P., Leafshimmer, Jenna Danchuk, Blake Baron Ray, and Scott Treleaven – each exploring how witches have been perceived, presented, and portrayed in popular culture. “Realer than real, stranger than fiction.” 

PRAISE FOR G.B. JONES WITCHES

Witches by G.B. Jones is a summoning spell posing as a book, a paper potion like the potion Nicky gives Gillian in Bell, Book and Candle. It draws me to it and to what’s in it, Jones’ divine drawings of the witches we both worship, the witches of TV and film and true life. I go to it gladly. I go to it gayly. I pore over it and prize it and purr like Pyewacket.

— Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot

G.B. Jones is the original Foxy Genius. Her zines, drawings, music, and Super 8 films inspired both the Queer zine explosion and the Riot Grrrl movement of the 90s. Witches sees G.B. once again crafting her magic.

— Kathleen Hanna, singer, writer, artist, and front-woman of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre

With her illustrated procession of witches, post-punk icon G.B. Jones acts as medium to a dazzling diversity of disrupters from across screen history, as well as a pantheon of real-life hellraisers, from Sybil Leek and Rosaleen Norton to Vali Myers and beyond – all woven through with astute commentary by a host of countercultural collaborators. A captivating book; I was certainly under its spell.

— Kier-La Janisse, author of House of Psychotic Women

Dark Rides is like the best carnival dark ride you've ever been on: funny and frightening, short and shocking. Dark Rides is a collection of stories about gay teenagers growing up in a small city in Canada in the 1950s. There's a different kid in each of the stories: the kid that loves Hank Williams, the kid that works at a haunted hayride, the kid that thinks he's Caligula and so on. They don't meet, but they share similar attributes: they're all named Derek McCormack, and they all fall for the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Published for the first time in 1996, Dark Rides was Derek McCormack's first book. This thirtieth anniversary edition features new illustrations and a foreword by Lisa Robertson.

‘A fresh, thrilling, perfect book.’ — Dennis Cooper

‘Derek McCormack is a genius of prose that is driven and artificial. In Dark Rides, homo-hormones ask our teen hero Derek the questions and deliver the answer—SEX. Derek’s small-town hardscrabble world is suffused with sparkling off-hand clarity as he undergoes the tender and menacing rituals of the high school closet.’ — Robert Glück

‘Welcome to the perverse and innocent world of Derek McCormack. The mystery of objects, the lyricism of neglected lives, the menace and nostalgia of the past—these are all ingredients in this weird and parallel universe.’ — Edmund White

‘Way back when, when I first read Derek McCormack's books, I thought that I'd like to be his twin, to share his brain and soul matter—his writing was that important to me and it still is.’ — Miriam Toews

Derek McCormack is a writer and artist who lives in Toronto. Among his previous books are the novels Castle Faggot and The Well-Dressed Wound and a collection of essays about fashion and death titled Judy Blame's Obituary. The Shithole Opry Collector's Guide, a monograph about the hillbilly jewellery he designs, is forthcoming from Cushion Works/DAP. Dark Rides was his first book.

30th Anniversary Edition 
with a foreword by Lisa Robertson

Newly discovered in the author’s archives and published for the first time in the UK in 2023, this portrait of queer, working class London drifts from coffee shop to house party, in search of the next tryst.

Leda is lost. He spends his days steeped in ennui, watching the hours pass, waiting for the night to arrive. Trysts in the rubble of a bombsite follow hours spent in bed with near strangers, as Leda seeks out intimacy in unlikely places. Semi-homeless and estranged from his family of origin, he relies on the support of his chosen one: a community of older gay men and divorced women who feed and clothe him, gently encouraging him to find a foothold in a society which excludes him at every turn. And then there is Daniel, a buttoned-up man of the Lord, for whom Leda nurses an unrequited obsession—one which sends him spiraling into self-destruction. Pre-dating the British Sexual Offences Act of 1967, Love, Leda was first published in 2023 in the UK. This long lost novel is a portrait of London’s Soho that is now lost, an important document of queer working-class life from a voice long overlooked.

The artist book Amanda is greatly inspired by “Tradeswomen” quarterly magazine for women in blue-collar work, published in the 1980’s and 1990’s in the United States. Amanda is similarly thought as a periodical dealing with the subjects of technology and industry from a feminist (not solely female) angle. The first issue contains fiction stories of an emancipatory character, citing trade associations, oil industry in Iran and ghosts of the printer feeders.

The publication is made in the framework of The Building Institute, an experimental organisation aiming to strengthen the position of femmes builders in the domain of technical construction work. Amanda brings together literary texts by Maria Toumazou, Samantha McCulloch, Sepideh Karami and Madeleine Morley, combining fiction stories with visual artwork. 

Olga Micińska is a visual artist currently living in Amsterdam. Graduated from the MA Art Praxis program at the Dutch Art Institute and holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Also trained as a woodworker, collaborates with craft studios of various domains. Recently she has initiated The Building Institute.

The Building Institute (TBI) is an experimental platform aiming to emancipate the undermined knowledges dwelling in the craft domains, and to unpack diverse questions related to technology and the means of production. TBI combines art’s speculative competences with the grounded practice of manual labor, manifesting its objectives through educational activities, exhibitions, and publications.

A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond.

The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history — the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities. In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.