Tentacle

"A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father. . ."

So begins Ann Quin's madcap frolic with sinister undertones, a debut "so staggeringly superior to most you'll never forget it" (The Guardian). Alistair Berg hears where his father, who has been absent from his life since his infancy, is living. Without revealing his identity, Berg takes a room next to the one where his father and father's mistress are lodging and he starts to plot his father's elimination. Seduction and violence follow, though not quite as Berg intends, with Quin lending the proceedings a delightful absurdist humor.

Anarchic, heady, dark, Berg is Quin's masterpiece, a classic of post-war avant-garde British writing, and now finally back in print after much demand.

Ann Quin (b. 1936) was a British writer from Brighton. She was prominent amongst a group of British experimental writers of the 1960s, which included B.S. Johnson. Prior to her death in 1973, she published four novels: Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969), and Tripticks (1972). A collection of short stories and fragments, The Unmapped Country (edited by Jennifer Hodgson) was published by And Other Stories in 2018.

Born in Korea, raised in the American South, and trying her best to survive British academia, SJ Kim probes her experiences as a writer, scholar, and daughter to confront the silences she finds in the world. With curiosity and sensitivity, she writes letters to the institutions that simultaneously support and fail her, intimate accounts of immigration, and interrogations of rising anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. She considers the silences between generations―especially within the Asian diaspora in the West―as she finds her way back to her own family during the pandemic lockdown. Embracing the possibilities and impossibilities of language, Kim rejoices in the similes of Korean, her mother tongue, and draws inspiration from K-dramas and writers who sustain her, including Yusef Komunyakaa, Don Mee Choi, Toni Morrison, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

‘I thought to myself that I needed to sing death, perform a rite for death, write death, then bid farewell to it. The way to send death away was to sing with my own death all the death in the sky and on the ground.’

The title section of Kim Hyesoon’s visceral Autobiography of Death consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea’s violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls ‘the structure of death, that we remain living in’. Autobiography of Death at once re-enacts trauma and narrates death – how we die and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural ‘you’ speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. The volume concludes on the other side of the mirror with ‘Face of Rhythm’, a poem about individual pain, illness, and meditation.

Winner of the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize

Winner of the 2019 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize

Kim Hyesoon is an iconic figure in feminist poetry. In her new collection, she depicts the memory of war trauma and the collective grief of parting through what she calls an ‘I-do-bird-sequence’. Through intensely rhythmic lines marked by visual puns and words that crash together and then fly away as one, Kim mixes traditional folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, the legacies of Rimbaud and Yi Sang, a film by Agnès Varda, Francis Bacon’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones, a princess trapped in a hospital, and more. A simultaneity of voices and identities rises and falls, existing and exiting on their delayed wings of pain.

Winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (USA)
2024 Poetry Book Society Translation Choice

Hardly War, first published in the USA in 2016 and finally published in the UK in 2025, splices the personal and political to dizzying effect in a poetry fluid with forms and genres including reportage, memoir, opera libretto, archival photos and drawings. Using artefacts from Choi’s father, a professional documentary photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she explores her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire.

Choi’s KOR-US Trilogy (Hardly War and the subsequent DMZ Colony and Mirror Nation) brings us a new poetic language to learn. Suggestive and subtle in its connections and allusions, there is an exhilarating freedom in its playful form, all while looking straight at the brutality of colonialism and dictatorship.

In the second volume of the Native Tongue trilogy, the time has come for Láadan—the secret language created to resist an oppressive patriarchy—to empower womankind worldwide. To expand the language’s reach, female linguists translate the Bible into Láadan, and a group of Roman Catholic nuns are tasked to spread the language. But when outraged priests detect their sabotage, they send a double agent to infiltrate and destroy the movement from the inside.

With a foreword by Rebecca Romney

Suzette Haden Elgin (born Patricia Anne Wilkins; 1936–2015) was an American science fiction author. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and was considered an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages. Elgin was also a linguist; she published non-fiction, of which the best-known is the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series.

In the 2090s, Earth is somehow still here. Drones and clones are big business and Henries Ickles, debonair New Los Angeles infoarchitect, wants in on the action. Metaphysical theories are put into practice, invisible art is critiqued, quasicrystals are crafted, yogurt is spilled. From diplomatic misadventures with metallic herds in RealSweden to an underwater rendezvous in the free domes of MiamiVII, Ickles, ad Infinitum is a compendium of the exuberant and the abject, a refracted hologram of the absurdities of cultural production that swerves between incisive ode and knowing lampoon.

Mark von Schlegell has been pushing the envelope with independently-published experimental fiction and theory since the 1990s. He was born in New York, moved to L.A. in 2000, and currently lives in Cologne. His first novel, Venusia (Semiotext(e), 2005) was honor's listed for the Otherwise Award in Science Fiction.

Metabolize, If Able is a queer correspondence sent from a dystopian future. ​Clay AD’s hybrid-novel​ follow​s​ the lives of clones​ and their spawn through ​medical charts, IMs, self-help meditations, screenplays, and, of course, epistles. ​For the clones, a ​corporation​ controls life and death, sickness and wealth. Corp doctors, or DRs, bring the clones to life and assign them work. But DRs restrict clone reproduction. They pathologize and withhold care. They keep the clones sick. What happens when the clones and their anti-Corp cell turn illness into a weapon? AD’s ​sci-fi world posits the hope found in collective intimacy & the struggle against state control.