The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos

Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.

The Cosmic Oval is a nocturnal entrance into an exploration of feminist cosmologies, storytelling and the many ways of knowing and imagining the hot blue beginnings of time. By turn dreaming and waking, Ella Finer enters history and imagination from the sleep side, taking her cue from Anne Carson. Finer attends to cultural memory as composition, gathering cosmic guides with whom to listen beyond what is given to hear.

In west London, the entrance to architect and theorist Charles Jencks’ Cosmic House is overlooked by The Cosmic Oval, a representation of the origin of the universe referencing both contemporary scientific discoveries about its elliptical shape and ancient cosmogonic myths. Finer’s imagined conversation between the figures who inhabit the frieze surrounding the Oval, such as Hannah Arendt, Imhotep and John Donne, re-orchestrates cultural history to explore social scenes of study and the way knowledge moves through bodies and time.

Commissioned by the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House.

Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent.

By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is.

From the acclaimed author of the novel Oval comes a book of "fan nonfiction" about living and writing in the age of extinction.

In this constellation of essays, Elvia Wilk asks what kinds of narratives will help us rethink our human perspective toward Earth. The book begins as an exploration of the role of fiction today and becomes a deep interrogation of the writing process and the self.  

Wilk examines creative works across time and genre in order to break down binaries between dystopia and utopia, real and imagined, self and world. She makes connections between works by such wide-ranging writers as Mark Fisher, Karen Russell, Han Kang, Doris Lessing, Anne Carson, Octavia E. Butler, Michelle Tea, Helen Phillips, Kathe Koja, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, and Hildegard von Bingen.  

What happens when research becomes personal, when the observer breaks through the glass? Through the eye of the fan, this collection delves into literal and literary world-building projects—medieval monasteries, solarpunk futures, vampire role plays, environments devoid of humans—bridging the micro and the macro and revealing how our relationship to narrative shapes our relationships to the natural world and to one another.

Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child’s life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.

In Anne Carson's Short Talks the reader is bombarded with short prose poems that resound with the fullness of meditations on lyric sermons, riddle-poems that consist only of answers, Lou Reed meets Claude Monet and converts to Zen, the pure hilarious ache of ontology. SHORT TALKS, the first book-length collection by this accomplished, original voice, is elegiac, perceptive, and droll. 

Quiet Fires, the debut poetry collection from andriniki mattis, queries the everpresent questions of Black lives. Be it in a bakery in Brixton, London, at a corner on Malcolm X Blvd, Brooklyn, or the pews of Notre Dame, Paris – whether crossing violent borders on land or in gender, we know how it is to be in a familiar place that feels foreign.

As we follow along on bike rides over the Manhattan Bridge or sit alongside queer lovers in Bushwick, mattis reflects on the profound impact of pandemics, indifference, and heartbreak. In these lyrical and intimate poems that interrogate white spaces on the page and in the world with evocative metaphors, we wonder: “is there ever a party if you're always working this skin”— where can we feel safe and loved?  In a world of climate change and the constant “twilight of violence”, be it gun violence or the expectations of capitalism, quiet fires erupt in these errant everyday moments. Centered around the experience of the Black queer, trans body, andriniki gabriel mattis uncovers the complexities of identity and the quest for self-discovery.

New edition of this long out of-print classic of diasporic literature, featuring a forward by Eunsong Kim, an afterword by Emgee Dufresne, and new endnotes by Bhanu Kapil.

Incubation: a space for monsters is a formally innovative, hybrid-genre book that incorporates poetry and prose. Set in a shifting narrative environment, where human bodies, characters, and text are neither one thing nor another, this fragmentary-diaristic text journeys through the spaces in-between. Originally published in America in 2006 by Leon Works, and out of print for the last seven years, this is the first time this seminal text has been available in the UK.

Following protagonist Laloo – Cyborg, girl, mother, child, immigrant, settler – on a roadtrip through American landscapes, genre styles, and form, Incubation creates radical space for what is ‘monstrous’. Appropriating iconic American tropes, and the structure of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Incubation explores the challenges faced by immigrants in attaining such notions of freedom in so hostile an environment. In this fragmentary document there is a celebration in the cobbling together of lives; global in scope, with an intimate focus on interior voice, this landmark text evidences the early innovations and talents of this T.S. Eliot prizewinning author.