The Vivisectors

Cactus erotica. Dykes taking T erotica. Handmade rope erotica. 
Tangentially alien erotica. Clit long like laffy taffy erotica. Death erotica.

In L.A. Warman's anti-sequel to her award-winning debut Whore Foods, two anonymous lovers traverse the vast and lonely desert which has blighted most of the continent. In their possession is the gift of the Vapors, a mystical substance which allows them to transcend death. Yet as they explore the desert realm and each other, they cannot help but wonder if their entwined destiny resides somewhere beyond transcendence.

LA Warman is a poet, performer, and teacher currently based in New York City. Warman is the author of Whore Foods, an erotic novella which recieved a Lambda Literary Award in 2020. She is the founder of Warman School, a non-accredited and body based learning center. The Warman School has taught over 500 students online and in person. She teaches topics such as erotics, death, depression, and god. Pitchfork named her piece ADMSDP one of the top 100 songs of 2020. She has had performance and installation work in shows at MOCA Cleveland, ICA Philadelphia, Time-Based Art Festival, Poetry Project, and Open Engagement. Warman has presented performative poetics research at Brown University, Hamilton College, Reed College, Hampshire College, and others. She is a founding organizer of the Free Ashley Now survivor defense campaign.

"This book is an instant waypoint on my return to the revelation: if nothing else, my tears have a place where they belong—mixed into the dust of others." — Wilmer Wilson IV

Insula est un roman d’anticipation aussi intime que spéculatif qui mêle autofiction, confession intime, esthétique queer, jeu vidéo, et une formidable vision apocalyptique du monde contemporain. Insula (île, en latin), c’est d’abord le nom d’un jeu clandestin de réalité augmentée d’un nouveau genre : il suffit d’ingérer une pilule stupéfiante et illégale pour accéder à la simulation. Théo, le narrateur, en apprend l’existence lors d’une fête de cruising queer, au sommet d’un immeuble désaffecté du centre de Londres, dans une atmosphère d’apocalypse. Un garçon s’effondre à ses pieds quelques minutes après avoir consommé la substance, et pleure des larmes de sperme. Mais Théo doit tout interrompre pour se rendre au chevet de son père mourant, dans un hôpital parisien. C’est le moment de la dernière nuit, du dernier souffle et des derniers aveux. Le mot insula revient, cette fois dans la bouche des médecins, pour désigner une partie flottante du cerveau ravagée par la maladie, comme une île qu’on a dans la tête. Alors que les médias annoncent la disparition de plusieurs personnes qui auraient pris une pilule d’insula, l’étau se resserre sur Théo qui se résout à son tour à prendre un cachet prohibé avec l’intuition que les avatars ne sont que des fantômes, et qu’il pourra ainsi retrouver son père dans l’autre monde.

Ce roman aux accents dantesques (vision d’un enfer digital qui n’est que le double du monde réel), entre vertige technologique et exploration du désir, est marqué par la pensée critique du réel et la pop culture (Final Fantasy, Kanye West). Il ouvre un univers parallèle pour raconter l’histoire d’une traversée intime, convoquer des époques, des territoires et des identités multiples, dans une seule et même histoire qui navigue entre témoignage et fantasme. Dystopie, histoire d’amour et de fantômes, enquête et cauchemar, Insula est un portail entre plusieurs dimensions, le vrai et le faux, le réel et le digital, la vie et la mort.

The devastating final work by Brazil’s greatest modern writer, The Hour of the Star tells the haunting tale of Macabéa—a typist who lives in the slums of Rio—underfed, sickly, and unloved, yet inwardly free.

Translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser. With a contribution by Paulo Gurgel and Valente Colm Tóibín.

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

Un fabuleux recueil – le premier publié en français – de poèmes et récits de l'autrice argentine Cecilia Pavón, préfacé par Chris Kraus (écrivaine dont Pavón a par ailleurs traduit des livres en espagnol).

« Cette traduction n'aurait pu voir le jour si je n'avais pas développé pendant quelques temps une obsession quasi malsaine pour l'Argentine. Cherchant à Buenos Aires les traces de lieux proches de Shanaynay que j'avais co-dirigé à Paris, je découvris au hasard sur internet l'existence d'un espace nommé Belleza y Felicidad et dirigé par Fernanda Laguna et Cecilia Pavón. Bien avant l'émergence de l'artist-run space en Europe, les deux femmes créèrent un lieu associant art et littérature. Lors d'un voyage à Buenos Aires, j'eus l'opportunité de rencontrer Cecilia Pavón qui lors d'une conversation sur l'écriture et la poésie, me proposa de traduire Licorice Candies en français. Sa poésie fut autant révélatrice qu'émancipatrice, à la fois par sa singularité et sa simplicité. Elle écrit ce qu'elle voit et ce qu'elle vit. Elle parle de certains quartiers de Buenos Aires, de ses amis, d'elle, d'un vélo qu'elle a perdu, de Timo. Il me semble qu'elle écrit comme elle parle d'amour, d'erreurs et de sexe ». Marion Vasseur Raluy, traductrice

The first collection of texts published in French by the Argentinian artist and poet.

Preface by Chris Kraus.

Translated from the English and Spanish by Marion Vasseur Raluy, Rosanna Puyol Boralevi and Mona Varichon.

Situated between memoir, social criticism, and conceptual art, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam is an incisive response to a modernist classic and an affecting exploration of the poetics and politics of our times. "We are supposed to know where we are with biography and autobiography, they are the literary equivalents of the portrait and the self-portrait," writes Jeanette Winterson about Gertrude Stein's 1932 classic, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. By narrating her own story from the perspective of her partner, Stein invented a literary form that was both intimate and uncanny, blurring lines of authority and identity as it winds through a story of two women living and loving together through a tumultuous moment in history. Almost a century later, experimental filmmaker and artist Lana Lin has resurrected Stein's project to tell another story of queer love, life, and artistic collaboration in a differently discordant age. At heart a candid chronicle of her partner Lan Thao's life journey from Vietnam during the war and her own troubled history as a gender-queer Taiwanese American, Lin's Autobiography draws in subjects as varied as photography, tropical fruit, New York real estate, and queer theorist Eve Sedgewick's eyeglasses, weaving a landscape of living that is also a critical investigation of race and gender in our time. 

Lana Lin is a writer, artist, and filmmaker based in New York and Connecticut. She is the author of the book Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer and film and video works including The Cancer Journals Revisited. Her various works and collaborative projects (with Lan Thao Lam as "Lin + Lam") have exhibited at festivals and art and educational spaces throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, and New Museum, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Gasworks, London; the Taiwan International Documentary Festival and Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute, New Taipei City; Arko Art Center, Korean Arts Council, Seoul; and the 2018 Busan Biennale. Having had three years of psychoanalytic training before dropping out, she sometimes still dreams of becoming a psychoanalyst one day.