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Cover of The Waterfront Journals (US edition)

Grove Press

The Waterfront Journals (US edition)

David Wojnarowicz

€16.00

David Wojnarowicz came to fame in the 1980s as a radical artist whose work challenged the boundaries of art, making him, for a time, the object of Jesse Helms's conservative backlash. Before his death in 1992, he was established as an outspoken AIDS activist, anticensorship advocate, and groundbreaking artist and writer. New York called him a "spokesman for the unspeakable," and The New York Times declared that "his most lasting legacy will be as a writer."

The Waterfront Journals is a collection of his early works of autobiographical fiction. Written as short monologues, each is in the voice of one of the many people he encountered in his travels throughout America in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he was living on the street.

Wojnarowicz stumbles upon his characters in bus stations, at the side of the road, in hotels, coffee shops, and back alleys, where their interactions are less than epic, but unnervingly intimate. The Waterfront Journals is a testament to their identities, and of Wojnarowicz's grace as a writer.

Published in 1997 127 pages

recommendations

Cover of Evolution

Grove Press

Evolution

Eileen Myles

Poetry €16.00

"In Eileen Myles's newest book of poetry, Evolution, we encounter an arrival, a voice always becoming, unpinnable and queer. Myles's new poems are transformations, and perhaps a culmination of the poet's previous inquiries into love, gender, poetry, America, and its politics . . . The form of Myles's work rivals its subject matter in intimacy. The lines in Evolution are physical, a body unleashed but not yet comfortable and not without fear. The short lines rush down the page, movement as touch, touch as freedom." — Natalie Diaz, New York Times Book Review

Cover of At the Full and Change of the Moon

Grove Press

At the Full and Change of the Moon

Dionne Brand

Fiction €17.00

Written with lyrical fire in a chorus of vividly rendered voices, Dionne Brand's second novel is an epic of the African diaspora across the globe.

It begins in 1824 on Trinidad, where Marie-Ursule, queen of a secret slave society called the Sans Peur Regiment, plots a mass suicide. The end of the Sans Peur is also the beginning of a new world, for Marie-Ursule cannot kill her young daughter, Bola, who escapes to live free and bear a dynasty of descendants who spill out across the Caribbean, North America, and Europe.

Haunted by a legacy of passion and oppression, the children of Bola pass through two world wars and into the confusion, estrangement, and violence of the late twentieth century.

"[Brand has] a lush and exuberant style that may put some readers in mind of Toni Morrison or Edwidge Danticat." — William Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review

Cover of The Weight of the Earth

Semiotext(e)

The Weight of the Earth

David Wojnarowicz

Biography €17.00

Audio journals that document Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.In these moments I hate language. I hate what words are like, I hate the idea of putting these preformed gestures on the tip of my tongue, or through my lips, or through the inside of my mouth, forming sounds to approximate something that's like a cyclone, or something that's like a flood, or something that's like a weather system that's out of control, that's dangerous, or alarming.... It just seems like sounds that have been uttered back and forth maybe now over centuries. And it always boils down to the same meaning within those sounds, unless you're more intense uttering them, or you precede them or accompany them with certain forms of violence.
—from The Weight of the Earth

Artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was an important figure in the downtown New York art scene. His art was preoccupied with sex, death, violence, and the limitations of language. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Wojnarowicz began keeping audio journals, returning to a practice he'd begun in his youth.The Weight of the Earth presents transcripts of these tapes, documenting Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.

In these taped diaries, Wojnarowicz talks about his frustrations with the art world, recounts his dreams, and describes his rage, fear, and confusion about his HIV diagnosis. Primarily spanning the years 1987 and 1989, recorded as Wojnarowicz took solitary road trips around the United States or ruminated in his New York loft, the audio journals are an intimate and affecting record of an artist facing death. By turns despairing, funny, exalted, and angry, this volume covers a period largely missing from Wojnarowicz's written journals, providing us with an essential new record of a singular American voice.

Cover of My Lesbian Novel

Dorothy, a publishing project

My Lesbian Novel

Renee Gladman

Fiction €17.00

The latest in writer and visual artist Renee Gladman's ever-expanding body of imaginative investigation is a sui generis novel of queerness and art-making, philosophy and sex. 

The narrator of My Lesbian Novel is Renee Gladman, an artist and writer who has produced the same acclaimed body of experimental art and prose as real-life Renee Gladman, and who is now being interviewed by an unnamed interlocutor about a project in process, a seeming departure from her other works, a lesbian romance. 

Between reflections on art making and on the genre of lesbian romance - "though aspects of the formula drive me crazy... people who write these stories understand how beautiful women are" - a romance novel of her own takes shape on the page, written alongside the interview, which sometimes skips whole years between questions, so that time and aging become part of the process. 

The result is a beautifully orchestrated dialogue between reflection and desire, or clarity and confusion, between the pleasures of form and the pleasures of freedom in the unspooling of sentences over time.

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing, and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, all published by Dorothy— Event Factory, The Ravickians, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, and Houses of Ravicka. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and was a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize winner in fiction. She makes her home in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.

Cover of “The Misery of Love” & other essays from 'Social Disease'

Spiral Editions

“The Misery of Love” & other essays from 'Social Disease'

Mar Stratford

LGBTQI+ €16.00

From 1972 to 1974, the anonymous writers of Social Disease offered groundbreaking, incisive, and sweeping critiques of social relationships through the lens of Situationism. Arguing that true revolution — the kind of complete and irreversible revolution longed for in the wake of such revolutionary moments as the May 1968 student uprisings and the 1969 Stonewall riots— would change every aspect of society, it was clear that affective relationships — how we love, how we feel pleasure— would necessarily be changed as well, and thus deserved examination as much as the traditional questions of labor or politics. The voices in the essays speak with urgency, and do not compromise in their expression. Beyond the theoretical insights of the text, the emotional truth of history comes through in the spaces of contradiction, and allusions to intercommunity conflicts. These essays were written without constraints for an immediate audience of comrades and peers; with this translation of the collection, that audience now includes us.

"Translating from the French, Mar Stratford's MISERE DU L'AMOUR captures the urgency, passion, and drama of 1970s gay leftism. MISERE DU L'AMOUR asks questions that persist: what does a better world look like? What is the true nature of love? Can we fuck and suck our way to liberation?The questions asked by F.H.A.R in the 1970s have a relevance to today's discourse that Stratford's translation animates. Tell your friends, your lovers, and your haters." —Brendan Williams-Childs

"The Misery of Love" & Other Essays From Social Disease / “Misère de l'amour” & autres textes de le flèau social. Bound with staples. Covers printed on Mohawk off-white cardstock, with front cover image hand colored with pencil and marker. Interiors printed on bright white French text weight paper. Printed and assembled in "Kingston, New York,” the unceded and occupied lands of the Haudenosaunee, Mohican, Munsee Lenape, and Schaghticoke tribes.

Designed by The Aliens.

Cover of Darryl

Divided Publishing

Darryl

Jackie Ess

Fiction €16.00

Darryl Cook is a cuckold, and that’s exactly how he likes it. He has an inheritance that spares him from work, a manageable and seemingly consequence-free drug habit, and a lovely wife called Mindy who’s generally game for anything—and for as much of it as she can get. But after an accidental overdose and some serious oversharing, Darryl’s world begins to crack up. Tormented by what seems to be the secret truth in sex, and less assured of that secret’s form, Darryl steps into what used to be called real life . . . Darryl is a disarmingly funny and unabashedly intelligent look at a community of people parsing masculinity, marriage, sex (and love) on their own terms.

Underneath the sharp satire and hilarious sexual irreverence this is a deadly serious book: a brilliant novel of a seeker, like The Pilgrim’s Progress refracted by queer internet culture. —Torrey Peters

Ess is what I might call a burgeoning cult literary figure, armed with an unmistakable lyric deadpan and a taste for provocative subject matter. — Stephen Ira, Poetry Project

What Darryl is looking for is a crisis of sufficient severity that it will cause him to feel real to himself. — Dominic Fox, Review 31

Cover of Amanda

Maria Editions

Amanda

Olga Micińska

Fiction €15.00

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.

Cover of The Stone House

Hajar Press

The Stone House

Yara Hawari

Fiction €18.00

A vivid, haunting tale of intergenerational trauma and survival under Israeli occupation. 

A New Arab Book of the Year 2021.

The year is 1968. The recent Arab defeat in the Naksa has led to the loss of all of historic Palestine. In the midst of violent political upheaval, Mahmoud, a young Palestinian boy living in the Galilee, embarks on a school trip to visit the West Bank for the first time.

For Mahmoud, his mother and his grandmother, the journey sets off a flood of memories, tracing moments that bond three generations together. How do these personal experiences become collective history? Why do some feel guilty for surviving war? Is it strange to long for a time never lived?

In this groundbreaking novella, Yara Hawari harnesses the enduring power of memory in defiance of the constrictions on Palestinian life. Against a system bent on the erasure of their people, the family’s perseverance is unbroken in the decades-long struggle for their stone house.

Yara Hawari is a Palestinian writer and political commentator. She completed her PhD in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, where her research focused on oral history and Indigenous Studies. She currently works as a senior analyst at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank. The Stone House is her first book.