Up Your Ass; And a Young Girl's Primer on How to Attain to the Leisure Class

“You run a WHAT?” A small press. Yes, this is the dream of those who don’t give a damn about mainstream literature, major presses and millionfold print runs. It is the nirvana to everyone interested in a mindful and loving acquaintance with books.

“Start out small. Continue smaller if needed. Never end. Dream big. Continue dreaming bigger if needed. Make sure to keep being considered small.”

This is not a basic guide, it is a fun and inspiring glance at the inner depth of a small press. With enthusiasm and distinctness the publisher gives advice on everything from networking to handling the scripts to creating and selling a book.

Kristian Carlsson (b.1978) is published in a number of select small presses following his literary debut in 1996. For a decade he had been engaged as an occasional guest editor and project based publisher, when he in 2009 founded Smockadoll Förlag [Smockadoll Press] and decided to publish contemporary poetry. In 2012 Smockadoll was featured by the news agency TT/ Spektra as one of a handful of today’s unsurpassed Swedish small presses for translated literature. During the years Kristian Carlsson most certainly has had time to break each and every one of the small press guidelines issued in this volume.

The poet, the unknown being… a loony, a dreamer, a hermit. The poet writes poetry… but really, what is poetry? Arts, politics, mere amusement?

This little book is an insight into the mindset of someone who just can’t help but to be a poet. It is a manifesto for the freedom of thought and expression, an essential source of motivation and inspiration for readers and writers alike.

Anisur Rahman (b.1978) made his poetic debut in 2003. As a journalist, translator and playwright he has further contemplated the poetic mind. Born in Bangladesh, he writes in both Bengali and English, but nowadays lives exiled in Sweden.

Valerie Solanas's rarely published, legendary play, Up Your Ass, explodes social and sexual mores and the hypocritical, patriarchal culture that produces them through her signature irreverence and wit, incisiveness and camp.

The play, whose full title is Up Your Ass Or From the Cradle to the Boat Or The Big Suck Or Up from the Slime, marches out a cast of screwy stereotypes: the unknowing john, the frothy career girl, the boring male narcissist, two catty drag queens, the sex-depraved housewife, and a pair of racialized pickup artists, among others. At the center is protagonist Bongi Perez—a thinly veiled Solanas—a sardonic, gender-bending hustler who escorts us through the back alleys of her street life. The fictionalized predecessor to SCUM Manifesto, the play shares the same grand, subversive, implicative language, equally spitting and winking, embracing the margins, the scum, and selling a trick along the way.

Valerie Solanas (1936-1988) is an American radical feminist intellectual, known for her SCUM Manifesto—a pamphlet with which she declares the power of women and imagines a political future through the margin—, and for having tried to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Edited by Leah Whitman-Salkin.
With a contribution by Paul B. Preciado.
Graphic design: Roxanne Maillet.

Palestine + 100 poses a question to twelve Palestinian writers: what might your country look like in the year 2048 – a century after the tragedies and trauma of what has come to be called the Nakba? How might this event – which, in 1948, saw the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes – reach across a century of occupation, oppression, and political isolation, to shape the country and its people? Will a lasting peace finally have been reached, or will future technology only amplify the suffering and mistreatment of Palestinians?

Covering a range of approaches – from SF noir, to nightmarish dystopia, to high-tech farce – these stories use the blank canvas of the future to reimagine the Palestinian experience today. Along the way, we encounter drone swarms, digital uprisings, time-bending VR, and peace treaties that span parallel universes. Published originally in the United Kingdom by Comma Press in 2019, Palestine +100 reframes science fiction as a place for political justice and the safekeeping of identity.

Edited by Basma Ghalayini. Featuring  Talal Abu Shawish, Tasnim Abutabikh, Selma Dabbagh, Emad El-Din Aysha, Samir El-Youssef, Saleem Haddad, Anwar Hamed, Majd Kayyal, Mazen Maarouf, Abdalmuti Maqboul, Ahmed Masoud & Rawan Yaghi.

In The Rebound, a short story by author Natasha Stagg (Surveys, Artless), a young woman takes a work trip in the wake of a humiliating break-up, and agrees to be set up on a blind date...

The erotic works of Anaïs Nin started out as a freelance job. To support their bohemian lifestyles, Nin and her writer friends earned a dollar a page writing pornography for an anonymous client. The writers hated The Collector, as they called him, for his repeated instructions to “Concentrate on sex. Leave out the poetry”.

The Collector, a new series of short stories published by jouissance, seeks to pay homage to writers, like Nin, who explored the erotic, the taboo and the connection between jouissance and the creative process. It also honours their chosen, but much maligned, genre. By commissioning some of our favourite female writers to compose erotic short stories, we begin what we hope will be an ever-growing collection of compelling and provocative fiction that will inspire conversation, debate and further creative expression.

Munken Pure 80gsm paper publication with red Singer Sewn binding. Featuring an illustration by Emma Rose Schwartz.

Basta Now. Women, Trans & Non-binary in Experimental Music is a non-academic essay by French poet, novelist and music enthusiast Fanny Chiarello. It’s also the first book to be published by Permanent Draft, an all-female record label and micro-press founded by Chiarello & musician Valentina Magaletti, dedicated to promoting contemporary female, non-binary and transgender artists.

Basta Now is essentially a huge (yet admittedly not definitive) overview of 2,371 womxn in the global experimental sound & music scene. It’s been writ ten in playful and compelling prose and stylishly presented with photos, illustrations, and discographies.

“This book has nothing against men, it’s just not about them” (Fanny Chiarello)

You Can Vibe Me On My FemmePhone follows three friends, in a near-future Los Angeles, who are trying to improve themselves using a phone with a feminist operating system. Join Veronica, Phoebe, and Remy on their absurd adventures to seduce artists, entrap local Proud Boys, and enter a kinky queer horse-play scene. Their FemmePhones, programmed with their personal values, guide them toward the transformative love and professional passions they seek. But what choices will they make when they disagree with their phones and what does this mean about their feminist values? Kamala Puligandla’s heartfelt, humorous novella takes you on a wild ride about queer love, self-knowledge and growth.

Size: 4.5" x 7", 108 pages, perfect bound

Self-published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Feminist Center for Creative Work. Copy edited by Pratishtha Kohli. Illustrations by Phoebe Unter. Designed by MJ Balvanera, Riso-printed by Neko Natalia.

A legend in his home country of Greece but virtually unknown abroad, The Commune is the final work of Marios Chakkas, composed in the months preceding his early death in 1972. Born under the Fascist regime and reared as a socialist revolutionary, The Commune is Chakkas' reckoning with the uncertainty of the past and the madness of the present as the military junta secures its position and the spirit of the socialist insurrection fades. Returning from political exile, Chakkas confronts the decay and ruin of his Athenian neighborhood as he recounts childhood gunfights in the streets, churches filled with asbestos, vanished comrades, and violent squabbles over memorials for executed partisans in his singular voice which swerves from scorching poetic indignation to gallows humor to metaphysical meditation.

Chloe Tsolakoglou is a Greek-American writer who grew up in Athens, Greece. A PhD Student in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, her work has been published in or is forthcoming by Denver Quarterly’s FIVES, The Adroit Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.

Translated by Chloe Tsolakoglou