Books
Books
in random order
Hack 'N' Slash
Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel réalise au printemps 2020 la série de dessins Hack’n’slash.
Ces collages sont faits à partir d’aplats de couleur autocollants Letrafilm Color/Tint Overlay, que l’on pourrait traduire par Couleur/Teinte Superposition, permettant ainsi de nommer l’importance des jeux de profondeur qui s’y trouvent.
L’artiste se calque là-dessus et joue alors avec la confrontation entre le hack: détournement et réemploi d’outils techniques (trames numériques, encres d’imprimante, dessin manuel) – et le slash: le fait de trancher/juxtaposer les formes venant de différentes dimensions pour composer ses dessins.
Chaque édition a une couverture unique sérigraphiée sur du papier Pantone Letraset par l’Atelier PPP et un texte critique-fiction de Mia Brion.
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König
Unlawful Assembly
A collection of interrelated short stories by Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael. First published in private limited edition, it was intended as a cheap holiday read to titillate and entertain summer visitors to the Mediterranean island of Stromboli, and as a piece of site-specific work; the location of the action and the place in which it is read being the same.
The visual art subsequently generated by Unlawful Assembly includes work by Josephine Pryde, with whom the artists collaborated to produce this second edition’s cover image.
We Don’t Live Here Anymore
A fragmented reflection on movement, absence, and the unraveling of identity within the shifting landscapes of departure and return. Tarren Johnson explores the tension between private longing and public expression, where moments of love and vulnerability emerge in transient encounters.
Tarren Johnson grew up in North County San Diego, where she began dancing and writings a child. She continued her studies at CalArts in Los Angeles before moving to Europe, where she built a decade-long career in the performing arts. Her debut book of poetry, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, also serves as the foundation for the stage work of the same title.
You Can Vibe Me On My Femmephone
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.
Éclairages : 12 entretiens et analyses sur les violences d’État
Filippo Ortona, Francesco Sebregondi
Depuis 2020, l’ONG d’investigation Index mène des contre-enquêtes sur les violences policières en France. De la mort d’Adama Traoré à celle de Nahel Merzouk, ses rapports ont pour objectof d’établir les faits dans des affaires où le déni est la norme.
Ce livre rassemble des entretiens et analyses publiés par Index entre 2024 et 2025, pour exposer l’arrière-plan des affaires qu’elle documente. En donnant la parole à des sociologues, juristes, chercheur·euses, journalistes et militant·es, l’ensemble explore différentes fomes de violences institutionnelles, les logiques discriminatoires qui les traversent, ainsi que les espaces où elles s’intensifient : des quartiers populaires aux outre-mer ou encore aux zones de frontières de territoire.
Éclairages se veut une ressource pour comprendre les conditions s’exercice des violences d’État aujourd’hui.
Contributions de Nour Abuzaid (Forensic Architecture), Matteo Bonaglia, Magda Boutros & Aline Daillère, Rémi Garayol, Thomas Chambon (Utopia 56), Groupe Retrace, Gwenola Ricordeau, Mathieu Rigouste, Sebastian Roché.
Protoplasmic Flow
One of artist Jenna Sutela's regular collaborators, Physarum polycephalum, is often referred to as a natural computer. This yellow, ‘many-headed’ slime mold is an ancient, decentralized, autonomous organism that processes data without a nervous system, operating via communities of coordinated nuclei that demonstrate advanced spatial intelligence. If the slime mold cannot find the resources it needs, it hibernates until better conditions arise; theoretically, it is immortal. Over the years, Sutela has, for example, ingested the slime mold in her performances as a form of artificial intelligence, letting its hive-like behavior program her own.
Sutela's work for Samara reactivates this line of work, delivering co-existence with the slime mold to people's homes in the form of a dried sample of Physarum polycephalum as well as related performative instructions. Inside the box, the audience receives everything necessary to grow slime mold at home, and witness the behaviour of this fascinating organism. With the set of performative instructions, Jenna Sutela proposes the ways of co-existing and engaging with Physarum polycephalum.
Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds, and other living media, such as Bacillus subtilis nattō bacteria and the “many-headed” slime mold Physarum polycephalum. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Sutela's work has been presented at museums and art contexts internationally, including Guggenheim Bilbao, Moderna Museet, and Serpentine Galleries. She is a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019-21.
Protoplasmic Flow contains everything required to activate the slime mold in a location of your choosing.
Duration: take all the time that you need
Language: Instructions are in English and Italian.
Red Seed: Poems for Luno
Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez, Wendy Call and 1 more
Through a voice at once intimate and collective, Lucas Juárez expands the powerful presence of Tutunakú roots to open up territories and to interweave desirous bodies, dream relationships, and the memories of women ancestors. This beautiful translation by Wendy Call and Whitney DeVos, in a precious handmade edition, affirms the trilingual (Tutunakú, Spanish and English) as an ethical strategy of listening to and translating the world. Red Seed collects twelve poems of women's sexualities and spirits in which body, language and territory are political spaces that Indigenous memory expands within and renews.
—Maricela Guerrero, author of The Dream of Every Cell
After Sex
Who decides what happens after sex? The last decade has seen many significant changes to the laws governing women’s reproductive rights around the world, from liberalisation in Ireland to new restrictions in the USA. After Sex offers personal and political perspectives from the mid-20th century to the present day, setting feminist classics alongside contemporary accounts. These essays, short stories and poems trace the debates and tell the stories; together, they ask us to consider what reproductive justice might look like, and how it could reshape sex.
The writers pay special attention to people — both fictional and real — who have sought control over their sexual lives, and the joy, comedy, difficulties and disappointments that entails. But above all, After Sex testifies to the power of great writing to show us why that freedom is worth pursuing — without shame and without apology.
With contributions from:
Lauren Berlant, Joanna Biggs, Edna Bonhomme, Gwendolyn Brooks, Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, Storm Cecile, Lucille Clifton, Rachel Connolly, T.L. Cowan, ’Jane Does’, Maggie Doherty, Nell Dunn, Andrea Dworkin, Anne Enright, Deborah Friedell, Tracy Fuad, Kristen Ghodsee, Vivian Gornick, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Barbara Johnson, Jayne Kavanagh, Lisa Hallgarten and Angela Poulter, Jamaica Kincaid, Patricia Knight, R.O. Kwon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Natasha Lennard, Sophie Lewis, Audre Lorde, Amelia Loulli, Erin Maglaque, Holly Pester, Adrienne Rich, Denise Riley, Sally Rooney, Loretta J. Ross, Madeleine Schwartz, SisterSong, Sophie Smith, Annabel Sowemimo, Amia Srinivasan, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Alice Walker and Bernard Williams.
Raven Chacon: A Worm’s Eye View From a Bird’s Beak
Stefanie Hessler, Katya García-Antón and 1 more
A career-spanning catalogue featuring excerpts from Raven Chacon’s scores, musical prompts, and drawings interspersed with full-color documentation and descriptive texts of installations, sculptures, and performances. Raven Chacon is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among land, space, and people.
In an experimental practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, Chacon breaks open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined. In 2022, Raven Chacon became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2023.
Texts by Raven Chacon, Lou Cornum, Aruna D'Souza, Candice Hopkins, Anthony Huberman, Ingir Bål Nango, Marja Bål Nango, Dylan Robinson & Patrick Nickleson, Eric-Paul Riege, Sigbjørn Skåden, Ánde Somby.
Foreword by Katya García-Antón and Stefanie Hessler.
Jaw Filler
Maz Murray, Charlie Markbreiter
'You don't need dysphoria to be trans. You don't need a body at all.’
When Sean Hastings, (the first) transgender private detective, is asked to investigate the disappearance of Character, he enters the First Trans Commune in Sim World, a virtual reality community imagineered by transfluencer Kevin and bankrolled by VSI, a mysterious tech company.
At VSI, representation matters, which is why Taylor, the token QTPOC face, runs their latest project. Haunted by the death of his cis gayguy college bestie and their shared diasporic dilemmas, Taylor sees potential in Kevin’s ability to Release trauma into the virtual world, while Casey, Sean’s ex, seeks Releasing as the latest Long Plague miracle cure. Then femme fatale Mitchelle reappears, and the plot thickens.
A pulpy neo-noir romp through the anxiously assimilated transmasculine id, Jaw Filler asks: who is VSI, and what do they really want? Can you be your own dad? And if Character’s mind is trapped in Sim World, then where is his body?
The Activist
The Activist begins in the middle of a revolution. There is a protesting group of commuters with a missing leader. There is a bridge that may or may not have been bombed. People speak in nonsense and cannot stop themselves. In the midst of all this, the language of news reporters mixes with the language of confession. The art of this beautifully written book is in how it touchingly illustrates that relations between humans and cities are linked in a more complex interface than most realize. The book is full of entrances and exist, alternate routes and incommensurate geographies. The Activist does not analyze or explain the hopeful desires of protest at the turn of the century, but it does enable us to see them differently. — Juliana Spahr
"Whether this is a dream in which I'm captured or I've been captured and made to think I'm in a dream, I can't figure." Apropos to the rapturous tension The Activist evokes. A covert narrative operating as an event disguised as a repot. A grass trap glimpsed through the lashes of a sleepwalker. Topography of disrupted positionality, reflection girders flaccid memory against the romantic high up. Flea-bitten news and neuralgic placards. You are here**. Is dreaming the medium for crossing the ambiguous borders of talk, responsibility, collectivity, solitude? Or does reading anatomize a phantom bridge that carries you over to an unmappable reality and calls you by your secret name? Root, plan and faction, armed with tongue-tied intensity. You may ask how Renee Gladman knows that this city of slippage is your city, how she holds you within it, riveted. And therein lies the magic of this book. — Tisa Bryant
The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader
Poet, philosopher, speculative architect and transdisciplinary artist, Madeline Gins is well known for her collaborations with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on the experimental architectural project Reversible Destiny, in which they sought to arrest mortality by transforming the built environment. Yet, her own writings — in the form of poetry, essays, experimental prose and philosophical inquiries — represent her most visionary and transformative work. Like Gertrude Stein before her, Gins transfigures grammar and liberates words. Like her contemporaries in conceptual art, her writing is attuned to the energized, collaborative space between reader and page.
The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader is a revelatory anthology, edited and with an introduction by the writer and critic Lucy Ives. It brings never-before-published poems and essays together with a complete facsimile reproduction of Gins' 1969 masterpiece, WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G, R, E, T, A, G, A, R, B, O, It Says), along with substantial excerpts from her two later books What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984) and Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994). Long out of print or unpublished, Gins' poems and prose form a powerful corpus of experimental literature, one which is sure to upend existing narratives of American poetics at the close of the 20th century.
Edited by Lucy Ives.
Stalled Death Train
A dark-humored poet’s novel of cruising, contempt, and database crawling, Stalled Death Train rumbles through the death of David Bowie in 2016 to shake apart its narrator’s sense of self. Nick, a burned out office worker and late-Bowie fanatic, spends his days mourning his fallen star, left to decipher the legacy and lyrics of a singular pop icon whose excesses did not cease, even after his greatest moments had passed. Meanwhile, Nick must solve the mystery of why his boyfriend has begun to self-amputate as a form of autonomously upgrading his dimensions—or at least call tech support before he uploads himself to the cloud.
BIG JOE
A chance encounter with two older fellows at the movie theater has the young vagabond Ligie on his way to Lot-8, a trailer park down the road with an unconventional local reputation. There, Ligie meets Big Joe and his extended Lot-8-family: a tight-knit community of freaks all sectioned together by the landlord at the outskirts of town.
Weaving together colorful characters and outright carnal debauchery, BIG JOE is a radical pastoral of community, desire, and the strangeness of knowing one another.
Featuring color illustrations by Drake Carr and Sabrina Bockler.
Cover illustration by Drake Carr
Samuel R. Delany is the author of numerous books and novels, including the Nebula Award-winning Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, as well as Nova (now in a Library of America anthology) and Dhalgren. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. Other erotic novels include Equinox, Hogg, The Mad Man, Throu gh the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, and Shoat Rumblin. Delany was the subject of a 2007 documentary, The Polymath, by Fred Barney Taylor, and he has written a popular creative writing textbook, About Writing. He is the author of the widely taught Times Square Red/Times Square Blue and numerous books of essays; his book-length autobiographical essay, The Motion of Light in Water, won a Hugo Award in 1989. As e-books, paperbacks, or audiobooks, his works are available through his website at: www.samueldelany.com
Steal This Book
Eleven performance-based projects by Dora García, documented through letters, emails and other elements from the artist's private correspondence with various interpreters of performances, whether they were direct collaborators of simple spectators.
Edited and prefaced by François Piron, Steal This Book, a tribute to Abbie Hoffmann's pamphlet of the same name, is not a definitive attempt at rendering the pieces on which it is based; it calls for a free, active and contradictory reception, that of an open archive. Part epistolary novel, part rough screenplay and part user's manual, Steal This Book proposes a body of discussions, questions without answers and endless ramblings, in place of the critique's or the artist's voice.
The book has also been presented in exhibitions as a Dora García sculpture meant to be stolen, but it can also be purchased in selected bookstores worldwide.
Contrary to the idea that would have art addressing the greatest possible number of people, Dora García (born in 1965 in Valladolid, lives and works in Barcelona), best known for her performance devices, is interested in what is enacted at the individual scale: in a radically conceptual form, at once accessible and elegant, she elects to transmit oddly coded messages, their ask being to bestir a specific relation with each and every visitor. Dora García is interested in everything that intervenes in the communication between an artist and his/her public: art no longer represents the world, but itself becomes a producer of realities often on the borderline of fiction and make-believe. It urges us to undergo experiences other than ordinary situations, at once simple and hard to grasp.
Dora García has had solo exhibitions at the MACBA in Barcelona, the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the SMAK in Gent. She represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 2011, and was a part of the Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, the Sydney Biennial in 2009, the Biennale de Lyon in 2009 and Documenta 13 in 2012.
Nothing at All
An atmospheric rumination on gendered violence, cosmic collapse, and colonialism.
From deep inside a black hole, comes Nothing at All—the space where everything collapses: form, genre, gender, and being. Olivia Tapiero’s poetic and essayistic fragments overflow with lyric beauty as they explore how colonialism, illness, and desire intertwine amidst personal and collective suffering. Generations, geographies, and desires mingle, contaminating one another in these anarchic, insubordinate texts. Here, the written word disrupts foundations and nations, claiming its own survival.
Olivia Tapiero is a writer, translator and musician. She is the author Les murs (Robert-Cliche Award, Prix Senghor finalist), Espaces (2012), Chairs (2019), Phototaxie / Phototaxis (Nightboat Books, 2017 / 2021, Lambda Literary Awards finalist), and Rien du tout (2021, Grand Prix du livre de Montréal Finalist, Governor General’s Literary Awards finalist). She is editor-in-chief for the literary magazine Moebius, and has contributed poems and essays to various publications in Canada, France, and Korea. She has also translated works of contemporary authors such as Roxane Gay, Anne Boyer and Billy-Ray Belcourt. She lives between Marseille and Montréal.
Foreword by Anne Boyer.
Tripwire 22
Featuring work by Sara M Saleh, Joni Prince, Shatr Collective, Carlos Soto Román, Petra Kuppers, Diane Ward, Dianna Settles, Mayra Santos-Febres translated by Seth Michelson, Elena Gomez & Chelsea Hart, Noah Mazer, Daniel Borzutzky, Ash(ley) Michelle C., Ghazal Mosadeq, Darius Simpson, Mohammed Zenia, Mario Payeras translated by Dan Eltringham, Ferreira Gullar translated by Chris Daniels, Christophe Tarkos translated & read by Marty Hiatt, Andrew Spragg on Tom Raworth, Matthew Rana on Ida Börjel, & Paisley Conrad on Harryette Mullen
Do Everything in the Dark (2023)
Faced with photos of a once-tumultuous New York art world, the narrator's mind in this scathing, darkly funny novel begins to erupt. Memories jostle for center stage, just as those that they are about always did. These brilliant but broken survivors of the '80s and '90s have now reached the brink of middle age and are facing the challenge of continuing to feel authentic. Luminous with imagery, cackling with bitter humor, and with a new foreword by the author, this roman a cle spares no one.
First published in 2003, Gary Indiana's turn-of-the-millennium novel traces the lives of a loosely connected group of New York artists and the dissolution of their scene.
During the summer of 2001, the narrator of Do Everything in the Dark, a gallery curator, receives intermittent dispatches from his far-flung friends, many of whom resemble well-known figures in the art and intellectual worlds, who are spread out across the globe, from Istanbul to Provincetown to Santa Fe. Seeking various reprieves from a changed New York, the long-festering, glossed-over incompatibilities of these aging bohemians blossom into exotic and unbearable relief. Beneath the contemporary excesses Indiana chronicles, we can see the outlines of the earlier New York bohemia captured by Dawn Powell.
Arguably Indiana's most intimate, internal, and compassionate work to date, Do Everything in the Dark is a chilling chronicle of madness and failure, success and disappointment, and the many ways love dies in a world people find increasingly unlivable.
Oraison funèbre pour Zelda1990
D’eux, il ne reste que les mots de celle qui a croisé leur route. Le crissement de pneus qui sifflent avant un malheur qui tarde à se produire. Sanctification plus que célébration, Oraison funèbre pour Zelda1990 est une tentative de communication au-delà de la matière physique de l’énonciation, un dialogue interne qui convoque « par moment le frère, par moment l’ami parti », toujours la ruine, la consommation de la séparation avec le tout. À travers quatre parties qui font écho à la structure des éloges funèbres de la Grèce antique, Romane Constant réouvre la poésie des plaies larges et profondes que les vers lapidaires d’Hélène Bessette – sur qui l’autrice mène un travail de recherche – ont laissé dans l’histoire moderne de la littérature, et signe un texte bouleversant sur la difficulté des choses qui ne (se) passent pas, la force de celles que l’on voit suspendues par le cou au bord d’une paix impossible à trouver. Oraison funèbre pour Zelda1990 est une douleur croissante, avec écoulement et rougeur.
Romane Constant vit et travaille à Paris. Elle explore à travers différents supports les questions relationnelles, d’intimité, du corps et du genre. Attachée aux Ardennes où elle a grandi, elle s’intéresse également à l’héritage de la classe ouvrière et aux traumatismes intergénérationnels.
Darryl
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
A Musical Hell
Alejandra Pizarnik, Yvette Siegert
“An aura of legendary prestige surrounds the work of Alejandra Pizarnik,” writes César Aira. Her last collection to be published before her suicide in 1972, A Musical Hell is the first book of poems by Pizarnik to be published in its entirety in the U.S. Pizarnik writes at the edge of poetic impossibility, opening with a blues singer, expanding into silence, and closing into a theater of shadows and songs of the drowned.
this simulation sux
Jr Ting Ding, DeForrest Brown Jr.
this simulation sux is a collection of speculative essays and personal observations commissioned by global cultural institutions and local counterculture zines between February 2020 and April 2021.
"During the moment of pause brought on by the initial lockdown, we chose to write as a form of self care and mediated therapy; writing, for us, is a way to process, orient, and grasp for a moment of clarity in the ever changing media and cultural landscape. In this informational era, in which our attention is in very high demand, the amount of content we are expected to consume is endless. Beset with political unrest, economic uncertainty, and waning emotional bandwidth, we have become datapoints in the vast and saturated marketplace presented to us as “society.”
[...]
Flânerie, the French term describing the act of walking and observing, became a part of our daily ritual; we lapped the outer edges of the island of Manhattan and exploring various neighborhoods during the peak of the pandemic. The images presented on this book’s jacket were captured on these walks, documenting the absurdities of everyday life in this fraying simulation. Personal, anecdotal narratives of an imagined reality are represented through the images, which are placed alongside our speculative observations derived from historical data.
We hope that these writings can provide others with prose and information that can be applied like an antidotal balm to treat our communal ailment of future shock."
—Ting Ding 丁汀 & DeForrest Brown, Jr.
Malibongwe: Poems from the Struggle by ANC Women
In the late 1970s, Lindiwe Mabuza, a.k.a. Sono Molefe, sent out a call for poems written by women in anc camps and offices throughout Africa and the world. The book that resulted, published and distributed in Europe in the early 1980s, was banned by the apartheid regime.
Authorised by the editor, this re-issue of Malibongwe re-establishes a place for women artists in the history of South Africa's liberation. These are the struggles within the Struggle: a book that records the hopes and fears, the drives and disappointments, and the motivation and resilience of women at the front lines of the battle against apartheid. Here we see the evidence, too often airbrushed out of the narratives of national liberation, of a deep and unrelenting radicalism within women; of a dream of a South Africa in which not only freedom reigned, but justice too.
Studying Hunger Journals
In 1972 Bernadette Mayer began this project as an aid to psychological counseling, writing in parallel journals so that, as she wrote in one (in bed, on subways, at parties, etc.), her psychiatrist read the other. Using colored pens to “color-code emotions,” she recorded dreams, events, memories, and reflections in a language at once free-ranging and precise—a work that creates its own poetics. She sought “a workable code, or shorthand, for the transcription of every event, every motion, every transition” of her own mind and to “perform this process of translation” on herself in the interest of evolving an innovative, inquiring language. STUDYING HUNGER JOURNALS registers this intention within a body of poetry John Ashbery has called “magnificent.”