Books

The involuntary whispering of the dew-harvest.

A grimoire carved in scarlet, SALAMANDER'S WOOL is the inaugural full-length collection of writing by V Manuscript, amalgamating a vast array of arcane rituals into an ensorcelling poetic corpus. To read SALAMANDER'S WOOL is to consort with spirits and scry with dæmons, a linguistic alchemy which transmutes both language and reader.

V Manuscript is a poet and scriptomancer living in New York City.

Lava Lines explores the life forms, contemporary myths and geopolitical powers that shape volcanic landscapes. It gathers poetry, role play's transcription, film scripts and visual works of several artists, to touch on collective memory, non-human agency and myth-making.

The art works presented in the publication are by Leïla Arenou, Francisca Khamis, Naïmé Perrette, Camille Picquot, Rachel Pimm, Francisca Khamis, Juliette Lizotte, Riar Rizaldi and Arif Kornweitz 

It also archives live performances/screenings by Francisca Khamis, Arif Kornweitz, Mika Oki, Chooc Ly Tan, Adán Ruiz, Ana Vaz, and Rieko Whitfield.

M was exasperated by her friend's frivolous attitude toward the tragedy of losing a role. She was not trained to read the potential in R's wild imagination. Was it a commitment to realism, trained by the ideological morality of activism, that made her unresposive to the fantasy genre and vigilante characters? R's instinct was to court the unfamiliar, whereas M's training was to engage with criticality. Both these attributes could have interfaced in interesting and colourful ways, with sparks and currents, if and only if the social conditions of the time had been conducive to the arrival of a vigilante.

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, curator and author based in Mumbai and Berlin. She has been the executive director of Majlis Culture, a centre for rights discourse and art initiatives in Mumbai, 1998-2016; and artistic director of Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne, 2018-2021. Her areas of interest are documentary practices, urban cultures, migration movements, transient identities, and lived-in hybridity.

Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, Dao Strom’s Yellow Songs vibrates with the ramifications and ripples of Empire. Each of the four Yellow Songs books reckons with the intimate consequences of the colonial project, reconfiguring them into complex and lucid, literal and figurative songs of selfhood. Embodied, critical, wholehearted, collective, personal, genre-defying—Yellow Songs renders the brute force of history with tender precision. Art book quality printing in full color with felt paper inserts.

Yellow Songs 1: Voiced-Voiceless unearths, unwinds, un-bodies the violence of stigma, reclaiming the ventriloquized voice of David Bowie's "China Girl” through a lyric-critical essaying (assaying) of cultural tropes, racialized and gendered power plays, and memory.

Early Works collects Alice Notley’s first four out of print poetry collections, along with 80 pages of previously uncollected material. A must have for any Notley fan. Includes original collection cover artwork by Philip Guston, Philip Whalen and George Schneeman, among others.

From editor Nick Sturm’s “Introduction” to Early Works:

In the author’s note that begins Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005, Alice Notley writes, “My publishing history is awkward and untidy, though colorful and even beautiful.” I have always been enamored of this sentence, which reminds us that an array of dispersed and varying publishing contexts are the original sites that give shape to such a book’s form. It is also something of an invitation into that color and untidiness, a prompt to become more curious about the awkwardness and beauty of Notley’s publishing history. This book, Early Works, accounts for a significant portion of that history by bringing back into print the complete versions of her first four books, a little-known 22-poem sonnet sequence, and a large selection of early uncollected poems gathered from little magazines. In doing so, Early Works joins an important set of recent volumes that put Notley’s earlier poetry back into circulation, including Manhattan Luck (Hearts Desire, 2014), which collects four long poems written between 1978 and 1984, and Songs for the Unborn Second Baby, originally published by United Artists in 1979 and reissued in a facsimile edition by London-based Distance No Object in 2021. Each in their own way, and especially taken together, these books continue to confirm that, as Ted Berrigan writes in The Poetry Project Newsletter in 1981, “Alice Notley is even better than anyone has yet said she is.”

A debutante frees a hyena from the zoo so that it might take her place at her coming-out ball; an artist paints a portrait of a man’s dead wife, but finds she has painted herself instead; a woman makes love to a boar underneath a mountain of cats; a chicken is roasted with the brains and livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve and drops of divine liqueur; two noble sisters wonder whether anybody can be ‘a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense’; a psychoanalyst must decide what to do with the gift of a team of Russian rats trained to operate on humans. In this first complete edition of Leonora Carrington’s short stories, written throughout her life from her early years in Surrealist Paris to her late period in Dirty War-era Mexico City, the world is by turns subversive, funny, sly, wise and disarming.

We are not where we need to be but, we ain't where we were is the first volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against that reports on active research engaged within the artistic professions and institutions since 2017. Its aim is to question the underlying neoliberal logics in the contemporary art world, by orienting our object of study towards the struggles that impact it. With this publication, our hope is to put into practice various values specific to the campaign: the existence of a systematic and fair remuneration, a desire for transparency, the sharing of knowledge, and the visibilization of demands proper to the field of the visual arts and concomitant struggles. It is the result of militant experiences, at the convergence of our individual experiences and collective questionings.

With texts by Tiphanie Blanc, Antonella Corsani, Fanny Lallart, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ramaya Tegegne and an interview with Outrage Collectif.

Homophone Dictionary was originally a file that is compiled by the now 96-year-old former schoolteacher Susan Nixon. She has build up many collections throughout her life, almost all of them exist out of objects, except one: after her retirement she compiled a word document that by now exist out of almost 1000 homophones; two, or more words that you pronounce similar but have a different meaning, often the spelling is also different.

The document is structured as a dictionary and the homophones are illustrated with examples that are based on autobiographical information. The structure of Homophone Dictionary also refers to speech therapy exercises and concrete poetry.

“As a student nurse learning medical terminology, I became fascinated with understanding the roots of words. When I had a young family, words were a principal source of entertainment: it was not unusual for one of the children to slip from their chair at the dinner table and fetch a dictionary in order to settle a dispute or satisfy someone’s curiosity. Then I became a teacher and brought this love of words into the classroom. My habit of word collecting became the children’s habit – my pupils became ‘word-lovers’ and ‘list-makers.’

I casually collected homophones for years. When introducing homophones into the classroom, the kids found definitions dull; the typical reaction was, ‘Yes, but give me a sentence using the word!’ and this idea emerged: a book of sentences demonstrating the meanings of homophone pairs or sets.”

Offset print
20,4 × 12,4 cm
edition of 500

Responses to Untitled (eye with comet) (c.1985) by Paul Thek is the sixth and final anthology in a series that gathered responses to works of art made during a period of the ongoing AIDS Crisis, from the identification of the virus in 1981 to the introduction of life-saving drugs in 1996.  

In this sixth iteration, responses were sought to the painting Untitled (eye with comet) by Paul Thek. The work was found in his storage after his death from AIDS in 1988. 

List of contributors in order of appearance:

E.R. De Siqueira
Ben Estes
João Motta Guedes
Lucy Swan
Jon Rainford
Louis Shankar
Amy Evans Bauer
Hattie Morrison
Sammy Paloma
AN Grace
James Horton
Nick Wood
Sophie Paul
Jae Vail
Elizabeth Zvonar
Lars Meijer
Clay AD
Michel Kessler
Pablo Miguel Martínez
Emma Harris
Dylan McNulty-Holmes
Kitya Mark
Katherine Franco
Ainslie Templeton
Alistair McCartney
John Brooks
Jesse Howarth
jimmy cooper
Felix Pilgrim
Nicholas Chittenden Morgan
Murphy O’Neir
Rachel Cattle
Isabel Nolan
Susan Finlay
Ted Simonds
Brooke Palmieri
Kate Morgan
Ashleigh A. Allen
Diogo Gama
JP Seabright
Hugo Hagger
Amanda Kraley
Brendan Cook
Matt Bailey
Charlotte Flint
Rodney Schreiner
Lucy Price
Morgan Melhuish
Jordan Weitzman
Jaakko Pallasvuo
Alex Fiorentino
Harald Smart
Marguerite Carson
loll jung
Richard Porter
Nicholas Kalinoski
Hedi El Kholti
Edmund Francis English
Ted Bonin

In the mid-1960s, legendary artist and writer Joe Brainard (I Remember) teamed with poets such as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, Kenneth Koch, Ted Berrigan, and many more for these pioneering collaborative comic strips—unavailable for decades and collected here for the first time.

“PEOPLE OF THE WORLD… RELAX!”

In the creative hotbed of 1960s New York, Joe Brainard was a whirlwind. He was a maker of paintings, assemblages, collages, book covers, poetry-reading flyers, and more. But some of his most exciting work was done with his friends. In 1964, the twenty-two-year-old Brainard turned his talents to rewiring the lowly comic book form into something new and surprising. He invited his friends Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Peter Schjeldahl, Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, and others—all of them New York School poets—to collaborate with him on comics that they would write and he would draw.

The results were unlike any comics seen before. Previously available only on the rare-book market (at very high prices) but available here under one cover for the first time, the two issues of C Comics still feel as fresh as when the first page rolled off the mimeograph machine more than sixty years ago. Brainard’s energetic line and joyful humor charge across every page, illustrating O’Hara’s recasting of a cowboy as a mash-note-writing lover, Padgett’s experiments with traditional cartoon sound effects (ROAR! GRRR! SKREE!), cameos by Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, and heaps of Dadaesque delights.

This edition includes a foreword from Padgett and an essay by comics historian Bill Kartalopolous, who details the creation (and creators) of C Comics. A masterpiece of collaboration and spontaneity, C Comics is a testament to the vastness of Brainard’s creativity and his ability to push any artistic form in a new and powerful direction.

Foreword by Ron Padgett
Contributions by Bill Kartalopoulos

A facsimile of the GALA Committee's mock auction catalog for an artistic intervention into the props and plots of Melrose Place.

Originally published in a limited run in 1998, Primetime Contemporary Art documented In the Name of the Place, a radical two-year intervention by a group of artists, initiated by Mel Chin and known as the GALA Committee, on the primetime television show Melrose Place. This extremely rare artist's book is reproduced for the first time as a facsimile edition.

The artists comprising the GALA Committee worked with the producers of Melrose Place to develop a series of political works that were used as props and plot devices across two seasons of the show, providing surreptitious commentary on reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS, the Gulf War, domestic terrorism, corporate malfeasance and substance abuse. Some of these topics were banned by the FCC at the time, and the group's works allowed for the artists and the show to create political commentary that went unnoticed by censors. The artworks they produced were exhibited at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1997 and then sold at an auction at Sotheby's to support several charities. Primetime Contemporary Art was created by Mel Chin and Helen Nagge as a mock auction catalog documenting the artwork made for the show and the conceptual framework of the GALA Committee.

If there is a centre around which the language of this pamphlet circulates, then it is Palestine. As this centre, Palestine enables a transformative power that persistently and steadfastly turns repression and silencing into solidarity. Essay-fiction, prose poetry, radical philosophy, speculative nonfiction — this uncategorizable collection of texts brings militant inquiry to each utterance, each narrative turn, in acts of transnational and transhistorical becoming.

Nova Scotia House takes us to the heart of a relationship, a community and an era, both a love story and a lament. 

In this profound meditation on grief, Johnny looks back at his relationship with his life partner, Jerry, after his AIDS-related death. When they met, nearly thirty years ago, Johnny was 19, Jerry was 45. They made a life on their own terms in Jerry’s flat: 1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny is still there today—but Jerry is gone, and so is the world they knew. 

Intimate, visionary, and profoundly original—as well as raw, hot, and hilarious—Nova Scotia House marks the debut of a vibrant new voice in contemporary fiction.

Translated from the French by the author.

“From time to time, there occurs what suspends time, revelation—at least for certain people, martyrs. But then the apocalypse, revelation, is withdrawn, occulted by the ‘apocalypse,’ the surpassing disaster, so that symptomatically apocalypse’s primary sense (from Greek apokalypsis, from apokalyptein to uncover, from apo- + kalyptein to cover) is occulted by its secondary meaning, and martyr’s primary sense, witness, is occulted by its secondary, vulgar meaning: ‘a person who suffers greatly or is killed because of their political or religious beliefs’… While the Arab ‘apocalypse’ as surpassing disaster leads to a withdrawal of Arabic tradition, the apocalypse as revelation leads to Arabic tradition’s vertiginous extension.” — from the Foreword by Jalal Toufic

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She is a celebrated writer, essayist, and playwright, and is the author of more than twenty books in all these disciplines. Her work as a whole is a faithful record of the times and places she has lived in Beirut, Paris, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. At least eighteen works by Adnan have been published in English. They include Sitt Marie Rose (Post-Apollo Press, 1982); The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; Premonition (Kelsey Street Press, 2014); Surge (Nightboat Books, 2018); Time (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award; and Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020). In 2021, Litmus Press published a second edition of Journey to Mount Tamalpais (originally published by The Post-Apollo Press), which included nine new ink drawings by Adnan. Her paintings, described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as "stubbornly radiant abstractions," have been widely exhibited. Spanning media and genres, Adnan's writings have led to numerous collaborations with artists and musicians, including the French part of CIVIL warS, a multi-language opera by American stage director Robert Wilson, performed in Lyon and Bobigny in 1985.

What does an oracle look like? gathers essays and drawings made by Perri MacKenzie between 2020 and 2024, themed loosely around pottery painting and vocal expression. The drawings, rendered in splashy India ink and collage, range from expressive sketches to theatrical still lives and experimental bandes dessinées. The book presents for the first time the essay Cathedral. Part memoir, part literary/sonic investigation, it meditates on the vocal texture of a Hollywood actor.

Designed by Ilke Gers.

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

as the non-world falls away is set of fragmented poetic compositions, created through iPhone scans of the artists notebook that have then been worked over digitally, testing the boundaries between image and text in a palimpsestic manner

WITHOUT THE E is a series of pamphlets responding to a presence or an absence felt in contemporary digital culture.

The Hortus  project is an open investigation into the nature of seemingly common objects through 'Floriography', urban gardens, and the history of female rights. Hortus was inspired by urban gardens in West Amsterdam and created with its plants by Lilia Luganskaia. 

Joanna Cresswell about the 'Hortus':

History teaches us that a language of flowers can communicate endless things about the culture in which it emerged, and herein lies Lilia Luganskaia's interest. Taking inspiration from the world of 19th Century sentimental flower books, Hortus presents itself as a set of notes towards a modern handbook for contemporary floriography, considering what the discipline might look like today. By collecting common flora across one year in the urban gardens around her home in Amsterdam and cross-referencing their meanings with publications from the past, Luganskaia reflects on their natures, their roles, and the symbolic familiarity they might hold for the communities living with them. A female artist and reader of the twenty-first century, she seeks out the essence of modern life through her lens, and through flowers, just like the women who came before her. 

Lilia Luganskaia (1990) Russian - Dutch multidisciplinary artist and author, based in Amsterdam. In her artistic practice, Lilia uses her background in documentary techniques to focus on what she calls ‘investigating reality’.  Her practice is research-based, Lilia decodes abstract notions such as love, tourism, bureaucracy, politics, and feminism through the use of constructed images, sculptures, videos, and installations. One of the key elements of her work is to understand multiple aspects of the photographic image.

A previously unpublished collection of 60 ink pictograms, drawn between 1976 and 1996, originally printed individually as A2 plane prints.

An early progenitor of the artist's book genre, Warja Honegger-Lavater was born in Winterthur, Switzerland in 1913. She worked as an illustrator for the magazine Jeunesse from 1944-1958, and moved to New York shortly thereafter where she began a wonderful series of artist's books. 
These books were published between 1962 and 1971, an exceptionally ripe time for artists to turn to the bookform, a time when the most often cited "first" artist's book also appeared, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) by Ed Ruscha.

All of Honegger-Lavater's books are made using the accordion-fold binding. Her aesthetic has been aptly described as "very clean, very Swiss." Each book tells a story, sequentially, like traditional books, but varying from them by rarely using words. Instead she chooses a symbol to represent, for example, a character, as in the red dot standing in for Red Riding Hood in Little Red Riding Hood.

This monograph covers more than fifty years of creation by Art & Language, whose artists are at the origin of conceptual art. Through unpublished texts by Matthew Jesse Jackson and Art & Language, a transcript of their opera libretto Victorine, and an interview with the artist collective, this publication questions their journey, and more broadly, the relationship between contemporary art and conceptual art.

The permanent collection of the Château de Montsoreau – Museum of Contemporary Art has grown to include 800 works from Art & Language. To celebrate this event, the museum produced a major exhibition and a publication titled Reality (Dark) Fragments (Light). The monograph and exhibition look back at 50 years of creation by these critical, provocative, subversive, punk art collective. They question the main issues involved in Art & Language's work: conversation as an artwork, description, transdiciplinarity, crisis in the relationship between the artist, the museum and the art gallery.

Edited by Marie-Caroline Chaudruc.
Foreword by Marie-Caroline Chaudruc.
Text by Matthew Jesse Jackson, interview with Art & Language by Victorine Meurent.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Unbidden Tongues #5: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Between the Teeth at Manifold Books, Amsterdam, November 28, 2021 – January 22, 2022.

​Drawing on artist, poet and filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s extensive and largely unexhibited archive of ‘work on paper’, Unbidden Tongues #5: Between the Teeth is a publication-turned-exhibition and the fifth title in the series. From never-realised film scripts to concrete poetry and artists statements written intimately in the first person, the collection of material selected for this occasion presents the varying ways with which Cha drew on her personal and familial experience as an immigrant to conceptually grapple with language and its mediation and suppression, particularly, in this case, in its written form.

La sexualité comme un problème proprement philosophique de la psychanalyse.

La satisfaction de parler contient en soi une clé de la satisfaction sexuelle (et non l'inverse) – une clé de la sexualité et de ses propres contradictions. Alenka Zupančič aborde la question de la sexualité comme un problème proprement philosophique de la psychanalyse – celle de Freud et de Lacan – et non celle des praticiens cliniciens tels que décrits par Lacan « orthopédistes de l'inconscient ». Que se passe-t-il, comme l'affirme Lacan, si nous pouvons obtenir exactement la même satisfaction que le sexe par la parole, l'écriture, la peinture, la prière ou autres activités ? Il ne s'agit pas d'expliquer la satisfaction que procure la parole en indiquant son origine sexuelle, mais bien de souligner que la satisfaction de parler est elle-même sexuelle.

Alenka Zupančič soutient que la sexualité est à la limite d'un « circuit court » entre ontologie et épistémologie. La sexualité et le savoir sont structurés autour d'une négativité fondamentale qui les unit au point de l'inconscient. L'inconscient (en tant que lien avec la sexualité) est le concept d'un lien inhérent entre l'être et la connaissance dans leur négativité même.

Alenka Zupančič est une philosophe lacanienne, spécialiste renommée de Nietzsche, professeure à l'European Graduate School / EGS et à l'Université de Nova Gorica, Slovénie. Elle est également research advisor et professeure à l'Institut de philosophie du Centre de recherche de l'Académie slovène des Sciences et des Arts. Avec Slavoj Žižek et Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupančič est l'une des figures les plus incontournables de l'Ecole de psychanalyse théorique de Ljubljana dont les travaux s'intéressent aux relations entre sexualité, ontologie et inconscient, à la critique de la théorie du sujet et à l'exploration théorique du concept lacanien du Réel.

Tender yet brutal vignettes on a girlhood in Gaza, Palestine, filled with honey and warmth.

Winner of the Creative Award in the 2022 Palestine Book Awards.

Chosen as a 2021 Book of the Year by The White Review, Middle East Eye & The New Arab.

Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies is written for those who had to leave—collected remembrances of a childhood in Gaza by a woman far from Palestine’s sun and sea. Overindulgent, chaotic and sentimental, Heba Hayek’s narrator struggles to navigate life in colder, unfamiliar worlds. She holds tightly to memories of home, hoping they will lead back to her sisters and mothers.

With brilliance and grace, Hayek’s vignettes explore the methods of survival nurtured by Palestinian women in the face of colonial occupation and patriarchy—the power of community care, and of loving what’s not meant to be loved. Her reflections reveal the intimate magnificence and quiet devastation of everyday life: a family drive on the shore, waxing for the first time with aunties, or peeling figs while waiting at a checkpoint.

Heba Hayek is a London-based, Gaza-raised Palestinian author, creative and facilitator. She completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Miami University, Ohio, and studied for an MA in Social Anthropology at SOAS University of London.

Heba’s first book, Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies, won the Creative Award in the 2022 Palestine Book Awards and was chosen as a 2021 Book of the Year by The White Review, Middle East Eye and The New Arab.

Surreal, psychedelic riffs on domestic objects from a trailblazing feminist artist. 

From her beginning in the mid-1960s through the early '70s, German artist Anna Oppermann (1940-1993) - best known for her encyclopedic, immersive installations - created an astonishing series of surreal, almost psychedelic drawings that quietly explode the private space of the home, and her experience within it. These early drawings contribute to a feminist reentering of spheres traditionally associated with women, casting everyday objects as symbolic, consequential protagonists: houseplants sprawl to take over the picture plane, windows and mirrors provide views into other worlds and tables display drawings that themselves open out into new domestic scenes. By placing her own body—her knees, arms, the back of her head—as reference points in the work, Oppermann emphasizes the gendered realms of the home and the relationships that we form to our private spaces.

This volume gathers these drawings and early installations in an English-language publication for the first time.