Fiction

A horror story of one woman's awful reinvention, M. S. Coe's The Formation of Calcium is disturbingly funny and completely unexpected.

Middle-aged Mary Ellen Washie has finally freed herself of her stultified past life in western New York state and moved to Florida. With the husband she's grown to hate firmly in her rearview mirror, and all ties to her family cut off, she changes her name, bleaches her hair, and befriends Natalie, a seemingly kind, martini-loving woman whom she promptly begins to manipulate. As her machinations propel her beyond the brink of who she used to be, Mary Ellen seeks to unburden herself—but not one to sit down with pen and paper, she narrates the events of her new life into a cassette tape recorder, giving each tape an innocuous name to keep the curious away. A riveting account of one woman's awful reinvention, M. S. Coe's new novel is disturbingly funny and completely unexpected. With elements of pulp noir and confessional literature, The Formation of Calcium depicts the bland misery of modern American life as one woman seeks her own ill-fated transformation.

Born in Las Vegas, Nevada, M. S. Coe is an American writer living in Guadalajara, Mexico. After she graduated with an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University, Clash Books published her first novel, New Veronia, in 2019. Coe's stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Electric Literature, Nashville Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has held residencies from the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, Petrified Forest National Park, and Ora Lerman Trust.

At an otherwise forgettable party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter spots a woman who instantly controls the room: gorgeous and distant and utterly white, the centre of everyone’s attention. Haunted into adulthood by her Korean father’s abandonment of his family, as well as the spectre of her beguiling, abusive white mother, the painter finds herself caught in a perfect trap. She wants Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or some confusion of all the above. Since she’s an artist, she will use art to get closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model. As for Hanne, what does she want? Her whiteness seems sometimes as cruel as a new sheet of paper.

When the paintings of Hanne become a hit, resulting in the artist’s first sold-out show, she resolves to bring her new muse with her to Berlin, to continue their work, and her seduction. But, just when the painter is on the verge of her long sought-after breakthrough, a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds in the art community, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for their imperialist and racist practices.

Torn between her desire to support the petition, to be a success, and to possess Hanne, the painter and her reality become more unstable and disorienting, unwilling to cut loose any one of her warring ambitions, yet unable to accommodate them all. Is it any wonder so many artists self-destruct so spectacularly? Is it perhaps just a bit exciting to think she could too?

Your Love Is Not Good stuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, between desire and art, and revels in the raining debris.

Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and 
musician who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hedva is the author of the essay 'Sick Woman Theory', originally published in 2016, which has now been translated into ten languages. Hedva is also the author of the novel On Hell, which was one of Dennis Cooper's favourite books of 2018, and the nonfiction collection Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain. Their albums are The Sun and the Moon and Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House.

An artist in her thirties weaves and unravels connections between the loom and the computer, DNA and technology, dreams and decisions

Thread Ripper is a double-stranded novel about weaving, programming, and pioneering women. A tapestry-weaver in her thirties embarks on her first big commission: a digitally woven tapestry for a public building. As she works, devoting all her waking hours to the commission, she draws engrossing connections between the stuff that life is made from – DNA, plant tissue, algorithms, text, and textile – and that which disrupts it – radiation, pests, entropy, and doubt. In the novel’s second strand, we meet Ada Lovelace, the 1830s mathematician and pioneer of computer programming, and mythical figures such as Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus, who wove and unpicked a shroud to put off her 108 suitors.

Contemplative yet clear-sighted, and reviving women’s histories, Amalie Smith’s bracing hybrid of a novel bares the aching interwovenness of art and life.

Inventive fiction that probes the tender places where human longings push through the cracks of a breaking world

Under Cancún’s hard blue sky, a beach boy provides a canvas for tourists’ desires, seeing deep into the world’s underbelly. An enigmatic encounter in Copenhagen takes an IT consultant down a rabbit hole of speculation that proves more seductive than sex. The collapse of a love triangle in London leads to a dangerous, hypnotic addiction. In the Nevada desert, a grieving man tries to merge with an unearthly machine.

After the Sun opens portals to our newest realities, haunting the margins of a globalised world that’s both saturated with yearning and brutally transactional. Infused with an irrepressible urgency, Eika’s fiction seems to have conjured these far-flung characters and their encounters in a single breath. Juxtaposing startling beauty with grotesquery, balancing the hyperrealistic with the fantastical, he has invented new modes of storytelling for an era when the old ones no longer suffice.

The crew of the Six-Thousand Ship consists of those who were born, and those who were made. Those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike start aching for the same things: warmth and intimacy. Loved ones who have passed. Shopping and child-rearing. Our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory.

Gradually, the crew members come to see their work in a new light, and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether they can carry on as before – and what it means to be truly living.

Structured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission, Ravn’s crackling prose is as chilling as it is moving, as exhilarating as it is foreboding. Wracked by all kinds of longing, The Employees probes into what it means to be human, while delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by the logic of productivity.

Translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken

One day in April the body of Owen Beausoleil, a poet, is found drowned. As the investigation begins, three people find themselves haunted by him – Noah Lang, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy; his wife, Kitty Lang, a psychotherapist; and Lolita Hammershøi, a ballet dancer and Owen’s close friend. As the three of them become bound up in the mystery of what happened to Owen, their lives begin to interweave in both expected, and unexpected ways. Meanwhile, Owen intervenes from the after-life, desperate to find out his fate. Interiors is a about how loss and desire shape our lives, and about what waits beyond the borders of everyday life.Jessie Widner’s debut novel Interiors is poised and poetic, a moving account of what happens to the lost inner lives of the people who leave us, ‘the invisible things that expand within the self … that leave no record’. The mood of the novel, an air of trepidation, stayed with me long after I put it down like a ghostly presence, echoing the novel's own fictional haunting.

Jessica Widner is a writer and academic. Her work has appeared in Extra Teeth, Gutter Magazine, and The Cardiff Review. Interiors is her first novel.

Call centre agents and migrant workers, soldiers and charity workers, fresh university graduates and street children — they all navigate the myriad of avenues in which their desires are entangled within the Philippines’ harsh and unforgiving conditions of migration and labour in Rogelio Braga’s collection of stories, Is There Rush Hour in A Third World Country? Now translated by Kristine Ong Muslim into English, the collection offers a glimpse of the lives of ordinary Filipinos, told amidst coup d’états, active conflict areas, late-night convenience store rendezvous, and bumper-to-bumper Manila traffic, given a considered dignity and nuance by one of the Philippines’ celebrated playwrights.

Rogelio Braga is an exiled playwright, novelist, essayist, and a political activist from the Philippines. They had published two novels, a collection of short stories, and a book of plays before they left the archipelago in 2018, borne of the increasing harassment they faced for their critical stance against the administration of then-President Rodrigo Duterte. Their satirical play against the infamous Marcos family, “Ang Mga Maharlika” was also controversial, drawing ire from supporters of current Philippine president Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Junior. Since 2022, Braga has been granted asylum status by the UK, and remains an active human rights advocate to this day.

“This exhilarating novel-poem situated in a dystopian future, is a quest to find out what is distinctive about humankind, a poetic and vigorous praise of reading, knowledge and art as the only way to survive. The Night of the World makes indeed a beautiful, powerful and meaningful reading that stays with you for a long time.” — Cristina Fuentes De La Roche OBE, Hay Literary Festival International Director

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is the author of two critically acclaimed books, What If Latin America Ruled the World?(Bloomsbury, 2010) winner of the Frantz Fanon Award, and Story of a Death Foretold (Bloomsbury, 2013) shortlisted for the 2014 Bread & Roses Award. More recently, In Defence of Armed/Art Struggle (Bogota: UTadeo, 2019), “A Future for the Philosophy of Liberation” in Decolonising Ethics (Pennsylvania University Press, 2020), and the poem Night of the World (The 87 Press, forthcoming 2021). Professor at the University of London.

JonBenet meets Kathy Acker in a rollicking coming-of-age tale set in the snow globe of Boulder, Colorado. With guest appearances by Little Lord Fauntleroy, H. P. Lovecraft, the Blue Fairy, a wind-up Walter Benjamin, a soft-toy Cthulhu, O (from Story of O), and many more. Neither tribute nor pastiche, The Memoirs of JonBenet by Kathy Acker investigates the "self" of very-late-capitalism in a collage of all that is right, and terribly wrong, in America. 

The Memoirs of JonBenet by Kathy Acker is published as part of the TrenchArt: Surplus Series, with an introduction by Peggy Kamuf and visual art by Klaus Killisch.

Michael du Plessis teaches Comparative Literature and English at the University of Southern California, where he is also completing a masters degree in Professional Writing. Du Plessis has written about a wide variety of subjects, from Goth culture to the French fin-de-siècle. He has also performed at Highways and at the MAK Center/Schindler House, amongst other venues.

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, CM, wild with grief and refusing everyone's good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM knows where X was born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora's box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, and which finally, in the present day, is being forced into an uneasy reunification.

Navina Sundaram is sitting in the editing room in Hamburg. She has managed to reduce the complexity of the Kemal Altun case to the required 2 minutes and 40 seconds for the political magazine; a journalistic feat considering the legal terminology and the international political situation, which must be presented in simple terms. She places her interview with the judge at the back. The audience therefore first gets an impression of perhaps the best-known deportation prisoner of the republic on trial here. The phone rings. I imagine she is displeased about the disturbance. It’s the day of the broadcast; the report still needs to be approved. It rings again. She answers. Peter Boultwood is on the phone and says, “Did you hear? Kemal jumped out of the window in the courtroom. He’s dead.” 

Merle Kröger lives in Berlin where she works as a novelist, screenwriter and dramaturg. She was a member of the Berlin film collective dog film (1992–1999) and founded pong  lm in 2001. Kröger is the co-author of Philip Scheffner’s internationally awarded films Revision (2012), Havarie (2016) and Europe (2022). Kröger has published five novels to date, including Grenzfall (2012), Havarie/ Collision (2015) and Die Experten/ The Experts (2021). Her novels have received numerous awards, including Best Crime Novel of the Year, the Radio Bremen Prize for Crime Fiction and the German Crime Fiction Prize.

Translated by Rubaica Jaliwala 

Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping is Derek Jarman’s only piece of narrative fiction. Written in 1971, it is a surreal, fabular, lyrical work – a literary fairytale acid-trip road movie hybrid – the energies and details of which influenced much of his later work across media. The story serves as a foundational text, laying out many of the themes, images and styling of Jarman’s work in painting, film and design whilst also being haunted by the then emerging ecological crisis in its juxtaposition of the beauty of nature with the reckless consumption of modernity.

This edition features facsimile images of the story’s handwritten drafts from Jarman’s archive, a link to an exclusive audio recording of Jarman himself reading the story in full, and is comprehensively informed by a vivid foreword from Philip Hoare, a deeply researched afterword by Jarman scholar Declan Wiffen, and a warm memoir by the artist Michael Ginsborg, a close friend of Jarman’s throughout the period of the story’s writing.

It's New York City, 1981, and everyone wants to be at the Emerson Club, from Cindy Crawford to Cindy Adams; from Famous Roger, one-time lion of the talk shows, to Sandy Miller, the "downtown" writer with the tattoos and the leather; from Lauren Hutton to the art star who does the thing with the broken plates. Everyone, that is, except Danny. Danny just works there, waiting tables to put himself through architecture school, turning tricks on the side. And when he's not on the clock, he's recording the sexual, aesthetic, and financial transactions that make up his life, in gruesome detail. But even a clever boy like Danny can wind up on the menu. Blinded by love for his fellow rent boy, Chip—as gorgeous as he is reckless—Danny is about to learn that there's more than one way to turn your body into cash, and that cynicism is no defense when the real scalpels come out. A gimlet-eyed crime novel with an inventively filthy mind, Rent Boy is Gary Indiana at his most outrageous—and his best.

A noir tour-de-force set in the world of hustlers from "one of America's darkest and funniest chroniclers." (The Guardian) 

“Je voyais ce qui était écrit sur les murs. Ce n’était plus les années 1990. Ce n’était même plus le Pacifique Nord-Ouest. Quelque chose était arrivé qui avait tout balayé et j’avais été abandonnée enfermée dans un sarcophage puant, rêvant de l’endroit où j’étais née, me sentant très triste parce que cet endroit aussi avait été ramassé et fourré dans la gueule du monde.”

Elle a 17 ans, sort à peine de l’adolescence et pourtant elle est déjà en rupture totale avec le monde qui l’entoure et la violente. Fuyant sa famille d’accueil, elle part à la recherche de Kim, une sœur adoptive adorée qui a pris la route un peu avant elle. En chemin, elle tombe sur une bande d’enfants perdus, junkies violents devenus vampires qui dérivent de concerts en hold-ups, de parkings de supermarchés en gares routières. Sur les routes crasseuses de l’Oregon, cette riot grrrl d’un genre un peu particulier commence à entendre une voix, celle d’une pionnière morte de froid des siècles auparavant, qui se mêlent à celles de toutes les laissées-pour-compte de la société américaine. 

Texte culte de la contre-culture aux USA, publié en 2010 et immédiatement salué comme un choc, le premier roman de Grace Krilanovich n’est pas un récit traditionnel. Héritière de William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Stephen King et David Lynch, elle explose les carcans de la narration et offre une œuvre à la lisière de la littérature gothique et du roman d’horreur, invitant à une plongée rare dans le milieu punk hardcore américain des années 1990.

At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror.

Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world politics and the War on Terror with the archeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself. Cyclonopedia is a middle-eastern Odyssey, populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets. The journey to the Underworld begins with petroleum basins and the rotting Sun, continuing along the tentacled pipelines of oil, and at last unfolding in the desert, where monotheism meets the Earth's tarry dreams of insurrection against the Sun.

'The Middle East is a sentient entity - it is alive!' concludes renegade Iranian archeologist Dr. Hamid Parsani, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The disordered notes he leaves behind testify to an increasingly deranged preoccupation with oil as the 'lubricant' of historical and political narratives. A young American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never arrives. Discovering a strange manuscript in her hotel room, she follows up its cryptic clues only to discover more plot-holes, and begins to wonder whether her friend was a fictional quantity all along. Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates, the US is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil ...

Mahasweta Devi is one of India's foremost literary figures, a prolific and best-selling author in Bengali of short fiction and novels, and a deeply political social activist who has been working in marginalized communities for decades.

Breast Stories is a collection of short fiction that focuses on the breast as more than a symbol of beauty, eroticism, or motherhood. Instead, it is seen as a harsh indictment of an exploitative social system and a weapon of resistance. At a time when violence towards women in India has escalated exponentially, Devi's acerbic writing exposes the inherently vicious systems in Indian society.

Publié cinq ans après L’Opoponax, Les Guérillères, second livre de Monique Wittig, vient à son heure pour souligner et fortifier notre conviction. Le talent de cet écrivain le porte, j’allais écrire, pour notre plaisir et notre profonde satisfaction, à faire du récit le lieu naturel de la contestation du langage, non pas contestation abrupte et maladroite, mais contestation habile par le biais d’une opération beaucoup plus subtile et toujours séduisante. Il semble, en effet, que mots et phrases soient deux fois présents dans le texte : d’abord comme les mots et les phrases de l’usage traditionnel, ensuite comme éléments actifs de l’autodestruction. La métamorphose est très frappante dans ce nouveau livre. Convaincante aussi, tant est sensible le renouveau des images, et leur force.Notons pour commencer, que les Guérillères (ce curieux féminin de « guérilleros ») ne sont ni les cousines, ni les lointaines descendantes des Amazones auxquelles Hérodote prêta le nom scythe d’Oiorpata, ou tueuses d’hommes. La destruction de l’homme n’est pas l’enjeu du combat que les guérillères ont décidé de mener jusqu’à son therme. Ce qu’elles combattent, c’est l’oppression, ou plutôt sa cause, le langage, celui qu’elles ont reçu des hommes, lesquels les ont, par ce moyen, d’abord nommées, puis soumises et réduites à la merci des mots. Ce qu’elles veulent promouvoir, c’est un monde nouveau où elles retrouveront l’expression de l’indépendance originelle. — André Dalmas, La Quinzaine littéraire (novembre 1969)

“The “opoponax” uses neither the language of adults nor that of children; he is neither the novelist nor a narrator. Confronting – in a moving “we” – the “he” and the “I”, he seems to have cancelled them out by the other: this voice which speaks in the present tense of very concrete things, which is gradually strengthening and discovering itself, could it not simply be ours?

My Opoponax is perhaps, indeed it is almost certainly the first modern book ever written about childhood. My Opoponax is the capital execution of ninety per cent of the books that have been written about childhood. It is the end of a certain literature and I thank God for it. It is a book that is both admirable and very important because it is governed by an iron rule, never or almost never broken, that of using only pure descriptive material, and only one tool, pure objective language. The latter takes on its full meaning here. It is the very same language – but brought to the plainsong by the author – that childhood uses to clear out and count its universe. Which is to say that my Opoponax is a masterpiece of writing because it is written in the exact language of the Opoponax.” (Marguerite Duras)

An experimental novella about the bounds of the self and the many forms of embodied expression.

Where does your body end and the world begin? How do you locate the limit between your self and others? A Rock, A River, A Street follows a young, Black woman who lives at the hazy border between Brooklyn and Queens in the not so distant present. As she rides the subway, walks around her neighborhood, visits the doctor, watches movies, attends dance class and tries to heal her body, we are brought into her conflicted relationship with language, as she recalls formative experiences from her childhood and absorbs the world around her. Acutely conscious of the soft, responsive nature of her physical self, and pushed and pulled by forces she cannot control, the narrator is vulnerable, terrifyingly open. Everything and everyone leaves an impression. Brooklyn-based artist Steffani Jemison (born 1981) moves deftly across narrative genres and styles in this novella, as she interrogates the boundedness of the self, the possibilities of plurality and the limits of performance.

A baroque work of intimate myth exploring one woman's interdimensional search for beauty and embodiment, through kaleidoscopic renderings of hospital corridors, brutal breakups, and passionate romance. 

The Fifth Wound is a phantasmagorical roman à clef about passion as a way of life. In one dimension, this is a love story—Aurora & Ezekiel—a separation and a reunion. In another, we witness a tale of multiple traumatic encounters with transphobic violence. And on yet another plane, a story of ecstatic visionary experience swirls, shatters, and sparkles. Featuring time travel, medieval nuns, knifings, and t4t romance, The Fifth Woundindulges the blur between fantasy and reality. Its winding sentences open like portals, inviting the reader into the intimacy of embodiment—both its pain and its pleasures.  

Named a must read book of 2023 by Nylon, BookRiot, Vulture, The Millions, and Ms. Magazine! 

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.

It was 1969, and temperatures were rising across the factories of the north as workers demanded better pay and conditions. Soon, discontent would erupt in what became known as Italy’s Hot Autumn. A young worker from the impoverished south arrives at Fiat’s Mirafiori factory in Turin, where his darker complexion begins to fade from the fourteen-hour workdays in sweltering industrial heat. His bosses try to withhold his wages. Our cynical, dry-witted narrator will not bend to their will. “I want everything, everything that’s owed to me,” he tells them. “Nothing more and nothing less, because you don’t mess with me.”

Around him, students are holding secret meetings and union workers begin halting work on the assembly lines, crippling the Mirafiori factory with months of continuous strikes. Before long, barricades line the roads, tear gas wafts into private homes, and the slogan “We Want Everything” is ringing through the streets.

Wrought in spare and measured prose, Balestrini’s novel depicts an explosive uprising. Introduced by Rachel Kushner, the author of the best-selling The Flamethrowers, We Want Everything is the incendiary fictional account of events that led to a decade of revolt.

Translated by Matt Holden
Introduction by Rachel Kushner

Part prose poem, part reflection on the relations between writing and place, Lagoon tells the story of the slow undoing of an idyll. In it the narrator walks for hours during long summer nights, gazing through the windows that line the streets. In between, she reflects on how she might write about the shifting space of the lagoon, where she spent summer holidays with her family years ago. In adolescence, the narrator watches quietly as her mother, father and sister go about building their holiday home. But she can sense something is awry, she just does not fully understand what.

Lagoon is the first novella by McCulloch.

Lagoon by Samantha McCulloch is the first title in Kunstverein Amsterdam's new imprint called First Drafts, which, inspired by artist and publisher Anne Turyn, celebrates experimental and commercially unviable work by publishing completed manuscripts that haven’t yet found a home in their first draft form. Importantly, each title is also the first attempt by the author to write in that particular form, or, to write at all.

A young filmmaker’s life is disrupted by a fated encounter with a Peruvian healer. Called to twin paths of artistic creation and mystic truth-seeking, they set out on a transcontinental journey. In the Pacific Northwest they meet K, a double agent working between art and technology, who invites them to test a secret program called Shaman.AI. This human-machine experiment, rooted in magic, produces a key to rewriting reality – a manifesto describing how entangled human and non-human intelligence will remake our technologies, identities and deepest beliefs.

Allado-McDowell (along with their AI writing partner GPT-3) weave fiction, memoir, theory and travelogue into an animist cybernetics – an air age blueprint. 

Cover art by Somnath Bhatt