Weight of the Earth
The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz

By David Wojnarowicz
Edited by Lisa Darms and David O’Neill
Introduction by David Velasco

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

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Vzszhhzz

By Jeanne Graff

A novel that captures the glancing intersections of a loose group of artists and lawyers, restaurateurs, philosophers, wine-makers, and boxers.

Having dinner at the Triennale, Massimiliano is cooking Pho. He bought the ingredients a few days ago on his way back from Vietnam. The building was built in 1933, Malou went there as a child with Jacqueline, the fascist architecture and the name Triennale remained. A building named “every three years.” Massimiliano was born on December 6th, the same day as Malou…—from Vzszhhzz

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Social Practices

By Chris Kraus

Essays on and around art and art practices by the author of I Love Dick.

A border isn’t a metaphor. Knowing each other for over a decade makes us witnesses to each other’s lives. My escape is his prison. We meet in a bar and smoke Marlboros.—from Social Practices

Mixing biography, autobiography, fiction, criticism, and conversations among friends, with Social Practices Chris Kraus continues the anthropological exploration of artistic lives and the art world begun in 2004 with Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness. Social Practices includes writings from and around the legendary “Chance Event—Three Days in the Desert with Jean Baudrillard” (1996), and “Radical Localism,” an exhibition of art and media from Puerto Nuevo’s Mexicali Rose that Kraus co-organized with Marco Vera and Richard Birkett in 2012.

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Seasonal Associate

By Heike Geissler
Afterword by Kevin Vennemann
Translated by Katy Derbyshire

How the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt: a writer’s account of her experience working in an Amazon fulfillment center.

No longer able to live on the proceeds of her freelance writing and translating income, German novelist Heike Geissler takes a seasonal job at Amazon Order Fulfillment in Leipzig. But the job, intended as a stopgap measure, quickly becomes a descent into humiliation, and Geissler soon begins to internalize the dynamics and nature of the post-capitalist labor market and precarious work. Driven to work at Amazon by financial necessity rather than journalistic ambition, Heike Geissler has nonetheless written the first and only literary account of corporate flex-time employment that offers “freedom” to workers who have become an expendable resource. Shifting between the first and the second person, Seasonal Associate is a nuanced expose of the psychic damage that is an essential working condition with mega-corporations. Geissler has written a twenty-first-century account of how the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt.

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Now The Night Begins

Alain Guiraudie
Afterword by Bruce Hainley and Wayne Koestenbaum
Translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman

A novel that is a meditation on friendship, love, obsession, power, and abuse, by turns hyperrealist and phantasmagoric, recalling the work of Sade and Bataille.

And he leaves. I’m not happy, I’m pretty upset at myself, I wasn’t satisfied with him but I wouldn’t have been any better without him. I sit on the couch and think. I’m not actually thinking, it’s already been thought, I have to call Grampa… I need to hear his voice. I miss him.—from Now the Night Begins

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How The World Swung To The Right
Fifty Years of Counterrevolutions

By François Cusset
Translated by Noura Wedell

An examination of the reactionary, individualist, cynical, and belligerent shift in global politics to the right, implemented both by the right and the establishment left.

Systemic, euphemized, insidious and structural violence has increased. It is now objectively measurable by the gulf in revenues, by subjective malaise, or by the menace of ecological apocalypse, and also by their constant exacerbation.—from How the World Swung to the Right

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Gore Capitalism

By Sayak Valencia

Translated by John Pluecker

An analysis of contemporary violence as the new commodity of today’s hyper-consumerist stage of capitalism.

“Death has become the most profitable business in existence.”—from Gore Capitalism

Written by the Tijuana activist intellectual Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism is a crucial essay that posits a decolonial, feminist philosophical approach to the outbreak of violence in Mexico and, more broadly, across the global regions of the Third World. Valencia argues that violence itself has become a product within hyper-consumerist neoliberal capitalism, and that tortured and mutilated bodies have become commodities to be traded and utilized for profit in an age of impunity and governmental austerity.

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Dusty Pink

By Jean-Jacques Schuhl

Translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman

A cult classic in France, the first translation of a novel that captures a subjective stroll through an underground, glamorous Paris

finally there are the rolling stones who call for all these at the same time among them and around them: the policeman, the cross-dresser, the dancer, Frankenstein, the dandy, the robot—from Dusty Pink

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Break Up

A novel in essays that locates a “romance” within the mesh of electronic communication.

So I didn’t call you: instead I posted a new avatar of myself without my habitual dark glasses. I have learned: an image, any image, is a blind. All avatars give different information, illusions of contact called Telepresence, none of them the real thing. You texted me, 3 am, from some station … As though it made any difference. But it did.—from Break.up

In this “novel in essays,” Joanna Walsh simultaneously flees and pursues an ambiguous partner in an affair conducted mostly online. Traversing Europe, she awaits emails and texts and PMs, awash in her dreams, offering succinct meditations on connection and communication. If Marguerite Duras situated the telephone as the twentieth century’s preferred hopeless form of connection, Walsh pinpoints the nodal points of a “romance” within today’s mesh of electronic communication.

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Wars and Capital

By Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato

Translated by Ames Hodges

A critique of capital through the lens of war, and a critique of war through the lens of the revolution of 1968.

“We are at war,” declared the President of the French Republic on the evening of November 13, 2015. But what is this war, exactly?

In Wars and Capital, Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato propose a counter-history of capitalism to recover the reality of the wars that are inflicted on us and denied to us. We experience not the ideal war of philosophers, but wars of class, race, sex, and gender; wars of civilization and the environment; wars of subjectivity that are raging within populations and that constitute the secret motor of liberal governmentality. By naming the enemy (refugees, migrants, Muslims), the new fascisms establish their hegemony on the processes of political subjectivation by reducing them to racist, sexist, and xenophobic slogans, fanning the flames of war among the poor and maintaining the total war philosophy of neoliberalism.

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Vile Days

Gary Indiana
edited by Bruce Hainley

Gary Indiana’s collected columns of art criticism from the Village Voice, documenting, from the front lines, the 1980s New York art scene.

In 1985, the Village Voice offered me a job as senior art critic. This made my life easier and lousy at the same time. I now had to actually enter all those galleries instead of peeking in the windows. At times, the only tangible perk was having the chump for a fifth of vodka whenever twenty more phonies had flattered my ass off in the course of a working week.—from Vile Days

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After Kathy Acker
A Literary Biography

By Chris Kraus

Rich girl, street punk, lost girl and icon… scholar, stripper, victim, and media-whore: The late Kathy Acker’s legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, created mostly by Acker herself. Twenty years after her death, Acker’s legend has faded, making her writing more legible.
In this first, fully authorized, biography, Chris Kraus approaches Acker both as a writer and as a member of the artistic communities from which she emerged. At once forensic and intimate, After Kathy Acker traces the extreme discipline and literary strategies Acker used to develop her work, and the contradictions she longed to embody. Using exhaustive archival research and ongoing conversations with mutual colleagues and friends, Kraus charts Acker’s movement through some of the late twentieth century’s most significant artistic enterprises.

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Foams
Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology

By Peter Sloterdijk
Translated by Wieland Hoban

Foams completes Peter Sloterdijk’s celebrated Spheres trilogy: his 2,500-page “grand narrative” retelling of the history of humanity, as related through the anthropological concept of the “Sphere.” For Sloterdijk, life is a matter of form and, in life, sphere formation and thought are two different labels for the same thing. The trilogy also offers his corrective answer to Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, reformulating it into a lengthy meditation on Being and Space—a shifting of the question of who we are to a more fundamental question of where we are.

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The Complete Madame Realism
and Other Stories

By Lynne Tillman
Introduction by M. G. Lord
Afterword by Andrew Durbin

The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories gathers together Lynne Tillman’s groundbreaking fiction/essays on culture and places, monuments, artworks, iconic TV shows, and received ideas, written in the third person to record the subtle, ironic, and wry observations of the playful but stern “Madame Realism.” This new collection also includes the complete stories of Tillman’s other persona, the quixotic author Paige Turner (whose investigation of the language of love overshoots any actual experience of it), and additional stories and essays that address figures such as the “Translation Artist” and Cindy Sherman.

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OrdinaryManofCinema

The Ordinary Man of Cinema

By Jean Louis Schefer
Translated by Max Cavitch, Noura Wedell and Paul Grant

When it was first published in French in 1980, The Ordinary Man of Cinema signaled a shift from the French film criticism of the 1960s to a new breed of film philosophy that disregarded the semiotics and post-structuralism of the preceding decades. Schefer describes the schizophrenic subjectivity the cinema offers us: the film as a work projected without memory, viewed by (and thereby lived by) a subject scarred and shaped by memory. The Ordinary Man of Cinema delineates the phenomenology of movie-going and the fleeting, impalpable zone in which an individual’s personal memory confronts the cinema’s ideological images to create a new way of thinking.

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Iguala43

The Iguala 43

The Truth and Challenge of Mexico’s Disappeared Students

By Sergio González Rodríguez
Translated by Joshua Neuhouser

On the night of September 26th, 2014, policemen attacked a group of student protestors in the Mexican town of Iguala. Forty-three of these students were then kidnapped and turned over to criminals who allegedly tortured and murdered them, and then burned their corpses. The families of the victims refused to accept the official story, which placed all blame on local actors and absolved the federal government of any culpability. The anger provoked by this atrocity, one of the most barbaric acts in recent times, divided Mexican society in two: on one side were those who unwaveringly supported the cause of the students and on the other those who accepted the government’s “historic truth.”

Written in memory of the forty-three students, this well-researched and powerfully argued book uncovers the agents, causes, and factors responsible for this unspeakable crime.

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BookofMutter

Book of Mutter

By Kate Zambreno

Composed over thirteen years, Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes—and dead calm—of grief. Book of Mutter is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author’s searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of her mother’s death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modeled the book’s formless form on Bourgeois’s Cells sculptures–at once channeling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space.

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Another Morocco

Selected Stories

By Abdellah Taïa
Translated by Rachael Small

Another Morocco collects short stories from Taïa’s first two books, Mon Maroc (My Morocco) and Le rouge du tarbouche, both published before this pivotal moment. In these stories, we see a young writer testing the porousness of boundaries, flirting with strategies of revelation and concealment. These are tales of life in a working-class Moroccan family, of a maturing writer’s fraught relationship with language and community, and of the many cities and works that have inspired him.

With a reverence for the subaltern—for the strength of women and the disenfranchised—these stories speak of humanity and the construction of the self against forces that would invalidate its very existence. Taïa’s work is, necessarily, a political gesture.

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Crazy for Vincent

By Hervé Guibert
Introduction by Bruce Hainley
Translated by Christine Pichini

Crazy for Vincent begins with the death of the figure it fixates upon: Vincent, a skateboarding, drug-addled, delicate “monster” of a boy in whom the narrator finds a most sublime beauty. By turns tender and violent, Vincent drops in and out of French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert’s life over the span of six years (from 1982, when he first met Vincent as a fifteen-year-old teenager, to 1988). After Vincent’s senseless death, the narrator embarks on a reconnaissance writing mission to retrieve the Vincent that had entered, elevated, and emotionally eviscerated his life, working chronologically backward from the death that opens the text. Assembling Vincent’s fragmentary appearances in his journal, the author seeks to understand what Vincent’s presence in his life had been: a passion? a love? an erotic obsession? or an authorial invention? A parallel inquiry could be made into the book that results: Is it diary, memoir, poem, fiction? Autopsy, crime scene, hagiography, hymn? Crazy for Vincent is a text the very nature of which is as untethered as desire itself

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Aberrant Movements

The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze

By David Lapoujade
Translated by Joshua David Jordan

In Aberrant Movements, David Lapoujade offers one of the first comprehensive treatments of Deleuzian thought. Drawing on the entirety of Deleuze’s work as well as his collaborations with Félix Guattari, from the “transcendental empiricism” of Difference and Repetition to the schizoanalysis and geophilosophy of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Lapoujade explores the central problem underlying the delirious coherence of Deleuze’s philosophy: aberrant movements. These are the movements that Deleuze wrests from Kantian idealism, Nietzsche’s eternal return, and the nonsense of Lewis Carroll; they are the schizophrenic processes of the unconscious and the nomadic line of flight traversing history—in short, the forces that permeate life and thought. Tracing and classifying their “irrational logics” represent the quintessential tasks of Deleuzian philosophy.

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Three Month Fever

The Andrew Cunanan Story

By Gary Indiana
Introduction by Christopher Glazek

First published in 1999, Gary Indiana’s Three Month Fever is the second volume of his famed crime trilogy, now being republished by Semiotext(e). (The first, Resentment, reissued in 2015, was set in a Menendez trial-era L.A.) In this brilliant and gripping hybrid of narrative and reflection, Indiana considers the way the media’s hypercoverage transformed Andrew Cunanan’s life “from the somewhat poignant and depressing but fairly ordinary thing it was into a narrative overripe with tabloid evil.”

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Dividuum

Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution

By Gerald Raunig

Translated by Aileen Derieg

As the philosophical, religious, and historical systems that have produced the “individual” (and its counterparts, society and community) over the years continue to break down, the age of “dividuality” is now upon us. The roots of the concept of the “dividuum” can be traced back to Latin philosophy, when Cicero used the term to translate the “divisible” in the writings of Epicurus and Plato; later, medieval scholars utilized the term in theological discussions on the unity of the trinity. Grounding himself in the writings of the medieval bishop Gilbert de Poitiers and his extensive commentaries on Boethius, Gerald Raunig charts a genealogy of the concept and develops a philosophy of dividuality as a way of addressing contemporary modes of production and forms of life. Through its components of dispersion, subsistence, and similarity, dividuality becomes a hidden principle of obedience and conformity, but it also brings with it the potential to realize disobedience and noncompliant con/dividualities.

Atlantic Island

By Tony Duvert

Translated by Purdey Lord Kreiden and Michael Thomas Taren

Tony Duvert’s novel Atlantic Island (originally published in French in 1979) takes place in the soul-crushing suburbs of a remote island off the coast of France. It is told through the shifting perspectives of a group of pubescent and prepubescent boys, ages seven to fourteen, who gather together at night in secret to carry out a series of burglaries throughout their neighborhood. The boys vandalize living rooms and kitchens and make off with, for the most part, petty objects of no value. Their exploits leave the adult community perplexed and outraged, especially when a death occurs and the stakes grow more serious.

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State and Politics

Deleuze and Guattari on Marx

By Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc

Translated by Ames Hodges

Often approached through their “micropolitics of desire,” the joint works of Deleuze and Guattari are rarely part of the discussion when classical and contemporary problems of political thought come under scrutiny. Yet if we follow the trajectory from Anti-Oedipus (1972) to A Thousand Plateaus (1980), it becomes clear that these problems were redeveloped during a period of historical transition marked by the end of the wars of decolonization, the transformation of global capitalism, and by recombinations of the forces of collective resistance that were as deep as they were uncertain.

Collected Essays

By Robert Glück

Since cofounding San Francisco’s influential New Narrative circle in 1979, Robert Glück has been one of America’s finest prose stylists of innovative fiction, bending narrative into the service of autobiography, politics, and gay writing. This collection brings together for the first time Glück’s nonfiction, a revelatory body of work that anchors his writing practice. Glück’s essays explore the ways that storytelling and selfhood are mutually embedded cultural forms, cohering a fractured social reality where generating narrative means generating identity means generating community.

A Novel

By Natasha Stagg

One day, I was not famous, the next day, I was almost famous and the temptation to go wide with that and reject my past was too great. When I was legit famous, it was hard to tell when the change had occurred… If I had been born famous, the moment I would have started engaging in social media, I would have seen this fame, not the rise of it. But first I saw the low numbers, and later, the high ones.—from Surveys

How The World Swung To The Right Fifty Years of Counterrevolutions

By François Cusset Translated by Noura Wedell

Gore Capitalism

By Sayak Valencia

Translated by John Pluecker

Dusty Pink

By Jean-Jacques Schuhl

Translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman

Break Up

Wars and Capital

By Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato

Translated by Ames Hodges

Vile Days

Gary Indiana edited by Bruce Hainley

After Kathy Acker A Literary Biography

By Chris Kraus

Foams Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology

By Peter Sloterdijk Translated by Wieland Hoban

The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories

By Lynne Tillman Introduction by M. G. Lord Afterword by Andrew Durbin

The Ordinary Man of Cinema

By Jean Louis Schefer Translated by Max Cavitch, Noura Wedell and Paul Grant

The Iguala 43

The Truth and Challenge of Mexico’s Disappeared Students

By Sergio González Rodríguez Translated by Joshua Neuhouser

Book of Mutter

By Kate Zambreno

Another Morocco

Selected Stories

By Abdellah Taïa Translated by Rachael Small

Crazy for Vincent

By Hervé Guibert Introduction by Bruce Hainley Translated by Christine Pichini

Aberrant Movements

Three Month Fever

Dividuum

Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution

Atlantic Island

State and Politics

Deleuze and Guattari on Marx

Uncertain Reading

Collected Essays

Surveys

A Novel

How The World Swung To The Right
Fifty Years of Counterrevolutions

By François Cusset
Translated by Noura Wedell

Gary Indiana
edited by Bruce Hainley

After Kathy Acker
A Literary Biography

Foams
Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology

By Peter Sloterdijk
Translated by Wieland Hoban

The Complete Madame Realism
and Other Stories

By Lynne Tillman
Introduction by M. G. Lord
Afterword by Andrew Durbin

By Jean Louis Schefer
Translated by Max Cavitch, Noura Wedell and Paul Grant

By Sergio González Rodríguez
Translated by Joshua Neuhouser

By Abdellah Taïa
Translated by Rachael Small

By Hervé Guibert
Introduction by Bruce Hainley
Translated by Christine Pichini