A beautiful, expansive essay about care, dependence, and what it means to breathe in an age of environmental catastrophe
Amna, Nimo, Mouna - these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, ascends to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s, a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo, a self-made divorcee and a lover, a 'pious mama' donning her hijab, and, finally, a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister - who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years - in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed. Hallucinatory, erotic, and stylish, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.
In this heartfelt exploration of queer fandom, legendary poet CAConrad charts the lasting power and pull of Elvis
When unambitious scholar Ramoon Beltra receives a mysterious invitation to a lucrative six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland, he reluctantly complies with the unusual qualifying paperwork requiring several pages of detailed measurements and photographs of his entire body. Beltra soon finds himself in the deserted university town of Lerna, together with twenty-three other 'novices' subject to the same undisclosed project - all of them doppelgangers of Beltra himself. At first, Beltra is the only one to bristle at the school's dizzying array of rules and regulations, but this all changes with the onset of an uncontrollable epidemic, and the fellows begin dying off one by one... The Novices of Lerna is a meditation on identity, surveillance, and isolation that remains eerily relevant. Shot through with wry humour and tender absurdity, this novella offers a perfect introduction to Angel Bonomini's incomparable body of work.
A former historian is spending time in a residential home - but is it an artist's retreat, a sanatorium, or a mental institute?
The City of Durham, 1434. Out of a storm, an aging minstrel arrives at the cathedral to entertain the city's most powerful men. Mother Naked is his name, and the story he's come to tell is the Legend of the Fell Wraith: the gruesome 'walking ghost' some say slaughtered the nearby village of Segerston forty years earlier. But is this monster only a myth, born from the dim minds of toiling peasants? Or does the Wraith - and do the murders - have roots in real events suffered by those fated to a lifetime of labour? As Mother Naked weaves the strands of the mystery - of class, religion, art, and ale - it starts to seem as though the chilling truth might be closer to his privileged audience than they could ever imagine. Taking its inspiration from a single payment entered into Durham's Cathedral rolls, 'Modyr Nakett' was lowest-paid performer in over 200 years of records. Set against the traumatic shadow of the Black Death and the Peasant's Revolt, Mother Naked speaks back from the margins in a fury of imaginative recuperation.
When Graham Caveney was a child the word 'cancer' was unspeakable, only uttered in jokes told by people too frightened to say the word in any other context. Now the boy with perpetual nervousness is a fifty-something man, and the oncologist in front of him is saying words evacuated of all meaning: Inoperable. Incurable. In this startling and deeply moving memoir from one of the great chroniclers of British working-class life, Graham Caveney charts a year of disease from diagnosis to past 'original sell-by-date'. Shot through with Northerness, tenderness, and Caveney's trademark humour, The Body in the Library reflects on an unfinished lifetime filled with books and with love. What's it like to realise that the books on your shelf will remain unread? That the book you are writing will be your last - that you have become your own deadline?
In these delightful, melancholy prose sketches Maeve Brennan goes in pursuit of the ordinary, taking us on a tour of the cheap hotels, unassuming restaurants, and crowded streets of New York City.
An artist in her late twenties awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear. She is diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the specter of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year - a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned - while living alone in a New York City studio apartment with her dog. Through a series of fleeting and often humorous encounters - with neighbours, an ex-lover, doctors, strangers, family members, faraway friends, and with the lives and works of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and philosophers - making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival. At once a rumination on silence and a novel on seeing, The Hearing Test is a work of vitalizing intellect and playfulness which marks the arrival of a major new literary writer with a rare command of form, compression, and intent.
The spaceship Audition is hurtling through towards an event horizon. Squashed immobile into its rooms are three giants: Alba, Stanley, and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing.
For readers of W. G. Sebald and Agustin Fernandez Mallo, this archaeological novel digs into Europe's soil, uncovering a long history of violence and expropriation.
In this meditative and inventive essay, Daisy Lafarge explores metaphors of love and disease as she seeks to understand our intimacy with microbial life.
The debut novel by acclaimed poet Lisa Robertson, in which a poet realizes she's written the works of Baudelaire.
A multi-faceted, matryoshka doll of a novel which asks how far we are ever able to understand ourselves.
From the brilliantly original novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman comes Mothercare, an honest and beautifully written account of a sudden, drastically changed relationship to one's mother, and of the time and labor spent navigating the American healthcare system.
In the stories that compose this scintillating collection, Maeve Brennan turns her anatomist's eye to the ugly feelings that teem just beneath the surface of family life - doing so, however, with an attention to detail that makes these unsparing portraits luminous and exquisite.
With a foreword by Huw Lemmey, this newly discovered, never-before-published novel - which pre-dates the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 - is a portrait of lost a Soho, as well as an important document of queer, working-class life, from a voice long overlooked.
In this radical and elegiac essay, Sam Johnson-Schlee invites readers to consider the dreams and fantasies we have about our homes, and their underlying reality.
From the author of Weird Fucks, a witty, bleak, and outrageous account of American girlhood.
Moments of clarity are rare and fleeting; how can we become comfortable outside of them, in the more general condition of uncertainty within which we make our lives? On Not Knowing forays into this rich, ambivalent space andcelebrates the defencelessness of not knowing yet - possibly of not knowing ever. Ultimately, this book shows how resisting the temptation of knowingness and embracing the position of not knowing becomes a form of love.
A 36 year old that looks like Eleven from Stranger Things works in a run-down hotel on an Isle of Wight battered by austerity. Polar bears emerge from t-shirts. Reebok Classics come to life. Blending fiction and critical writing and anarchic joy, this is a rakish, boundary erasing work that collides literary aesthetics with working class cultures and attitudes. Interrogating autobiographical material, it extends the avant-garde tradition to make it an ally for queer migrant experience, questions dreams of national belonging, while celebrating the radical potential of resistance, ingenuity, and friendship.
A New York Times Top Historical Fiction Pick of 2020An inventive and genre-bending new novel from a master of the form, exploring race, the legacy of past exploitation and present-day authorship. Who should be remembered, and who should tell their story? .
Sterling Karat Gold is Kafka's The Trial written for the era of gaslighting - a surreal inquiry into the real effects of state violence on gender-nonconforming, working-class and black bodies.
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