Nicholas Muellner – författare

These beautiful, unsettling and playful photographs show how certain sci-fi tropes—from digital servants to sex robots—have been consistently gendered as femaleThe latest photobook from Brooklyn-based photographer Hannah Whitaker (born 1980) imagines the embodied forms of personified technology which have long been central to sci-fi narratives: digital servants, sex robots, machine-learning projects.Ursula addresses the consistency with which these figures are gendered as female, subservient and sexualized, and slyly points to our society's insidious failures to fully see women without imposing such roles and distinctions.Immersed in techno-futuristic design tropes, Whitaker's photographs—at once playful, maximalist and estranging—are accompanied by texts by David Levine and Dawn Chan.

A meditation on the meaning of text–image collaboration, from the author of Sprawl and Margaret the FirstAuthor Danielle Dutton's A Picture Held Us Captive asks what it means for a writer to work "with" someone or something else—to make art in dialogue with an energy not one's own. Dutton (born 1975) explores ekphrastic fiction, looking at a wide range of writers and artists including John Keene and Edgar Degas; Eley Williams and Bridget Riley; Ben Lerner and Anna Ostoya; Amina Cain and Bill Viola; Lydia Davis and Joseph Cornell; as well as her own textual responses to visual artists Richard Kraft and Laura Letinsky. A Picture Held Us Captive—which includes a series of images at once illustrative and refusing simple illustration—considers the ways in which ekphrasis operates as a diptych. A work of both commentary and self-reflection, Dutton considers a dialectic between art’s ability to make strange what has grown familiar and the writer’s desire to make recognizable the experience of one artwork in the space of another.Danielle Dutton is an American writer and the cofounder of the feminist press Dorothy. Born in California in 1975, Dutton now resides in Missouri where she teaches creative writing at Washington University in St Louis. She has authored four books, including Sprawl and Margaret the First. She contributed the text to Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera, a book of collages by Richard Kraft. Her fiction has appeared in major publications such as the Paris Review, Harper's and Guernica.

A call-and-response between Lutz’s photography of labor conditions in America and Saunders’ writings In Orange Blossom Trail, American writer George Saunders (born 1958) and American photographer Joshua Lutz (born 1975) offer an alternately poetic and searing evocation of the cruelty and tender beauty of contemporary American life. Lutz (whose photobooks, including Mind the Gap and Hesitating Beauty, have been named Best Art Books by Time and PhotoEye) and Saunders (Man Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and MacArthur Award recipient) first met on a magazine assignment, where they discovered a shared interest in both the psychological and material conditions of the laboring individual and the Buddhist teachings of attachment and the sacredness of existence. Through Lutz’s photos and three texts by Saunders, the book asks: When do we zoom in and when do we zoom out from the individual lives whose labor supports other lives? Orange Blossom Trail is a meditation, in two voices, on the alienation of the industrialized landscape and the brutality of American inequality. Replete with a cover printed in four-color silkscreen, white foil-stamped text and textured colored endpapers, the volume is treated with special touches while remaining affordable.