MOIST – förlag

"I had just gotten away from it all, by which I mean all those ordinary, boring things like skyscrapers, cigar-smoking industrialists, linoleum, plastics, television, westerns and marihuana. I had either seen or heard about them. Whether they are good or bad is beside the point..."A nameless graphic designer is haunted by the concentration camp in which he was once interned. Obsessed with his past, as well as Italy's present 'economic miracle' he retreats to a rural villa where he decorates the rooms with "arrows, signs, advertisements"; invents a new, purposefully incomprehensible typeface; and attempts to devise a marketing campaign for stones. Upon finally returning to Milan life becomes even more unbalanced. He loses his job and acquires a mistress whom he soon confuses both with his wife and the memory of the young, Czech woman he abandoned at the end of the war...Known primarily as a screenwriter for Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini and Andrei Tarkovsky among many others, Tonino Guerra also wrote poetry and fiction. Reissued to mark the centenary of Guerra's birth, and with a new introduction by acclaimed cultural critic Michael Bracewell, Equilibrium remains a relevant, powerful, and intensely visual account of a truly (post-)modern man.

"There was something so unreal about the neat Georgian houses opposite and the laurel ball trees in front of them that once again I saw England as a piece of antique porcelain. As something no longer used or displayed due to its unfashionable appearance and propensity to crack..." June 2016, and world-famous cellist and former "sexiest classical musician" Allegra Le Clef is suffering from a compound wrist fracture. Europe also crumbles... From the initial break in London, to the crisis in Athens, to trying and failing to patch things up in Amsterdam Allegra traverses the continent to the accompaniment of a Late Romantic soundtrack (plus Vangelis via Nigel Havers). When not sending emails to a BDSM obsessed catfish, or wondering whether a piece of Nazi jewellery might "lift one of my more sombre evening gowns," she attempts to ease her conscience by volunteering at a refugee centre known for its Syrian cuisine, yet remains oblivious to the numerous other personal and political disasters that are looming. Shocking, camp-and shockingly camp-My Other Spruce and Maple Self is nevertheless a profoundly sad book about a woman unable to come to terms with her own declining status, as well as that of the West.

It's fall (or autumn) 2018. The Trump administration wants to fortify the United States-Mexico border, Robert 'Beto' O'Rourke is running for Senate, and British grifter Nicki Smith has just secured a "low-paid glamour job" at the University of Texas' Jacques Lacan Foundation. In between sleeping with the air-conditioning repair guy (or man) and watching Kate Moss make-up commercials (or advertisements) Nicki completes the first ever American-English translation of Lacan's newly discovered and highly controversial notebook - without knowing any French. An Anglo-American comedy of manners about identity and class The Jacques Lacan Foundation reveals-and revels in-the numerous pretentions that surround academia and authorship, and the institutions that foster them.

"I wrote five days a week for a year, no more than a page, writing only for the length of the analytic hour, fifty minutes, following Freud's model of train travel for his theory of free association, acting 'as though, for instance, [you were] a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views [...] outside'. Many of my women character's names begin with A: their first names; there are few surnames, save those of the secondary male characters. . Some of these women exist or existed, others are from fiction, or write fiction. Some are friends or acquaintances. None are credited but a keen reader could recognise many of them. I invented nothing. I am the aleph."

"Everything becomes familiar eventually. But there was something else, I'd tried to explain, a rhythmic presence like breath, barely a sound, more like pressure. I feel it on my stomach in bed, a weight. The hairs on my neck stand on end. She still doesn't believe me..."Tower Street, East London, 1975: a crumbling block of artists' studios shaped by the myth of male genius but maintained by Connie, a female caretaker struggling to find her creative voice. Cut to 2017, and this same building is now luxury apartments, the new home of young couple Jane and Tam. Yet their fresh start is jeopardized when a chance discovery brings past secrets to light. Drawing on interviews with artists, photographers and administrators, as well as autobiographical elements, Innominate is a mystery story about privilege and power, in which buildings (and bodies) alternately nurture, trap, and entangle their inhabitants. Perhaps it is only by dissecting the architecture of a place that we can truly understand what happened there?

"I'm embarrassed when I remember Les. Anything but him, with his crisp and coleslaw breath, his tongue slipping inside my mouth - a mouth much too small. A tongue prising the shell away from the outer membrane of an egg, while a blueish, angular embryo wriggles underneath, uncomfortable, fearful at being prematurely exposed to the light..." Shae wants to stop shagging other women's husbands and be a proper queer. Plus, she's bored of only ever getting to use her new strap on a pile of cushions. The answer seems simple enough: come out, go out, and finally get it on with the fit bird at Dyke Night. Or it would be if Evaline, a wayward silicone mistress from the future, wasn't jealous.... A surreal, dirty little book that falls somewhere between Derek McCormack, David Cronenberg, and the tentacle porn you 'accidentally downloaded', Silicone God is for those who like it very, very weird.

An unnamed, female narrator travels through school, then art school, then art school teaching jobs, finding or fashioning "the selves of herself" via encounters with PJ Harvey, the ghosts of Ann Quin, Susan Sontag, and a mansplaining Analyst that she first encounters in her grandparents' garden. Both a love letter to creative life, and a requiem for all that is lost in its pursuit, UH HUH HER asks is it possible to record-and retain-our experiences of being on the outside? Or can such stories only exist within the institutions that shape them?