Montez Press – förlag

A novel in three parts, Sinkhole: Three Crimes submerges readers in a grotesque and comical world on the edge of collapse – much like our own. Britain is immersed in a toxic swamp, and sinkholes are opening up in the ground with alarming frequency. Amid the mayhem, three crimes take place: Stonehenge has been stolen, a porn-addicted ghost writer faces the phantoms of her past, and a murder takes place among ex-pats in a Goan village.

Phone Plays is the first publication in Scores, a new imprint co-commissioned by Montez Press and London Performance Studios that publishes scripts and performance texts by artists, theatre-makers and performance-makers working between the visual and theatrical arts.Intended to be performed live over the phone, Sam Cottington’s Phone Plays invite readers and audience members alike to engage with a series of unclear relationships and scenarios, invoked and mediated by contemporary communication technology.This collection of plays explore what critic Sianne Ngai has called the ‘gimmicks of production’: those moments when an object or person performs too much or too little; when it’s too easy, undeserving of praise or overly produced, trying too hard, camp; and how in those moments, the sublimated labour in everyday judgements of taste or aesthetic value are revealed. Channelling conventions of soap opera and sci-fi, these plays explore the experiences of desire, subjugation and alienation inherent in communication.

Prepositions enacts a distinction between what language says and what it does. A catalogue of exercises, interviews, essays and creative explorations, this workbook-compendium invites the reader to investigate how we practise empathy, understanding, and contact, by learning and teaching all at once. Building on the archive of Montez Press Radio show Tongue and Cheek, and featuring work from a stellar cast of previous participants in the broader project, Prepositions asks us what active and embodied participation really means, not just in teaching, but across a whole life.

'Information didn’t need to be remembered; it remembered her…'A mysterious global syndrome is affecting women, causing symptoms of submissiveness and aphasia. While the number of sufferers grows, so does our protagonist’s paranoia—of the media, her doctors, and her husband. In the age of misinformation, AI, and surveillance technology, The Ginny Suite asks how much—and who—we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of progress.The Ginny Suite is formally innovative, a great read. Stacy Skolnik recasts the subject of the internet into telling particulars in her affecting choreography of memes/screens/women/men. — Constance DeJong, author of Modern LoveThe Ginny Suite is a perfect hell of a book: a gossipy stylish mystery that’s both petty and profound. I love how its paranoias and insecurities tip lushly into plot: is the lyric condition of poetry a pathology? Is dissociation a radical response to the lived conditions of patriarchy, or is it patriarchy hacking your brain into submission? What if, instead of self-diagnosing through google, your search history was used to diagnose you, and form the basis of covert treatment? Anyone who’s ever suffered the malady of writing poems will recognise The Ginny Suite’s inability to stop picking these scabs. Its prose moves seamlessly from the lush to the blunt, awash with glitching pronouns, horny ennui, sci-fi intrigue and tender girlish digital fantasies—like if the author of Malina had a dormant Neopets account. I adored it. — Daisy Lafarge, author of LovebugPerversely brilliant, fearlessly inventive, The Ginny Suite beautifully illustrates the horror of being a thinking person inside of a body and culture rushing toward the graveyard. — Brad Phillips, author of Essays and FictionsThe Ginny Suite proves that Stacy Skolnik is one of the most timely and original voices in post-pandemic New York. — Joshua Citarella, author of Politigram and the Post-leftA Handmaid’s Tale for the Post-Truth-AI-Surveillance Era. — Suzanne Treister, author of Hexen 2.0Stacy Skolnik is the author of the poetry collection mrsblueeyes123.com (self-released, 2019), the chapbook Sparrows (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2023), the workbook From the Punitive to the Ludic: Prompts for Writing Public Apologies (with Thomas Laprade for Montez Press Radio, KAJE, 2022), and the chapbook Rat Park (with Katie Della-Valle, Montez Press, 2018). She is a co-founder and co-director of Montez Press Radio, the Lower East Side-based broadcast and performance platform. The Ginny Suite is her debut novel.

From its anatomy and autonomy to its death and diet, this issue focuses on the motif Body and all its meanings, direct and indirect, for instance as in relation to human and non-human bearers of bodies, its inhabitants like bacteria and organs, its social, medical and juridical conditions, its intoxications, chemical processes, traumas, transitions, well-being, replacements, weaknesses, and its opposites.Within the format of a magazine, each page of Pfeil represents the floor, walls, or ceiling which together create an imagined room displaying a printed exhibition. Each issue is dedicated to a specific word, and artists are invited and given space to work on and with this term, and to construct or deconstruct the architecture around it. Combined, the contributions transform into an organic display surrounding the leitmotif.Contributors: Adam Dickinson, Andrea Éva Győri, A.L. Steiner, Alexandra Ivanciu, Barak Zemer, Bernhard Willhelm, Clara Lena Langenbach, Clémentine Bedos, Constance DeJong, Daisy Hildyard, Fanny Howe, Hanne Loreck, Hasti, Holly Hunter, Ingrid Jäger, Jannis Marwitz, Jess Arndt, Johannes Kuczera, Jolanta Nowaczyk, Henriette Maier, Mag Gabbert, Maja Smrekar, Manuel Vason, R.I.P. Germain, Rebekka Endler, Sonja YakovlevaEdited by Anja Dietmann and Nina Kuttler

Radical Rediscoveries: Performance Texts from the Women’s Theatre Movement 1969–1987 is the first of three volumes by Unfinished Histories as part of Montez Press imprint Scores, in collaboration with the Associate Artists programme at London Performance Studios. This collection brings together six seminal works of British alternative feminist and women’s theatre from the archive, with a contextual introductory text by Dr. Susan Croft, co-founder of Unfinished Histories.The play texts included are: Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven by Jane Arden (1969), Go West Young Woman by Pam Gems (1974), Ophelia by Melissa Murray (1979), Minutes by Hesitate & Demonstrate (1979), Room by Natasha Morgan (1981) and The Wind of Change by Winsome Pinnock (1987).Founded in 2007 by Susan Croft and Jessica Higgs, Unfinished Histories is a project to gather the oral histories and preserve the archive of the vital alternative theatre movement in Britain from around 1968 to the early 90s. It shares information gathered through its extensive website www.unfinishedhistories.com as well as through exhibitions, discussions, newsletters, readings and publications, and seeks to encourage new work inspired by this history. From 2023 to 2026 Unfinished Histories is working with London Performance Studios on the project FYFFI: Fifty Years of the Fight for Inclusion.

"Fantasy is the first monograph dedicated to the work of French artist Julie Béna. Featuring contributions by Michal Novotný, Silvia Franceschini, Eva Barois de Caevel, Laura Herman, Rose English, and Nicoletta Lambertucci, this book explores over twenty years of Béna’s work, from early site-specific performances and post-conceptual gestures, to the development of theatrical alter egos through narrative sculptures, subversive performative acts, and moving-image works.Fantasy is...a tool through which Béna lucidly reads reality, through which she confronts social roles, and imagines emancipatory possibilities. It is a way to work through trauma—a struggle to live, and to live in line with one’s beliefs. We hope that this volume—through a dense and dynamic repertoire of images, humorous drawings, unexpected movements, caricatural type design, and critical texts—will become, for you, a space in which to explore the rich and intricate world of an artist, and the layered meanings of fantastical transformations. A book which, in the artist’s own words, can become “a place to return to, which is never quite the same. A book which moves with us.”— Silvia Franceschini, 20 Years of Fantasy"

Edward Thomasson's The Whole Routine is a musical performance about control and desire. Thomasson's text is a collection of slippages, where strangers collide with unexpressed longing, discipline is put under pressure, and the possibility of falling out of time begins to emerge. The Whole Routine addresses the delicate friction of the public in our private spaces and the private in our public selves.‘Edward Thomasson’s The Whole Routine captures something exquisitely delicate about the experience of unease – and easefulness – in one’s own body. When I first saw the performance, I remember thinking yes, that’s exactly what it's like, having never before seen the tender pains and pleasures of having a body reflected back to me with such clarity. This text carries that same charge: brilliant, strange, euphoric.’– Oisín McKenna, author of Evenings and Weekends‘Edward Thomasson has made a collective score out of the place where longing and discipline collide; a tender space where the desire to move in perfect harmony tips into the desire to control, and the only honest response is to keep going anyway, differently. An intimate witness to the wobbly risk of being in relation when everyone is in pain, The Whole Routine is a manual for the dangers and pleasures of poetics in action.’– Jemma Desai, writer, convenor, and artist‘Between risk and safety, performance and rehearsal, public and private, in The Whole Routine Thomasson presents a work of radical vulnerability that explores what it means to perform, both on stage and in life, and the propulsive force of being a desiring subject. It asks what it might mean to stage vulnerability as a show, how falling apart can be a tool for coming together, and serves as a reminder of the importance of the musical form for contemporary art. The Whole Routine will be an essential resource for all those interested in performance and provides an insight into Thomasson’s singular artistic practice.’– Fiontán Moran, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern

There is no pause without prior exertion, and this issue of the magazine explores rest and all its associated contexts and contradictions. Amidst increasing environmental pollution, a tenuous global political climate, and a performance-oriented society demanding ever greater productivity, the balance between rest and labour becomes skewed. Pausing carries the risk of falling behind, but this risk can be mitigated by knowing when to rest. This issue examines rest as activity and as resistance. It questions how the individual body, in cohesion with a community, can generate weight through relaxation and distribute it.Within the format of a magazine, each page of Pfeil represents the floor, walls, or ceiling which together create an imagined room displaying a printed exhibition. Each issue is dedicated to a specific word, and artists are invited and given space to work on and with this term, and to construct or deconstruct the architecture around it. Combined, the contributions transform into an organic display surrounding the leitmotif.Contributors: Asma Ben Slama, Camila Cañeque, Christiane Blattmann, Eileen Myles, Federico Tosi, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Hanne Loreck, Hans-Christian Dany, Hyemin Yang, Ingrid Jäger, Jenni Bohn, Jochen Lempert, Julia Schulze Darup, Mariona Berenguer, Matthias Schubert, Mikołaj Sobczak, Mirene Arsanios, Nat Raha, Nicholas Grafia, Niclas Riepshoff, Omar Hahad, Sarah Drath, Stacy Skolnik, Thomas Laprade, Vir Andres HeraEditor: Anja DietmannCurator: Nadine Droste

The Interjection Calendar is a project devised and hosted by Montez Press. Each month an artist or writer is commissioned to produce a new piece of work for release on our website. At the end of the year the collection is published, demonstrating a diverse range of collaborations and experimental works, mapping the year in contemporary art writing, with equal space held for the emerging and the established. The Calendar reflects the current importance of online content media, pushing the relationship between image and text in this domain.From the Editor’s Note by Racheal Crowther:‘Scent cannot be mediated through digital platforms or photographic documentation. It relies on physical presence to inhale air and to internally process ingested molecules. Odour perception begins only after molecules have entered the body and altered it. The vibration theory of olfaction describes how scent molecules interlock with receptors and vibrate at specific frequencies, triggering quantum tunnelling and distinct neural responses. These processes alert the body ~ consciously or unconsciously ~ to the presence of molecules. This information is sent directly to the limbic system, specifically the amygdala and hippocampus. This is the part of the brain that regulates emotions, memory, behaviour and motivation.Scent, so often treated as peripheral, emerged as fundamental to orientation, safety, appetite, pleasure, intimacy, and presence.’To represent the immaterial quality of scent, The Interjection Calendar 011 features a transparent cover.Contributors:Solomon Garçon, Ariana Reines, Eilidh Duffy, Elida Silvey, Shanzhai Lyric, Ella Fleck, Ethan O’Connor, R.I.P Germain, Raheel Khan, Bishwadhan Rai, Eileen Myles, Perfume AreaGuest edited by Racheal CrowtherRacheal Crowther is a London-based artist whose practice examines governance, surveillance, and institutional power, tracing their entanglement with systems of care. Her work repurposes technical apparatus and industrial objects charged with memory to reveal failures in bureaucracy and the persistent grip of institutional structures on daily life. Her current line of enquiry investigates the politics of scent as a tool of influence and social control. Tracing the many roles of sensory manipulation across time and space—from the imperceptible conditioning of commercial environments to its deployment within military and policing apparatuses—her practice conceptualises olfactory manufacturing as a medium through which atmospheres are engineered and behaviours directed.Forthcoming presentations include a solo exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, London, and participation in the group exhibition Flare-Up at Goldsmiths CCA, London (both 2026).Crowther has developed solo exhibitions including Gebrauchsmusik at Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin (2025); Managed Decline at 243 Luz, Margate (2023); Qualified to Care at Ginny on Frederick, London (2022–23); and Hard Shoulder at Peak Gallery, London (2019). Her work has also been presented in numerous group exhibitions such as Concilium at Palazzo Grasselli, Cremona, Italy (2025); Royal Academy Schools Show at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2024); and Devotional Cache at House of Seiko, San Francisco, USA.Her publishing projects include The Interjection Calendar 011 (guest edited by Crowther, Montez Press, London/New York, 2025); The Eternal Pursuit of the Unattainable in Interjection Calendar 009 (Montez Press, 2023); and Qualified to Care (self-published, London, 2022).She studied at the Royal Academy Schools, Royal Academy of Arts (Postgraduate Programme in Fine Art, 2021–2024), following a BA (Hons) in Fine Art & Critical Thinking from Goldsmiths, University of London (2010–2013).

You come home to find yourself on TV. A decommissioned Concorde jet takes a job at a ­T-Mobile store. A princess is propositioned by a cosplayer. A young art historian discovers a gift for zoning out. A New York stockbroker becomes addicted to the pursuit of “good vibes only.” A despondent coffee enthusiast, struggling to navigate the web portal for medically assisted death, decides it might be easier to live.These are some of the circumstances of Imagining One, I Took the Other—Thomas Laprade’s collection of uncanny modern-day fables, fairy tales, and fan fictions. Accompanied by the artist’s drawings, the book charts the limits of imagination in a world where every choice is overwhelmed by the tantalizing promise, or imperative, of ­endless growth and possibility.‘Put down your phone and pick up this charming, addictive book instead.’— Stephanie LaCava, author of Nymph‘Imagining One, I Took the Other sits you down and spins 21st-century folklore that disorientates, defamiliarizes, and entertains, in a polyphonic portrait that leaves the world more enchanted.’— Dean Kissick‘I loved reading this book, and I've not loved reading anything for a long time. Contemporary narrative prose gets a reboot with the appearance of Imagining One, I Took the Other.Laprade’s settings, in these fourteen collected works—whether office or backyard or T-Mobile store—are a view into an environment of belief-opinions. Drenched in projections that everything can be explained, that there’s an answer to every question, and loaded with unending “how to” life guides, our lived culture is wonderfully seen by Laprade. Imagining One, I Took the Other is worthy scrutiny indeed.Laprade conjures his worlds with so much perceptiveness, without being didactic or mocking in tone…these texts don’t scream hey reader this is funny this is satire this is smart; they just are.’— Constance DeJong, author of Modern LoveThomas Laprade (b. 1991) is an artist, writer, and cultural producer who studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Montez Press Radio.

Newly reprinted, Huw Lemmey's caustic wit drives fanfiction to the edge in the smutty political satires, Red Tory: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell and its predecessor Chubz: The Demonization of my Working Arse .Tom Buckle is an ambitious young moderate Labour apparatchik, rising happily through the party bureaucracy on a diet of bottomless brunches, legitimate concerns and drug-fueled Blairite sex parties. That is until he meets Otto, a charismatic young radical whose urge for cocks, communism, and a mysterious plot for the victory of the holetariat opens his eyes to a changing world. Finding himself thrown into a chaotic new political landscape of pigfucking PMs, frog-frenzied neonazis and falafel-throwing communists, Tom has to pick a side. Will he manage to find a third way to a safe seat, or will Corbyn’s terrifying red horde make his moderate mission impossible? And can Tom resist the most seductive of all highs — pure, high-grade socialism, main-lined straight into London’s clogged and throbbing veins?So much for a kinder, gentler form of politics!

"Newly reprinted, Chubz: The Demonization of my Working Arse utilises Huw Lemmey's caustic wit to drive politics and fanfiction to the smutty edge.YOUTH RAGE! YOUTH VIOLENCE! YOUTH ORGASMS! FEAR OF A GAY UNDERCLASS – ARMED – DANGEROUS — SICK FUCKS. Andy ‘Chubz’ Wilson is just another NEET on the street, spending his summer days sucking dick and chilling in the park, one hand on his touchscreen, the other down his pants. That is, until he meets charming left-wing journalist and cute crypto-twink Owen whilst trawling Grindr for sex. But what starts as a quick, breathless hookup ends up changing Chubz — and London — forever. Whilst Owen battles poppers-mad PM Nigel ‘Nige’ Farage, our cock-hungry comrade wages his own 'ass war', and is left wondering: just what exactly is it he’s fighting for? Socialism? Barbarism? Or just cheap kicks?"

Alive with the grief, ferocity and humour of queer life in inner city London, Happy Baby is JJ Johnson’s debut play. The protagonist Joe navigates an open relationship with Sinéad, sex with strangers, and trying to become pregnant via a system that really does not want them to.‘Unflinching and tender, Happy Baby confronts the barriers queer people face in becoming parents. Full of grief and rapture, fury and sass, JJ’s writing sparkles with theory and experience: love, pain, sex, friendship.’– Izabella Scott, author of The Bed Trick‘I’m obsessed with this brilliantly innovative, frankly hilarious, impressively spot-on investigation of queerness, desire and family-making.’– Michelle Tea, author of Valencia‘JJ’s voice stopped me in my tracks; the clarity, the pitch, the taut, muscular prose. Like that moment when someone starts to sing and you know you’re in safe hands. The trust was instant. Absolute. I was struck by their courage, their care, their gorgeous community…and the sheer fucking grind. I also laughed out loud – so rare, so human. Joe asking the IVF doctor – in the face of such profound loss – to “fight for us.” The love, the generosity, the defiance. It broke me. This is a deeply specific, intimate story, with a quiet, noble heroism. A reclamation of agency. An artist’s eye finding beauty everywhere, suffusing light around the edges of a life that might have been. I am so grateful to them for sharing this. The best art changes us. I am altered.’– Orlagh Collins, screenwriter and producerJJ Pálka Johnson is a London-based artist working across film, painting, and performance. Their practice explores queer and trans approaches to embodiment, intimacy, and collective learning through production and collaboration. Their debut feature documentary what’s safe, what’s gross, what’s selfish and what’s stupid (2024) premiered at BFI Flare. They hold a DPhil from the Ruskin School of Art and have exhibited in the UK and internationally and teach Fine Art at Goldsmiths University of London. Featuring an introduction by writer and director Charlie Josephine, this is Johnson’s debut play.