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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. Brennan presents herself as the long-winded lady, solitary wanderer and wry observer of the human comedy. Whether she is riding the subway, failing to eat broccoli in a deserted restaurant, or watching lovers quarrel in Washington Square, Brennan manages to capture the wavering spectacle of the metropolis with an uncanny precision that makes these slight essays at once hallucinatory and hyperreal. Originally written for The New Yorker between 1954 and 1981 and presented here in full with a new introduction by Sinéad Gleeson, these pieces reveal Maeve Brennan to be one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished documentarians of city life, and one of its finest essayists.

Kieran and Harlow's best friend Annie disappeared a year ago. And now, so have the ghosts. After being reunited at Annie's memorial, Kieran and Harlow begin separate searches for their lost friend, all while trying to repair their friendship. Harlow, recently retired from the CGI company she helped found, discovers fragments of the dead - faces, gestures, glances - in AI generated videos; meanwhile Kieran, aimless and isolated, stumbles into an occult community of those dedicated to finding the missing ghosts. The friends' journeys will lead them through a world at once recognisable and strangely removed. A subterranean world of endless tunnels filled with ominous arrangements of consumer goods; a world of seances where attendees are haunted by the empty spaces where ghosts used to be. As Harlow and Kieran are drawn deeper into the circumstances behind Annie's - and the ghosts' - disappearance, a terrifying, singular pattern breaks the surface. No Ghosts is a startling debut which plumbs the undercurrents of feeling that pool beneath our use of emergent technologies, to ask what new forms haunting might take. Told with a sinister precision, it dramatizes the abstraction and unreality that increasingly define our everyday lives, and marks the arrival of a major new literary novelist.

A young woman drifts through a series of one night stands and truncated love affairs. Finding herself in a series of increasingly bizarre situations, she turns her curious and savage eye out on the foibles of the world around her. The men of this world evade and simper, they prey, and preen, and fall hopelessly in love. Through these snapshots we get a biting psychopathology, not just of masculinity in its various masks, but of sex and desire in the early 1970s.

Following the death of her mother, twenty-two-year-old Anastasia King leaves Paris to return to Dublin. In the time that she has been away, her estranged father has died. On arriving to her family home, Anastasia is met by her paternal grandmother, who, filled with bitterness and spite, has determined never to forgive Anastasia for fleeing with her mother. As her days fill up with little humiliations, it becomes clear that, while Anastasia thinks she has come home to stay, for the vengeful Mrs King she is an unwelcome visitor. Written while Brennan was still in her twenties, this novella is a masterpiece of compression, a terse and haunting account of the personal and political factors that impinge on a young woman's freedom. Presented here with a new introduction by Lynne Tillman, The Visitor seals Maeve Brennan's reputation as one of the twentieth century's finest writers, and one of its most unflinching documentarians of the human heart.

"The Good Story may be every story you write, but the Good Story is also not your story." Dog Days considers why we tell stories the way we do, and how we might tell them otherwise. Combining memoir and essay, cultural criticism and literary experiment, it begins with a personal trauma-the account of how Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage during the Christmas holidays of 2009-but looks outwards as much as inwards for answers. Skilful and controlled, but also searching and febrile, this is a book that unsettles time and narrative, art and imagination, embodying in form the trauma that it describes. Taking in writers and artists from Vivian Gornick to Robert Burton, David Lynch to Sylvia Plath, LaBarge picks apart the structures of narrative forms to ask how it might be possible to tell the "Good Story", and its aftermath, on its own terms.

From the author of Weird Fucks, a witty, bleak, and outrageous account of American girlhood. Haunted Houses is the story of three young women. Jane’s occasionally violent father reads her the Gettysburg Address at bedtimes, while Emily’s parents are FDR Democrats who only privately concede she may be normal. Grace believes her dolls come alive at night and talk against her, and has a mother who likes animals more than people. Tillman charts the girls’ unsteady drift into womanhood, revealing the multiple forms of inheritance – family, gender, culture – that a girl must swallow or rebel against. Haunted Houses is about the past within the present, the inescapability of private memory and public history. In prose that is uncanny and precise, it showcases Lynne Tillman at her boldest and most trenchant.

From the acclaimed cult writer of Weird FucksFor the narrator of Motion Sickness life is an unguided tour, populated with hotels and strangers, art, books, and films. Adrift in Europe, her life becomes a carousel of unusual encounters, where coincidences and luck shape la vita nuova. In London our narrator is befriended by an expatriate American Buddhist and her mysterious husband. In Paris she meets Arlette, an art historian obsessed with Velazquez’s painting ‘Las Meninas’. In Barcelona she meets two generations of Germans. She tours the hill towns of Italy in a London taxi with two surprising Englishmen in pursuit of art and Henry Moore. She buys postcards to send, but often tears them up, not sure of what the pictures mean.At once dreamlike and tough, hilarious and melancholic, Motion Sickness is a contemporary picaresque in which a young woman drifts and reinvents herself with every new encounter.

A mesmerising and unsettling novel from a powerful new voice Seeking release from their small-town existence, two teenagers drive north on a vaguely plotted road trip. Adam and Teddy hope to leave boyhood behind. But they carry with them all the upsets and resentments they have accrued in their unhappy lives to date. As the pair's journey progresses, the mood fluctuates as each of them sets out to prove himself. The dynamics of their friendship begin to unravel, culminating in an act of devastating - and all too familiar - violence. In taut and stylish prose, The Passenger Seat examines how men learn and perform masculinity. Rejecting easy answers, it keeps our eyes trained on the vanishing point where vulnerability edges into violence, alienation into aggression.

A beautiful, expansive essay about care, dependence, and what it means to breathe in an age of environmental catastrophe A few moments after birth we begin to use our lungs for the first time. From then on, we must continue breathing for as long as we are alive. And although this mostly happens unconsciously, in a society plagued by anxiety, climate change, environmental racism, and illness, there are more and more instances that ‘teach us about the privilege that is breathing.’ Why do we so easily forget the air that we breathe in common? What does it mean to breathe when the environment that sustains life now threatens it? And how can life continue to flourish under conditions that are increasingly toxic? To approach these questions, Jamieson Webster draws on psychoanalytic theory and reflects on her own experiences as an asthmatic teenager, a deep-sea diver, a palliative psychologist during covid, a psychoanalyst attentive to the somatic, and a new mother. The result is a compassionate and timely exploration of air and breathing as a way to undo the pervasive myth of the individual by considering our dependence on invisible systems, on one another, and the way we have violently neglected this important aspect of life.

Over the past decade, we have begun to talk more openly about the widespread harm inflicted by men on women. But little has been said about the fact that many of these men are also fathers. In Daddy Issues Katherine Angel draws on thinkers and writers from D. W. Winnicott to Valerie Solanas, from Virginia Woolf to Alison Bechdel, as she examines the place of fathers in contemporary culture. She tracks how the relationship between fathers and daughters is so often presented as a twisted romance, with the burden falling always on the daughter. Bold, challenging and nuanced, Daddy Issues asks how the mixture of love and hatred we feel towards our fathers can be turned into a relationship that is generative rather than destructive. If we are to effectively dismantle patriarchy, it is vital that fathers are kept on the hook.

'And at last Min was released from the duty she had imposed on herself, to remain with him as long as he needed her.'In the stories that compose this 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. Brennan's subjects are ordinary people worn down by life, by its disappointments, its little humiliations. Yet they are also dreamers, defiantly hopeful of one day overstepping the narrow confines of the situations in which, unaccountably, they find themselves. These are stories that ache; pitting imagination against circumstance, they are at once claustrophobic and expansive, heartbreaking and miraculous. With a new introduction by acclaimed novelist Claire-Louise Bennett, The Springs of Affection reveals Maeve Brennan to be one of the 20th century's most innovative and important writers.

Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Republic of Consciousness PrizePolar bears emerge from t-shirts. Reeboks come to life. Nothing is normal in the house of Mother Normal.In Isabel Waidner’s second novel, we follow an unnamed narrator who looks like Eleven from Stranger Things, but is in fact a 36-year-old migrant working for minimum wage in a run-down hotel on the Isle of Wight. Along with their best friend, Shae, the narrator faces Ukip activists, shapeshifting creatures, and despotic bosses while trying to hold down their job and preparing for their Life in the UK test.This is fiction that extends the avant-garde tradition beyond the upper-class experience that it usually chronicles – making it over as an ally of working-class queer experience. Set against a backdrop of austerity and decline, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff is an irreverent, boundary-erasing piece of work that celebrates the radical potential of resistance, ingenuity, and friendship.

Berlin is changing. Economic inequality is spiralling out of control, the party is moving on. Anja and Louis live on the mountain - an eco-community built and run by the corporation Anja works for. It is an experiment in green living. But soon enough the mountain begins to malfunction. Across the city, the weather becomes increasingly unpredictable. Louis has become obsessed with a secret project: a pill called Oval that temporarily rewires the user's brain to be more generous. While Anja is horrified, Louis believes he has found the solution to Berlin's income inequality.

In Lovebug, Daisy Lafarge explores metaphors of love and disease as she seeks to understand human vulnerability and our intimacy with microbial life. Turning to microbiology, mysticism, and psychoanalysis – as well as the raw materials of love and life – Lafarge navigates the uncomfortable intimacy between the human body and the many bacteria, vi-ruses, and parasites to which it is host. Lovebug is a book about the poetics of infection, and about how we can learn to live with multispecies ambivalence. How might we forge non-phobic relationships to our ‘little beasts’? How might we re-wild our imaginations? In weaving the personal with the pathological, Lovebug complicates the idea of coherent selfhood, revealing life as a site of radical vulnerability and an ongoing negotiation with limit.

A young woman reorients her relationship to the world in the wake of sudden deafness in this mesmerizing debut novel for readers of Rachel Cusk, Clarice Lispector, and Fleur JaeggyWhen the narrator of The Hearing Test, 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 spectre 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.

In a world that is coming to an end, two friends pursue a future worth believing in When Rita and Líton meet at a party, they quickly form a bond that will indelibly shape their lives. Theirs is not an easy world: most wildlife is extinct and the earth is tormented by drought and floods; the last vestiges of natural life are kept under lock and key in a mysterious greenhouse a day’s travel away. Like the other young men of the Service, Líton is frequently enlisted to put out the seemingly never-ending fires that tear through the valley; Rita lives perched on a hill in the Colony, where other men, including her father, empty an almost barren mine.Yet their bond grounds them. Together they navigate the love affairs, setbacks, and thwarted idealism of their twenties, finding in each other a vital reprieve for their disillusionment – that is, until Líton, like other gay men, falls sick.Unfolding back and forth across time, and told through the voices, conversations, and letters of a tapestry of characters, Paradise Burns is a poetic exploration of an uncannily familiar ecological and existential grief, and a lament for an entire generation forced to inherit a world they feel unable to change. But above all, the internationally celebrated Guasch – hailed as ‘the spokesperson for a generation’ (La Vanguardia) – has written a profoundly moving and astoundingly imaginative paean to the power of friendship: what it protects in a fallen world, and how, through love, it allows us to imagine a better one.

An essay about capitalism, automation, and fear of being replacedFear of being replaced has come to define the late-capitalist psyche. In an age of gig work and AI, more and more workers are threatened with replacement; meanwhile dating apps present both limitless choice and limitless competition, and demagogues stoke racist paranoia through myths of a ‘great replacement’ by immigrant populations. In this wide-ranging essay, Amber Husain asks how we might redirect the fear, turning our replaceability from an individual weakness into a collective strength. Radical, clear-sighted, and moving, Replace Me examines both the terror and the allure in fantasies of infinite replacement. Hailed by Chris Kraus as ‘one of the most sweeping assessments to date of neoliberalism’s psychic toll’, this new edition features a foreword by Daisy Lafarge and an afterword by the author.

'Like Helen I kept a diary when I was young. It was nothing like Helen's. I tried faithfully to record the events of the day, to describe what I was reading and thinking and to scrutinize and explicate my reactions and so on. She does little or none of this.' It is 1974. American and English expatriates, artists, writers, and eccentrics find their home in a quiet town on the island of Crete. Among them is Horace Vaughn, a sixty-five-year-old gay American writer who wants to write the Great American Novel, Household Gods, and who in the meantime supports himself by dashing off detective stories. Horace's young Greek lover often annoys him, provides little satisfaction, and Horace idles his time away with alcohol, friends, and machinations. That is, until a young, enigmatic nineteen-year-old American woman named Helen arrives, another outsider. In Helen, Horace discovers someone brilliant, beautiful, and stubbornly mysterious. He is fascinated by her punk style and elusive pose. In this small town, gossip spreads fast, and Helen's past begins to follow her to Crete: a suicidal ex-lover appears without warning, and there are whispers of her long-dead sister. The Henry Moore crowd dislike her, and a Greek waiter's wife threatens to murder her. When Helen vanishes, Horace is determined to follow her, to find her, especially her diary. His journey around Crete in his beat-up VW bug is funny and poignant, and for Horace, the mystery continues.

A glittering and erudite new novel of Paris from the author of The Baudelaire Fractal.Lucy Frost is an insomniac cleaning woman in Paris. She writes in a notebook at night, documenting a series of interwoven disappearances from her adopted city.First, her great-aunt, who vanished in her old age, but in her youth researched the Bièvre River. The Bièvre River itself, buried in 1912, for centuries the core of Paris’s textile industries. And finally the river’s laundresses, among France’s earliest labour and ecological activists, many of them active in the Paris Commune of 1871.  When Lucy receives her great-aunt’s research papers, she picks up this abandoned project and prises the defunct river’s story from the literature that depicted its winding path. Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Hugo, and Rabelais give bearings to her voice. What arises in her nightwriting is a disquieting meditation on age, failure, and maintenance. Riverwork unearths not just an urban river but also a philosophy of research and the archive, a politics of hydrology, an ontology of ageing and belatedness, and a consideration of the unrepresented labour of women, past and present. Along the way it resurrects, in unforgettable prose, a forgotten Parisian river and the writers and workers it threaded together.

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? Written by critic Emily Ogden while her children were small, On Not Knowing forays into this rich, ambivalent space. Each of her sharply observed essays invites the reader to think with her about questions she can't set aside: not knowing how to give birth, to listen, to hold it together, to love. Unapologetically capacious in her range of reference and idiosyncratic in the canon she draws on, Ogden moves nimbly among the registers of experience, from the operation of a breast pump to the art of herding cattle; from one-night stands to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Committed to the accumulation of knowledge, Ogden nonetheless finds that knowingness for her can be a way of getting stuck, a way of not really living. Rather than the defensiveness of wilful ignorance, On Not Knowing celebrates the defencelessness of not knowing yet - which, Ogden suggests, may be a form of love.

'Our lives do not start entirely with our births.'Prussia, the early 19th century. As he attempts to bury his recently deceased wife, Redo Hauptshammer uncovers the frozen body of a uniformed soldier. As he continues to dig, the bodies start to pile up - all of them fallen cavalrymen bearing the secrets of an earlier era.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. Mora's writing is audacious, melancholy, and formally experimental. Each chapter is longer than the one that precedes it – as the bodies proliferate, the story keeps getting more complicated.In a bold yet lyrical translation by Rahul Bery, Centroeuropa introduces English-speaking readers to one of Europe's pre-eminent experimental prose writers currently at work.

A visceral and carnivalesque mosaic of life at the fringesThe Waterfront Journals is a road trip through the sensuous, perilous landscape of alternative America - a series of fictional monologues that ventriloquise the real people Wojnarowicz met on his travels while he was sleeping rough.We meet these hustlers, runaways and dreamers in unassuming locations - in truck stops, bus stations and parks. Their stories are disturbing, often shocking; but they're told with an honesty and a hallucinatory intensity that simply demands to be heard.Published for the first time in the UK, this electrifying collection confirms that David Wojnarowicz was not only one of millennial America's most necessary and visionary artists, but also among its most humane and urgent literary chroniclers.

From award-winning writer Sarah Schulman, a longtime activist and critic of the Israeli war on Gaza, comes a brilliant examination of the misunderstood concept of solidarity which seeks to provide a new vision of what it means, and why it matters. In this nuanced analysis, Schulman challenges the traditional notion of solidarity as a simple union of equals, arguing that in today's world of globalized power structures, true solidarity requires the collaboration of bystanders and conflicted perpetrators with the excluded and oppressed. Schulman examines a range of case studies, from the fight for abortion rights in post-Franco Spain, to NYC's AIDS activism in the 1990s, to the current wave of protest movements against Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people, and her own experience growing up as a queer female artist in male dominated culture industries. Reckoning with the successes and failures of these movements, she argues that action always comes at a cost, despite not always being effective. But without solidarity we are stuck with the status quo, and we lose any hope of progressive change. By turns challenging, inspiring, pragmatic, and poetic, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity provides a much-needed path for how we can work together towards justice now and for the future.

‘Raised from babydom into doubt, I’m as feminine as Rousseau. I, Hazel Brown, eldest daughter of a disappearing class, penniless neophyte stunned by the glamour of literature, tradeless, clueless, yet with considerable moral stamina and luck, left my family at seventeen to seek a way to live. It was the month of June in 1979. I was looking for Beauty: I didn’t exactly care about art, I simply wanted not to be bored and to experience grace. So I thought I would write.’One morning, Hazel Brown wakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she’s written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris. This is the legend of a she-dandy’s life.Woven into the reminiscences of Hazel’s early life are episodes from Baudelaire’s youth, as well as reflections on the history of tailoring, the passion of reading and 19th century painting. Lisa Robertson’s debut novel is an exploration of life lived in pursuit of beauty, and a celebration of the mind of a girl.

Ezekiel Hooper Stark is a cultural anthropologist nudging forty. His interest is family snapshots. At home, he is absorbed by his own family's idiosyncrasies, perversities, and pathologies, until romantic betrayal sends him spiralling into a crisis. All the old models of masculinity are broken. Zeke embarks on a new project, studying the 'New Man', born under the sign of feminism. What do you expect from women? he asks his male subjects. What do you expect from yourself? Meanwhile, what will the reader make of Zeke is he enlightened, chauvinistic, or simply delusional? Kaleidoscopic and encyclopaedic, comic, tragic, and philosophical, Men and Apparitions showcases Lynne Tillman not only as a brilliantly original novelist but also as one of our most prominent contemporary thinkers on art, culture and the politics of gender.

In 1937 the Nazis staged an exhibition of seized artworks to showcase the 'perverse Jewish spirit' pervading German culture. It contained work by Jewish artists, but also those were queer or foreign. It was an event that sought to define degeneracy and put it on display. This exhibition, Entartete Kunst, is just a single episode in a long running culture war, one that has always been fought on terms set by fascism. In A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, So Mayer gives us a new frame through which to view these intertwined yet disparate histories.

Sterling is arrested one morning without having done anything wrong. Plunged into a terrifying and nonsensical world, Sterling – with the help of their three best friends – must defy bullfighters, football players and spaceships in order to exonerate themselves and to hold the powers that be to account.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.Following the Goldsmiths Prize–nominated We Are Made of Diamond Stuff, Isabel Waidner’s latest novel proposes community, inventiveness and the stubborn refusal to lie low as antidotes against marginalisation and towards fiercer futures.Praise:‘Ferocious and nebular, kind and strange—where strange means ‘queer, surprising’ and ‘outside of’—Sterling Karat Gold crackles on the edge of new language(s) while simultaneously demolishing language altogether. Narrator Sterling (think a nonbinary young Genet in foam spikes) is fomenting and canny, bent on surviving the mania of a rapidly morphing and out of control British regime. But what to lob against murderous nationalist illogics? Like all Waidner’s words, each verbal pulse is funneled velocity, gives no F’s, scraps for its place on the page, belongs, glitters. As much an elegy to the loss of mother tongues as mothers (also anticapitalist spaceships, friends, bodies, generations to AIDS, self), Waidner makes soft bombs of binaries, shows again and again how violence against bipoc, migrant, queer life is not fiction, and that liberation and alliance are inseparable. Sterling Karat Gold is fervid, focused, felt in all of its wholly radical clamor. The stakes? Our chest bones and tender communities inside. The mode? A Born-in-Flames-style reckoning that changes futures/leaves no one behind, ie, love.’ – Jess Arndt, author of Large Animals

Juggling with our perception of time and reality, Still Life tells the story of an author struggling to write a biography of Scottish poet and abolitionist Thomas Pringle. In her efforts to resurrect Pringle, the writer summons the spectre of Mary Prince, the West Indian slave whose History Pringle published, along with Hinza, his adopted black South African son. As these voices vie for control over the text and the lines between life writing and fiction-making begin to blur, yet another voice enters the chorus: Sir Nicholas Greene, the self-regarding poet from Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando. Their adventures through time and space, from Victorian South Africa and London to the author's desk in Glasgow in the present day, offer a poignant yet often playful exploration of colonial history and racial oppression

A piercing meditation on love and music, and the silence and inscrutability which underpins the performance of each. Luc has lived a long time as a soloist. She has not seen Billy for many years. A visit to a major show of his sculptures sends her arrowing back to a younger version of herself: to a time when she had to make room to love him when she'd felt no room within herself. To a time when she was forced to make a choice between being one thing or another. To a time when he was a sculptor, but she was not yet a cellist. In exquisite and crystalline prose, The Cellist explores how you might make room for beauty and mastery for yourself, and still leave space for someone else. It asks what love and companionship costs: what happens when you are forced to cast yourself in the distorting light of another person's needs?