Silver Press – förlag

Revised and updated for the twenty-first century, Steering the Craft is Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier bag of the essentials of a writer’s craft, a generous gift from one of the great thinkers about how – and why – to write.This handbook is an accessible and profound guide to the craft of writing and editing. Le Guin lays out ten chapters that address the most fundamental components of narrative, from the sound of language to sentence construction to point of view. Drawing on the global canon, Le Guin offers her inimitably witty commentary and incisive dissection, developing into an exercise that the writer can do solo or in a group. No other writing guide offers such a comprehensive, experienced and kind approach to “steering the craft” as a writing crew.Steering the Craft deserves a place on every writer’s shelf.

In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

Your Silence Will Not Protect You collects the essential essays and poems of Audre Lorde for the first time, including the classic ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’. A trailblazer in intersectional feminism, Lorde’s luminous writings have inspired a new generation of thinkers and writers charged by the Black Lives Matter movement.Her lyrical and incisive prose takes on sexism, racism, homophobia, and class; reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope that remain ever-more trenchant today. Also a celebrated poet, Lorde was New York State Poet Laureate until her death; her poetry and prose together produced an aphoristic and incomparably quotable style, as evidenced by her constant presence on many Women’s Marches against Trump across the world.This beautiful edition honours the ways in which Lorde’s work resonates more than ever thirty years after they were first published.

In the 1970s, microbiologist Lynn Margulis and atmospheric chemist James Lovelock developed the Gaia theory. Embracing the circular logic of life and engineering systems, the Gaia theory states that Earth is a self-regulating complex system in which life interacts with and eventually becomes its own environment. Gaia describes a living Earth: a body in the form of a planet.Fusing science, mathematics, philosophy, ecology and mythology, Gaia and Philosophy, with a new introduction by Dorion Sagan, challenges Western anthropocentrism to propose a symbiotic planet. In its striking philosophical conclusion, the revolutionary Gaia paradigm holds important implications not only for understanding life's past but for shaping its future.

A woman replays her abandonment by her mother, who is sometimes addressed as a male mother-god. She is also abandoned by her lover, to whom she is in thrall. She tries repeatedly to make or receive phone calls with the beloved figures, without success. She waits for their letters and imagines their contents. In a dream-like, torrid sequence, suffering, fear, fatigue and imperfection are apostrophised. Forgetting is examined and toyed with from every angle. Mythical hybrid creatures are invoked: a snake-headed lion, wolf-snakes, a wolf-peacock. How did this come to be? In a cunningly, wittily wrought rush, the unique, unpredictable voice of the narrator speaks from multiple perspectives to express powerful anguish and, ultimately, catharsis.

Fifteenth anniversary edition, with a new preface by the author and contributions by Saidiya Hartman and Katherine McKittrick.A haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry.In November 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert – the only extant public document related to the massacre of those African slaves – Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.‘Zong! is not just a book of poetry; it is a method displaying itself like a deep-sea creature that blossoms in search of food: the instant when ‘the material and nonmaterial come together in unexpected ways’, allowing the erased story of the slave ship to recompose itself in us.’ Cecilia Vicuña

Ursula K. Le Guin began writing poetry before writing across many genres for her whole life. This elegiac collection of poems, completed shortly before her death in 2018, reflects on the soul, mortality and the mysteries beyond. Weaving together rich sounds, echoes of myth and her vivid sense of our place in the natural world, So Far So Good walks between the knowable and the unknown with characteristic insight and courage.Legendary author Ursula K. Le Guin was lauded by millions for her ground-breaking science fiction novels, but she began as a poet, and wrote across genres for her entire career. In this clarifying and sublime collection – completed shortly before her death in 2018 – Le Guin is unflinching in the face of mortality, and full of wonder for the mysteries beyond. Redolent of the lush natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest, with rich sounds playfully echoing myth and nursery rhyme, Le Guin bookends a long, daring, and prolific career.

When Ursula K. Le Guin started writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map. The Word for World presents a selection of these images by the celebrated author, many of which have never been published before, to consider how her imaginary worlds enable us to re-envision our own.Le Guin’s maps offer journeys of consciousness beyond conventional cartography, from the Rorschach-like archipelagos of Earthsea to the talismanic maps of Always Coming Home. Rather than remaining within known terrain, they open up paradigms of knowledge, exemplified by the map’s edges and how a map is read, made and re-made, together. The Word for World brings her maps together with poems, stories, interviews, recipes and essays by contributors from a variety of perspectives to enquire into the relationship between worlds and the imagination and representation of them.With contributions by Federico Campagna, Theo Downes-Le Guin, Daniel Heath Justice, Bhanu Kapil, Canisia Lubrin, Una McCormack, David Naimon, Nisha Ramayya, Shoshone Collective, Standard Deviation, Marilyn Strathern.Co-published by Spiral House and AA Publications to coincide with an exhibition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s maps at the Architectural Association, London, opening on 10 October 2025.

Bodies of Sound began by enquiring into how sonic experience is intervening in realms such as gender, memory, disability justice, anti-colonial ways of knowing, and anti-war movements - responding to our contemporary emergencies. What has emerged is a collection that makes an expansive case for listening for peace,Featuring over thirty contributors, this groundbreaking anthology explores sound and listening through the lens of the body. Bringing together poets, artists, writers and musicians including Anne Carson, Svetlana Alexievich, Sara Ahmed, Pauline Oliveros and Don Mee Choi, Bodies of Sounds maps the intricate links between feminist sonic culture and radical listening.

In response to the anti-war movements of the 1960s, pioneering musician and composer Pauline Oliveros began experimenting with meditation, movement and activism in her compositions. Fascinated by sound and consciousness in daily life, Oliveros developed a series of Sonic Meditations that would lead to Deep Listening – a practice for healing and transformation open to all.Quantum Listening is a manifesto for listening as activism. Through simple yet profound exercises, Oliveros shows how Deep Listening is the foundation for a radically transformed social matrix in we act from compassion and peace. This timely new edition brings Oliveros’ vision together with a new Foreword and Introduction by Laurie Anderson and IONE.

Ursula K. Le Guin witnessed and contributed to many of the twentieth century’s rebellions and upheavals, including women’s liberation, the Civil Rights movement and US anti-war and environmental activism. Spanning fifty years of her life and work, Space Crone brings together Le Guin’s writings on feminism and gender for the first time, offering new insights into her imaginative, multispecies feminist consciousness: from its roots in deep ecology and philosophies of non-violence to her self-education about racism and her writing on motherhood and ageing. This new, expanded edition for 2026 includes the influential essay 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction'.

In 1964, Nell Dunn spoke to nine of her friends over a bottle of wine about men, sex, work, money, babies, freedom and love. Novelist Edna O'Brien remembers being 'very frightened' of having her nipples touched. The Pop Artist Pauline Boty says she got married to the 'first man I could talk very freely to'. Kathy Collier, who Dunn worked with in a Battersea sweet factory, confesses that she had thought about suicide. After more than forty years out of print, Talking to Women is still as sparkling, honest, profound, funny and wise as when it was first published. With a new afterword by Nell Dunn.

Winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in LiteratureHistory is filled with unacceptable noises: high pitch, gossip, talkativeness, hysteria, wailing and ritual shouts. Who makes them? Those deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control: women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category. From the myths of antiquity to Margaret Thatcher via Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein, The Gender of Sound charts the gendering of voice through Western culture. This enquiry into the way we hear sounds invites reimagining our conceptions of human order, virtue and selfhood.Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.

‘Palestine is everywhere because it names a political subject of radical universal emancipation,’ writes teacher and writer Nasser Abourahme. In Palestine is Everywhere, writers, thinkers and poets and artists map the Palestinian struggle for freedom and its global resonances.Amid a world-historical moment marked by unknowability and loss, this collection allowed its contributors time and space to write. Vital dispatches from Gaza, essays, poems, protest chronicles, images and letters from prison reflect upon resistance, solidarity and the right to self-determination offer essential reading for those interested in Palestinian liberation.Contributors include Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq, Mira Mattar, Anees Ghanima, Adam Rouhana, Nasser Abourahme, Lujayn, Rahul Rao, Sahar Khalifeh, Nahil Mohana, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Nasser Rabah, Lina Meruane, Houria Bouteldja, Ahmed Bassiouny, Ahmad Zaghmouri, Laleh Khalili, and Mohammed Mhawish.

In 1970s Naples, radical feminist collective Le Nemesiache invented the psycho-fable: a practice of ritual storytelling and performance that summoned myth, the cosmic and the body as tools for political transformation. Named after Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, the group rejected Westernised order, turning instead to the volcanic landscapes of Southern Italy – Vesuvius, the Phlegraean Fields, the Cumaean Cave – as sites of imaginative uprising where geology, archaeology and imagination converge.In Nemesis: Cave, Eruptions And Psycho-Fables For Resistance, performance-maker, writer and researcher Giulia Damiani draws on more than a decade of conversations with members and her own artistic practice. In dialogue with Le Nemesiache, Damiani reveals the psycho-fable as an eruptive method of collective creativity – porous, ecstatic and rooted in place – and the return of myth as a force for collective futures.

IONE is a Dream Keeper: a facilitator of dreams. Sharing this intimate part of our being, she believes, can be the start of new ways of being with one another.Exploring the reality of the dream and the dream of reality over many decades has led IONE to appreciate the quantum nature of dreams. Weaving science and dream traditions from around the world together with her own memories and the dreams of her friends and community members, Quantum Dreaming shows that as we start practising awareness, our consciousness also deepensIONE and Pauline Oliveros’s shared vision of a harmonious, self-sustaining network of artists and dreamers led to the founding of the Deep Listening Institute. Quantum Dreaming similarly seeks a radical shift in our collective consciousness, across all states of dreaming and waking.

The Cosmic Oval is a nocturnal entrance into an exploration of feminist cosmologies, storytelling and the many ways of knowing and imagining the hot blue beginnings of time. By turn dreaming and waking, Ella Finer enters history and imagination from the sleep side, taking her cue from Anne Carson. Finer attends to cultural memory as composition, gathering cosmic guides with whom to listen beyond what is given to hear.In west London, the entrance to architect and theorist Charles Jencks’ Cosmic House is overlooked by the Cosmic Oval, a representation of the origin of the universe referencing both contemporary scientific discoveries about its elliptical shape and ancient cosmogonic myths. Finer’s imagined conversation between the figures who inhabit the frieze surrounding the Oval, such as Hannah Arendt, Imhotep and John Donne, re-orchestrates cultural history to explore social scenes of study and the way knowledge moves through bodies and time.Commissioned by the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House.

Trans Central Station reflects on a trans life lived before the language to name it. In this luminous essay, award-winning science fiction and fantasy author and tarotist Rachel Pollack moves between personal memory, history, science fiction and myth to consider how words can both restrict and liberate.From Schrödinger’s cat and science-fiction portals to magic, early trans activism and comics, Trans Central Station breaks the world open to ‘both completely new and unknowably ancient’ possibilities of desire, joy and revelation. Situating trans existence within deep time, Pollack connects modern experience to shamanism and rites of transformation, insisting that trans people have always existed – and have often been understood as sacred figures.In this meditation on freedom – from rigid social structures, from fear and shame, and from history itself – to be trans is proof of ancient and ongoing cosmic power.

A debutante frees a hyena from the zoo so that it might take her place at her coming-out ball; an artist paints a portrait of a man s dead wife, but finds she has painted herself instead; a woman makes love to a boar underneath a mountain of cats; a chicken is roasted with the brains and livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve and drops of divine liqueur; two noble sisters wonder whether anybody can be a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense ; a psychoanalyst must decide what to do with the gift of a team of Russian rats trained to operate on humans. In this first complete edition of Leonora Carrington's short stories, written throughout her life from her early years in Surrealist Paris to her late period in Dirty War-era Mexico City, the world is by turns subversive, funny, sly, wise and disarming.

By turns a handbook of countercultural living, a manual for street protest, and a feminist broadside against the repressive state apparatus, Revolutionary Letters is a modern classic, as relevant today as it was at its inception, 50 years ago. During the tumult of 1968, Beat poet Diane di Prima began writing her ‘letters’, poems filled with a potent blend of utopian anarchism and Zen-tinged ecological awareness that were circulated via underground newspapers and stapled pamphlets. First published in 1971 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights in the US, di Prima would go on to publish four subsequent editions, expanding the collection each time. During the last years of her life, di Prima got to work on the final iteration of this lifelong project, collecting all of her previously published ‘letters’ and adding the new work, poems written from 2007 up to the time of her death in October 2020.

Who decides what happens after sex? The last decade has seen a rise in activism and arguments over women’s reproductive freedom reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s. Political progress in Ireland has been countered by regressive action in the US. AFTER SEX provides personal and political perspectives from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, setting feminist classics alongside contemporary accounts and highlighting the experiences of women of colour and working-class women. These essays, short stories and poems trace past understandings of reproductive freedom and consider what it might look like in future, making urgent connections between women’s equality and access to contraception, healthcare and childcare.The writers pay special attention to people — both fictional and real — who have sought control over their sexual lives, and the joy, comedy, difficulties and disappointments that entails. But above all, AFTER SEX testifies to the power of great writing to show us why that freedom is worth pursuing — without shame and without apology.

What constitutes personhood and consciousness? What memories get lost, and why? Dorothea Lasky’s MEMORY is a cycle of poet’s essays ranging across three dimensions of memory – ancestral, personal and poetic – to reflect on art; time, both everyday and the transcendent; charged sites of collective reminiscence, such as the moon landing; and forgetting through her father’s experience of Alzheimer’s.Lasky broaches the edges of knowability: what’s left where memory is absent? What’s ‘real’ beyond the horizon of death? The book closes with ‘Time, the Rose, and the Moon’, an ars poetica exploring the ouroboros as a symbol for the nonlinear processes of time, memory and art. Lasky reveals memory to be huge and haunting, as she accumulates impressions that challenge the possibility of fixed meaning.

‘Palestine is everywhere because it names a political subject of radical universal emancipation,’ writes teacher and writer Nasser Abourahme. In Palestine is Everywhere, writers, thinkers and poets and artists map the Palestinian struggle for freedom and its global resonances.Amid a world-historical moment marked by unknowability and loss, this collection allowed its contributors time and space to write. Vital dispatches from Gaza, essays, poems, protest chronicles, images and letters from prison reflect upon resistance, solidarity and the right to self-determination offer essential reading for those interested in Palestinian liberation.Contributors include Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq, Mira Mattar, Anees Ghanima, Adam Rouhana, Nasser Abourahme, Lujayn, Rahul Rao, Sahar Khalifeh, Nahil Mohana, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Nasser Rabah, Lina Meruane, Houria Bouteldja, Ahmed Bassiouny, Ahmad Zaghmouri, Laleh Khalili, and Mohammed Mhawish.

‘How incandescent the language is, each line emitting light through the membrane of time and anticipated grief. The work has a rigorousness, the poet pushing through the ache of experience from the first to the last word.’ Dionne BrandIn her signature epic vision, Canisia Lubrin distills a radiant elegy for her mother along an interwoven and unresolvable axis of astonishment, belonging as much to history as to today. Grief, tender and searing, is the channel through which the poet refracts the realm of contemporary life to reveal the paradox of its private and public entanglements. This is poetry of haunting gravity and resonance, with meditations on love, time, and loss, at once meticulously far-seeing, interior and inexpressible.

The storyteller is the living memory of her time: at once an oracle, weaver, healer, warrior, witch, protectress, teacher and great mother. Her powers are to do with passing on, not only the stories but transmission itself: ‘what grandma began, granddaughter completes and passes on to be further completed.’ In contrast to the idea that a story is ‘just a story’, pioneering postcolonial feminist theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha recodes ideas about truth and fantasy to tell a different story about power, civilisation, history, medicine and magic. Grandma’s Story shows how creative speech is connected to women’s powers of enchantment, drawing upon and speaking with storytellers including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Clarice Lispector, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko and Zora Neale Hurston – all who may be known as ‘she who breaks open the spell’.The story as a cure and a protection is at once musical, historical, poetical, ethical, educational, magical, and religious.

Tendrils threads through grief, joy and solidarity toward futures shaped by collaboration and care. Reaching through ecological crises, these poems seek new ways of living kinship in the more-than-human world. Bringing together twenty-five poets from around the world, this anthology gathers international voices that entangle, illuminate and resist.Edited by fieldnotes collective: Nina Mingya Powles, Pratyusha, Alycia Pirmohamed and Jessica J. Lee. With an introduction by the editors and contributions by Hala Alyan, Hana Pera Aoake, Polly Atkin, Kara Barlow, Khairani Barokka, Kat Benedict, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Corinna Board, Jody Chan, Carlina Duan, Chloe Elliot, Zoë Fay-Stindt, Shasta Hanif Ali, Sophie Hoyle, Bhanu Kapil, Petero Kalulé, Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal, Jayant Kashyap, Maija Makela, Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Lola Olufemi, Carl Phillips, Nat Raha, Shumin Tan, Dzenana Vucic and Alice Willitts.

What can we know, and what remains beyond our reach?In 1979, Annie Dillard witnessed the solar eclipse in Yakima, Washington. In Total Eclipse this celestial event becomes a metaphysical reckoning. With lyrical precision and eerie clarity, Dillard unforgettably evokes the strangeness of the shifting sky and the psychic dislocation that descends with the shadow.The quiet yet epic unravelling of the familiar becomes revelation: a rupture in time, a confrontation with mortality and a brush with the sublime. Juxtaposing the cosmic and the mundane, Total Eclipse meditates on the limits of perception and language, entering the surreal intensity of the phenomenon to emerge with the brief, blazing clarity offered by darkness.

The Site of Memory describes Toni Morrison’s work of literary archaeology. She offers insights into how she arrives at a text through the act of imagination bound up with memory and shows how she explores two worlds – the actual and the possible – via the nimbus of emotion surrounding the journey of an image: from picture to meaning to text.Exploring the radical possibilities of literature and the limits of history, Morrison finds a truth deeper than documentation in the silences and omissions in African American narratives of the past. Fiction, for Morrison, is a practice of ethical restoration: a means to recover what history has neglected through the ‘flooding’ of a rush of imagination. In The Site of Memory, ancestral presence, emotion and imagination converge.If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.