DIVIDED PUBLISHING – serie

A key novel from the renowned thinker and Booker-nominated author. Published in the UK for the first time. An account of the frenzy and paranoia of US politics refracted through one individual's psyche.

Waiting at Aime Cesaire International Airport, in the city of Lamentin, Martinique, Mayra A. Rodriguez Castro browses the bookshop. Alongside works by Cesaire, it offers titles by Frantz Fanon, Maryse Conde and Patrick Chamoiseau. She picks up Negre je suis, negre je resterai, an interview between Francoise Verges and Cesaire, and embarks. Another Sun revisits that initial interview, blending biographical experience and concise summaries of key figures in French anti-racist thought, marking their contemporary relevance. An eclectic, attentive, mobile conversation between Rodriguez Castro and Verges, shaped by ongoing struggles.

'Bourgeois coldness' describes a contemporary sentiment, with which bourgeois subjects shield themselves from the violence they themselves cause. It examines how racist affective structures are formed along the histories of colonialism and also Enlightenment philosophy. Canonical critical approaches by Adorno and Horkheimer enter a dialogue with the field of Black Studies and thinkers such as Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and Denise Ferreira da Silva.

Darryl Cook is a cuckold, and that's exactly how he likes it. He has an inheritance that spares him from work, a manageable and seemingly consequence-free drug habit, and a lovely wife called Mindy who's generally game for anything - and for as much of it as she can get. But after an accidental overdose and some serious over-sharing, Darryl's world begins to crack up. Tormented by what seems to be the secret truth in sex, and less assured of that secret's form, Darryl steps into what used to be called real life, as he embarks on a serious if stumbling assessment of himself, and the libertines, lovers and others who make up his world: Bill, a man among men and the last good one; Kit, a good-natured and practical lesbian; Greg, the bully turned bull; Oothoon, his trans poet pen-pal; a polyamorous pair of expert meditators called Satori and Moonbeam; a hamburger; a drop of water; and Clive, an ersatz Englishman, ersatz psychologist, and perhaps an ersatz human being. Darryl is a disarmingly funny and unabashedly intelligent look at a community of people parsing masculinity, marriage, sex (and love) on their own terms.

A ground-breaking document of the life and work of Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles. With many texts translated for the first time in English, Healing Institutions is a direct encounter with his clinical, intellectual and political writings, assembled by Joana Maso. Exiled at the end of the Spanish Civil War, Tosquelles joined the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital in Vichy France, carrying out a transformative clinical practice there until the 1960s. He worked with and against what he had, so that the hospital he helped to create was also the destitution of the structure that was there before. Saint-Alban was an extraordinary political event, a commune, an informal refuge in a time of extreme danger, a sort of upwelling spread through word of mouth. When someone arrived at the asylum, they were welcomed and that welcome never stopped, it was reinforced throughout their stay. This was Tosquelles' notion of hospitality. Each patient was necessary to what was called Saint-Alban. Care happened through a broad range of communal activities for staff and patients: theatre, cinema, collective writing, horticulture, the sorting of coloured pearls, gymnastics, singing, a monthly newspaper. Given state coercion, here the issue was above all the survival of dignity for every patient. The idea of combative asylums is not far-fetched, considering our own conditions: the generalised pathology in society at large, neoliberal governance, technical geopolitics willing to slaughter without blinking, to poison the atmosphere, to extract the minds along with the minerals, to make all of life, human and not human, quite difficult.