Elvia Wilk: Oval (2019)

“In the near future, Berlin’s real estate is being flipped in the name of “sustainability,” only to make the city even more unaffordable; artists are employed by corporations as consultants, and the weather is acting strange. When Anja and Louis are offered a rent-free home on an artificial mountain–yet another eco-friendly initiative run by a corporation–they seize the opportunity, but it isn’t long before the experimental house begins malfunctioning.

After Louis’s mother dies, Anja is convinced he has changed. At work, 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. Oval is a fascinating portrait of the unbalanced relationships that shape our world, as well as a prescient warning of what the future may hold.”

Publisher Soft Skull, New York, 2019
ISBN 9781593764050, 1593764057
pages

Reviews: Katy Waldman (New Yorker, 2019), Angelica Frey (Hyperallergic, 2019), Michael Friedrich (LA Review of Books, 2019), Jason Sheehan (NPR, 2019), Yvonne C. Garrett (Brooklyn Rail, 2019), Will Preston (Full Stop, 2019), Alex Ronan (Nation, 2019), Stan Portus (C Magazine, 2020).

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McKenzie Wark: Reverse Cowgirl (2020)

“Another genre for another gender.

What if you were trans and didn’t know it? What if there were some hole in your life and you didn’t even know it was there? What if you went through life not knowing why you only felt at home in your body at peak moments of drugs and sex? What if you expended your days avoiding an absence, a hole in being? Reverse Cowgirl is not exactly a memoir. The author doesn’t, in the end, have any answers as to who she really is or was, although maybe she figures out what she could become.

Traveling from Sydney in the 1980s to New York today, Reverse Cowgirl is a comedy of errors, chronicling the author’s failed attempts at being gay and at being straight across the shifting political and media landscapes of the late twentieth century. Finding that the established narratives of being transgender don’t seem to apply to her, Wark borrows from the genres of autofiction, fictocriticism, and new narrative to create a writing practice that can discover the form of a life outside existing accounts of trans experience: an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.”

Publisher Semiotext(e), South Pasadena, CA, 2020
Native Agents series
ISBN 9781635901184, 1635901189
199 pages

Reviews: J Inscoe (Rhizomes, 2020), Ondřej Trhoň (Revue Prostor, 2020, CZ).

Interviews with author: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (BOMB, 2020), Juliet Jacques (Frieze, 2020), Esmé Hogeveen (Hazlitt, 2020).

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Lawrence Liang, Monica James, Danish Sheikh, Amy Trautwein, Another: Invisible Libraries (2016)

“In Chemin-des-dames, a memorial library may be found encased in a series of catacombs, while in Memorious, the living have themselves become an oral record of literature. The rules of Linearis mandate fidelity to a book till its completion, while Dermestis Lardarius houses books in a state of half-eaten incompleteness. Journey further into this world, and you will find libraries taxonomized by smell, composed of marginalia, etched in ice, and forged in nightmares.

Invisible Libraries captures the sensuous, enigmatic and aesthetic world of books and libraries. Taking a cue from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the authors explore bibliophilia, especially in the way it manifests itself via our love affair with libraries.”

Publisher Yoda Press, New Delhi, 2016
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License
ISBN 9789382579274, 9382579273
vii+102 pages

Reviews: Parvathy Raveendran (Scroll.in, 2017), Ahalya and Ritika (Trilogy, 2017).

Publisher
WorldCat

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