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What might we be expected to make of a book of manic passages and dangerous incantations—a book which eschews the oppressive conventions of traditional literary criticism in order to convey something new; something venomously dark and unsettling? Quite simply, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh’s Onmicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-In-Delirium is not only a book about the killing of everything, but more importantly, it is “nothing less than a catalogue of insane reinventions of subjectivity in an always already insane world…”. Most disconcertingly, Mohaghegh’s Omnicide lures the reader into contemplating the terrifying idea that perhaps all of modern society’s cultural and socio-scientific modes of organization (taxonomies, typologies, symptomatologies) might themselves be emanations from the cauldron of mania.
Javier Padilla reviews Omnicide by Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh.
When I saw her first, she looked just like a statue, holding a spade above the dark soil of her daughter’s garden. Seeing her made me feel an intense awareness of what I knew a little bit, and what I didn’t know at all. The body given to me was this one, not that. Later I would seek her out, then she would tell me a few of the stories hidden in her mute figure.
New short fiction from Jessica Sequeira.
There was no upside to Przybyszewska’s mode of existence. Her descent from the three-room apartment upstairs that she’d shared with Jan to the ‘dungeon’ on the ground floor where she lived alone also marked the start of her descent into deeper and deeper addiction, fear, poverty, bitterness, loneliness, and probably madness. We will not speak of despair. In her final years, when she had ceased to see pupils and her trips out had become still more infrequent, her world shrunk to the vanishing point, her confinement the stuff of Beckett. In fact, Przybyszewska’s life in Danzig closely resembled the ‘ideal’ circumstances for a writer that Kafka described in a letter to his fiancée Felice, intending, among other things, to scare her.
Alex Andriesse on Polish writer Stanisława Przybyszewska.
I think my sexual experience has always been in dialogue with philosophy. It’s something about justice. That’s why it comes out in that confrontation that you pick up on that was there on the beach—why does male desire have to be stronger than mine? So although my sexuality has always been in dialogue with my philosophical practice, it’s never been in contact with philosophy. I can’t find my sexuality in Kant. I think it was Preciado who said that nobody could have an orgasm whilst quoting Hannah Arendt.
Andy West interviews Victoria Brooks.
Awoken several times in the night for weeks, I began rising in the dark to write down my dreams. Sometimes it was easier to draw a line instead, to indicate something more of an affect or intensity. Other times the dreams were ripe with narrative. Mostly I was semi-conscious; everything was often a mess. I’d start to write of a moment and find the marks of a previous dream seeping through its surface, the bounds of one dream would bleed into the next. There was often the appearance of memory. I spilled black ink on my sheets, I fell asleep at the curl of an imprecise letter. These are some of the more legible pages.
In the 67th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Maria Sledmere.
While on the surface these might just be abstract poems they are apt and true explorations of my own experience of loss, love, death of relationships, rebirth, objectification, heartbreak and sex work (to name a few). I like to think of them as my own subconscious musing on the concept of family, the idea of marriage, the inevitability of bad luck and the fundamental beauty of the mundane.
The marriage of the books, two of which are my only real physical evidence of a father, excluding my own existence, and the third being a Greek classic bought with my boyfriend, which despite the painfully obvious Freudian undertones also shows the marriage of the two foreign languages together to create something weirder/perhaps more beautiful than themselves.
In the 66th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Kathy Pendrill.
The furniture, does it appear to be from a boardroom, a convention center, a church basement, a college classroom, a dorm, a high school, a kindergarten, or maybe somebody’s home? If it’s like parlor furniture, what kind of parlor? Are you getting the brandy, cigars, and a whole lot of harrumphing vibe? The little sandwiches, Easter colors, and passive aggression vibe? Or, are you thinking more like a fraternity house vibe, bunch of mismatched couches, wrecked chairs, tables that look like they were heaved off the roof and somehow landed here? Maybe there’s an island theme, a nautical theme, a modernist theme, an antique theme, a 1950s theme, a far-flung future floating through space theme, or maybe the theme is that there’s no goddamn theme at all? Would it be worse if there were no theme because you might begin to lose the thread of why you’re here? Are you sweating through your pants onto this relentlessly unthemed furniture on account of whatever lies beyond this room waiting for you? Could it be that bad?
By Andrew Farkas.
The author, like the narrator, was born in Cork, Ireland and grew up speaking French at home. This dual heritage inscribes itself on every page of this Bildungsroman. It may be that Martiny’s bilingualism in both language and culture allows him a more than ordinary awareness of the potential playfulness and variety of English as spoken in Ireland – the novel abounds in verbal play with choice renderings of the speech patterns and pronunciations of Corkonian school kids, interspersed with diction that ranges high and astonishingly low.
Peter Harris reviews Erik Martiny‘s The Pleasures of Queuing.
The world beyond the verbal—the transverbal—endures through and past the entrance of the Symbolic in our lives, and there is deep understanding that comes from engaging other languages of the body alongside that of the tongue. I have noticed how much more I use facial expressions in Spanish, and how much more my hands come into play with the way in which I gesture in order to articulate the movement of time or to evoke a sense of scale and a sense of space. The way in which I lean on the transverbal has become crucial as I try to carve out meaning alongside spoken languages that are strange and unfamiliar to my tongue.
By Jack Young.
Kafka told Max Brod that K would live in the village until his death; and on his deathbed the castle would inform him that his “legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was permitted to live and work there.” This decree sounds like a ruling made by the Tories in Britain or the Trump Administration in the United States on behalf of a desperate migrant or refugee.
Alice Whittenburg reviews Franz Kafka’s The Castle.