Autofiction. Emily Segal, artist and trend forecaster in her 20s, tries to tell the future by reading the present. Literature finds commercial form in the shape of eXe, a mysterious and well-funded internet start-up that offers her a job. A conceptual take-over is deployed; gendered power play ensues; queerness incubates; memes converge. Set in New York City, post-Occupy and pre-Trump. First person / mixed media / pulp. Not actually about astrology. Published in 2020.

Mercury Retrograde

Literature & Fiction

Segal, Emily

Literary

Deluge Books

Jeanetta Rich is a mother and poet based in Los Angeles. Her work focuses on the emotional lives of voiceless women, those who have been silenced through poverty and/or lack of education. Her work was recently featured in Texte zur Kunst 30th Anniversary issue, "The Feminist." Black Venus Fly Trap is her debut poetry collection.

Black Venus Fly Trap

Rich, Jeanetta

Poetry

Amor Cringe explores the dually base and beautiful aspects of self-obsessed media culture. In a perennial bohemian style, an unnamed, ungendered protagonist travels from coast to coast and affair to affair, stumbling upon various moments of failure, absurd insight, and flashes of transcendence. 
Half traditionally-written and half AI-generated, Amor Cringe is a "deepfake autofiction" novelette about a TikTok influencer that seeks God, created with the intention to be "as cringe as possible." The result is a painfully self-aware series of encounters that exfoliate the repulsive and fascinating aesthetics of romantic life under social media.

Amor Cringe

Allado-McDowell, K

What is a world in which work disappears?\n"Time has never made any sense to me. Or rather, I am told the way I describe my experience of time does not add up. I am so disconnected from any common meter that I remain in disbelief of that sort of containment. I think this is what makes me a good whore" so begins Irene Silt's The Tricking Hour.\nPart anti-work polemic, part sex worker's confession, the luminous essays in The Tricking Hour envision a world organized around collective autonomy, survival, and care, instead of the compulsory exploitation of the body. Silt's dispatches-largely composed between June 2018 and October 2019 and first published as a monthly column in New Orleans' ANTIGRAVITY magazine-are already a cult classic in the movement for sex workers against work. Now collected in book form for the first time, with an additional essay written in 2022, The Tricking Hour is a vital account of sex, labor, and criminality in the twenty-first century.

The Tricking Hour

LGBTQ+ Books

Silt, Irene

Biographies & Memoirs

Precise, astute, and uncompromising in its nuance, My Pleasure lives in the poetic entanglements of pleasure, disgust, and agency. From the bed to the club, the coal mine, the power plant, and the jail cell, Silt asks: Where do we extract pleasure, and what pleasure do we find in extraction? Is there sex without work, or only before, during, and after? Unfurling the binary distinctions between freedom and control, language and pause, and mind and body, My Pleasure does not imagine a different world so much as it embodies the possibility of another order within this one.

My Pleasure