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Across multiple worlds in upheaval, a curious cast of Black queer characters must choose between what they already know themselves to be and what they might yet become in the cataclysm. A shapeshifter learns to embrace their body as it changes through a lunar cycle. A stranger’s visit disturbs three sisters sheltering from monsters that stalk the land. An archivist hears an irresistible call to the rising ocean as she uncovers a surprising history. A mysterious fire sparks whispers of revolution in the mind of a vampire’s captive consort. At once tender and audacious, Nathan Alexander Moore’s debut collection tells the stories of extraordinary creatures making impossible but human decisions. Traversing apocalypses both big and small, these captivating tales vibrate with the tensions between loss and growth; self and community; precarity and possibility., https://www.librarystack.org/rupture-files-the/?ref=unknown

This 6-part work of speculative fiction, set in the year 2065 is told through the lens of a journalist reporting on the City of Vancouver, BC, three decades after its transition to protocolized governance. Though many definitions of a protocol have been offered, for our purposes, protocols are defined here as encouraging a set of behaviors that when adopted by a sufficient number of participants in a situation, reliably leads to good-enough outcomes for all. The series takes some of the discussions we’ve had during this journey and follows those threads along a half-lit path into the distant future. Though imaginary, the stories are deeply grounded in past and present knowledge, fusing them with what we might expect to see. Here, speculative fiction is used as a vehicle for hope; its purpose is to explore the roads we might take, how we might build them, and share them in a grounded vision of what we are moving towards. Instead of asking what happens if it all goes wrong, I pose the question, what if it goes right? It’s a question we rarely ask and a scenario we often don’t dare allow ourselves to imagine., https://www.librarystack.org/dispatches-from-cascadia/?ref=unknown

Launching Season 7, Elvia Wilk, an essayist, critic, and novelist, talks to Sky Goodden about the decision to quit writing—if only to be able to start again. In discussing rejection, the changing conditions of the field, and the denuding of successful female writers, Wilk also touches on the authors who have modeled quitting (“the authors of the no”), or who have mitigated against their own exposure, including Olivia Sudjic, Enrique Vila-Matas, Rachel Cusk, and Elena Ferrante., https://www.librarystack.org/quitting-if-only-to-start-again/?ref=unknown

The history and future of an alternative, oppositional translation practice. The threat of machine translation has given way to an alternative, experimental practice of translation that reflects upon and hijacks traditional paradigms. In much the same way that photography initiated a break in artistic practices with the threat of an absolute fidelity to the real, machine translation has paradoxically liberated human translators to err, to diverge, to tamper with the original, blurring creation and imitation with cyborg collage and appropriation. Seven chapters reimagine seven classic “procedures” of translation theory and pedagogy: borrowing, calque, literal translation, transposition, modulation, equivalence, and adaptation, updating them for the material political and poetic concerns of the contemporary era. Each chapter combines reflections from translation studies and experimental literature with practical guides, sets of experimental translation “procedures” to try at home or abroad, in the classroom, the laboratory, the garden, the dance hall, the city, the kitchen, the library, the shopping center, the supermarket, the train, the bus, the airplane, the post office, on the radio, on your phone, on your computer, and on the internet., https://www.librarystack.org/experimental-translation-the-work-of-translation-in-the-age-of-algorithmic-production/?ref=unknown

Fluid Futures is about how science fiction imagines an open future. Science fiction does not claim to predict what will actually happen in times to come. But it offers pictures of potential developments; it narrates the unfolding of possibilities for change that are already implicit, or incipient, in the present moment. As Rod Serling said, science fiction is “the improbable made possible.” The book starts by looking at three tools that are commonly used in science fiction to address futurity: extrapolation, speculation, and fabulation. It goes on to consider concrete examples of how science fiction texts employ these tools to illustrate ways in which the future might be different from – but not entirely discontinuous with – the present-day conditions with which we are familiar. Fluid Futures insists upon the aboutness of science fiction, as it depicts situations and ideas that are at once possible and difficult to grasp. The book then explores how the genre embraces fictionality and narrative, reconceives time, and projects images of possible worlds. The point of the book is not to give a theory of science fiction. Instead, it emphasizes the ways that science fiction texts themselves propose theories, leading readers to reconceive concepts that we have taken for granted., https://www.librarystack.org/fluid-futures-science-fiction-and-potentiality/?ref=unknown

Chris Kraus, Anne Turyn in: Starship No. 17, Berlin: Starship e.V., 2018. My working mode was to give an open invitation to an author, and then I’d print anything so long as their submission/ piece fit in the 5 x 8″ format, and the back covers were consistent. Kathy asked for photos to be included. She described how she wanted the images to challenge the text. I shot in black and white in New York for the issue, which was not my way of working at the time. CK: NYC in 1979 came out in 1981, and it’s N°9 in the Top Stories series. How many issues did you publish in all? When did you start? Who were some of the earlier writers?…, https://www.librarystack.org/pwcw-9-chris-kraus-anne-turyn/?ref=unknown

Another Nabokov stands at the 21st century, overleaping the decades to resurface when the signifier shimmers in a strange new light. Today, as we gaze spellbound at Reason’s freak show, when fantastic new figures of the Name-of-the-Father who seek not to regulate but, above all, to enjoy, strut the international stage, Vladimir Nabokov swims back into view, beckoning with a dubious invitation: what if his famous literary virtuosity fails to point back to a designing Creator figure? Could the encoded patterns in Nabokov’s novels point not to the Other Worlds critics propose, but present rather as teletechnic marks whose ‘cinaesthetic’ import de-realizes the seeming solidity and reality of this one? What if, outside of any speaking or knowing agent, something non-human, non-intentional and non-knowing were making itself felt in Nabokov’s prose in myriad photo-graphematic patterns? Centring on these letteral events, The Nabokov Effect contends that if a “controlling presence” is indeed operative in Nabokov’s work, it will be to oversee the collapse of authorial paradigms. Jöttkandt’s book thus offers a counter to the “triumphal aesthetics” through which a certain Nabokov, humanist philosopher of subjectivity with metaphysical leanings, has been read. It takes the name “Vladimir Nabokov” as a cover for some kind of performative expression that exceeds and undoes the intentional systems it pretends to guarantee. It also means opening up once more the vexed question of Nabokov’s relation to psychoanalysis. Could Nabokov’s voluntary or conscious memory – whose true foil is not Proust but Freud and the unconscious – call forth another principle of interpretation? To read Nabokov in humanity’s endgame is to depose our central myth of Nabokov-the-Author, even as it opens up broader questions concerning our ability to read him or, indeed any writer, today., https://www.librarystack.org/nabokov-effect-reading-in-the-endgame-the/?ref=unknown

In this cultural biography from the incendiary and radical poet and thinker Howard Slater (Break/Flow), we speak about far-left culture in Britain since the 1970s and its relationship to politics and poetry. Slater started the legendary Break/Flow zine in the 90s and participated in the Virtual Future conference. In the 2000s, he began the eclectic label Difficult Fun with others. In the early 2010s, he was part of developing MayDay Rooms, a fantastic archive and resource for social movements and marginal cultures based in London. Slater is currently translating Jacques Camatte and working on his poetry. This podcast includes previously unreleased poetry from Slater., https://www.librarystack.org/howard-slater/?ref=unknown

For millennia one had measured oneself against the cycles of the seasons and the heavens, or against changing social mores and geopolitical configurations. To now be compelled to measure one’s life against the pace of machine time invited madness.” In this long-form essay by Seth Price, a “cultured middle aged artist from New York” attends a winter solstice party at an “open-air, tropical-Modern” island villa hosted by a man named Trader, “tanned, with a graying mane, khakis, trainers, and a billowing linen Oxford.” The real drama of this story, however, is arguably the “practice of divesting and reinvesting meaning” in our world of signs, a world whose semiotic layer is undergoing an epochal shift .. or so it seems. // This ep is part 1 of 2. “Machine Time” by Seth Price was first published in Heavy Traffic issue 1 (2022). We bring you this reading as part of Heavy Traffic’s New Models residency, which features essays from the magazine read aloud by their authors. Heavy Traffic issue IV is out now. For a conversation with Heavy Traffic publisher, Patrick McGraw, see NM75., https://www.librarystack.org/nm-x-heavy-traffic-seth-price-machine-time-part-1/?ref=unknown