Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.“Mohammed El-Kurd has written a new Discourse on Colonialism for the twenty-first century.”―Robin D. G. Kelley   Paperback, 265pp Haymarket Books, February 2025

Art students Gina Birch and Ana da Silva formed The Raincoats in 1977. Since the release of their seminal early records, the 'godmothers of grunge' have been revered by punk, queer, feminist and indie pop artists alike. The Raincoats reimagined the nature of experimental music and DIY design and went on to inspire Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and an entire generation of Riot Grrrl and queercore musicians.Shouting Out Loud: Lives of the Raincoats tells their astonishing story in three extraordinary lives. In The Raincoats' first life, they recorded three full-length albums now regarded as classics and were the first punk band to play behind the Iron Curtain in Warsaw. Nearly a decade later in 1992, the band's second life took off when Kurt Cobain's love of the band catalysed their renaissance.In 2001, The Raincoats emerged from their five-year hiatus into their third and ongoing iteration marked by performances in art museums such as New York's MoMA, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and London's National Portrait Gallery. The Raincoats have and continue to be a singular phenomenon and influence for so many.Featuring exclusive interviews and never-before-seen images from The Raincoats' archive, Shouting Out Loud is the ultimate, authorised biography of this pioneering group of women - and the must-have account of a legendary band that holds a vital place in twentieth and twenty-first century sonic history.Foreword by Greil Marcus  Hardback, 400pp White Rabbit, July 2025

Delirious Verse presents the first English translation of a talk given by Italian poet Amelia Rosselli in the early 1980s, in which she read aloud from and expanded upon her seminal essay “Metrical Spaces.” Drawing on her intensive literary and musical studies, and influenced by her trilingual upbringing as a refugee from fascist Italy, Rosselli conceptualizes a new kind of poetic form: a graphic-prosodic “time-space” capable of containing “all possible imaginable rhythms.”The book includes a new translation of “Metrical Spaces” by Jennifer Scappettone and an afterword by Andrea di Serego Alighieri.Staplebound, 68pp The Last Books, May 2025 No. 7 in The Yellow Papers

Softcover, 120pp BFI Film Classics, May 2025   Elena Gorfinkel is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s (2017); co-author with John David Rhodes of The Prop, (2025); and co-editor of Taking Place: Location & the Moving Image (2011), and Global Cinema Networks (2018).Actor-turned-writer/director Barbara Loden's only feature film, Wanda (1970), tells the story of an alienated working-class woman, Wanda Goronski (played by Loden), who abandons her life as a coal miner's wife and mother, electing instead to drift. Bracing in its realist texture and proto-feminist in its sensibility, it received critical acclaim upon release, winning the Critics' Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1970. Today, Wanda is considered one of the most notable films made by a woman director and a core work of American independent cinema.Elena Gorfinkel's study of this singular film traces Loden's creative process and unconventional approach to filmmaking. Drawing on archival sources, including scripts, interviews, production records, oral history, and previously unseen ephemera, she examines the film's de-dramatised aesthetic, one that rebukes the artifice and “slickness” of Hollywood. Gorfinkel considers Loden's craft in her framing of cinematic time, manipulation of gesture, voice, and posture, narrative ellipsis, and in her use of location and non-professional actors. Providing an account of Wanda's exhibition and reception in the 1970s and after, she traces the film's feminist legacies, and its lasting influence on contemporary filmmakers, artists and writers.

Paperback, 200pp Divided Publishing, Feb 2025Darryl 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 oversharing, 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 . . . Darryl is a disarmingly funny and unabashedly intelligent look at a community of people parsing masculinity, marriage, sex (and love) on their own terms.

Softcover, unbound, 200 x 250mm, 44 pp, Risograph printing Edition of 150 Vibrational Semantics/ TEXST, Bergen, 2024as the non-world falls away is set of fragmented poetic compositions, created through iPhone scans of the artists notebook that have then been worked over digitally, testing the boundaries between image and text in a palimpsestic manner

18 pp, risograph printed , edition of 150Vibrational Semantics, 2022DEAR EAR is a fragmentary text, moving through subvocalization, lingual acrobatics, ingressive speaking and rhythmic reading in various experiences of the visualised voice.

staplebound pamphlet Vibrational Semantics, Bergen 2023‘A Tone or Two’ comes in the form of a text score and a melodic voice work. Noticing a shift in her voice in recent years, Thams tracks how within the last decades female voices have lowered 23hz in pitch. Tuning into the shift toward more gender equality, vocal pitch is explored in relation to authority, electability, courage and rhythmicity. With link to online sound work.

Paperback, 120x210mm, 38 pp Veer2 Publication 006, June 2021. 'In Mudchute, the difficult structures of language are carefully treated. Infancy, attachment, ambivalence and loss are disassembled and reconfigured amidst gaunt hedgerows, fuel farm repositories, the bouncy castle and the DLR as Betteridge’s lyric voice navigates the edge of fragmentation. Deeply felt and experimental, apprehensive of and devoted to both the unbearable and the comic aspects of experience and memory, these poems perform the difficult bonds of social life even as they resist them: ‘you cannot live in the house that you are / with everyone’.'  (Helen Charman)'The poems assembled in Mudchute survive the disciplinary function of close reading in demanding and often beautiful ways. They are resistant objects, made to be held in the mouth and turned until the edges of the terms are worn. Across the collection, this Winnicottian regress to 'barest idiom' encounters a forensic vocabulary for ‘all the mute sparkplugs of accreted / emotional and physical violence’ that imprint our lived environments, developmental experiences, and the muddied recesses of generational memory. Torqued between the nuclear family, the experiential group, and the enervated provision of state institutions, the daily work of care becomes at once ‘the poverty of administered / atomized / gapping’ and the intimate horizon of a ‘grazed / lip- / stirred in the face of group kindness.’ It is a horizon we have called communism and reparative reading and family abolition. In Betteridge's work, it is the minimum.' (Fred Carter)     This is part of a series of works organised by Robert Kiely for Veer2, produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.

Veer2 Publication 034, December 2023 Softcover, 13x26cm, 44 pages £1 from the sale of each copy of this book will be donated to Palestine Action's legal defence funds www.palestineaction.org‘Picture a pencil curved, implausibly, parabolically. An implement bending back on itself (core straining) so as to be drawing the surest line, even as its eraser-end is simultaneously rubbing that graphite out. What remains almost never was: mark as memorial to foreclosure. Examined from a certain angle, the un-line flickers in and out of thereness. On registration, it lives, it goes forth. Sub rosa, it knows never to clear its throat. It has learnt to calibrate its signature; it can evade infra-red. Propelling itself through the narrowest channels, it proceeds with resolve, flayingly. Mattar’s And most of all I would miss the shadows of the tree’s own leaves cast upon its trunk by the orange streetlight in the sweet blue darks of spring is taut as writing can be. The tone she makes sound is singular and desperately (gloriously) intent.'- Sarah Hayden‘Piercing and lucid in its exposition of atmospheric violence and total erasure, Mira Mattar gets to the grain of how the languages of selfhood, mediated but also inhibited by the force of the ‘un-universal’, become complicit in forming the sovereign imperative to self-determination, ‘oh arrogant ambition / to transform / you & keep myself / plumed’, through the reproduction of a ‘contested field / of meaning’, one both marked by the lure and ruse of psychic stability as the real fantasy of occupation, and immanent to concrete, unknown modes of personal resistance and collective recovery thread like a ‘rope / in a knot in a line / of knots’, an inherited ‘excess of memory / mostly portal.’ Mattar carefully gleans in its undecidability, given over to moments of precarious decision without ties or duplicity.'- James GoodwinThis is part of a series of works organised by Robert Kiely for Veer2, produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.

with translations by Saskia Vogel Paperback; 130 x 210mm, 248pp; with black-and-white photographs throughout Prototype, London, July 2025In Diary of an Ending, internationally renowned photographer Lina Scheynius expands her artistic vision to prose, offering an unflinching and intimate exploration of heartbreak and self-recovery. Blurring the boundaries between diary and essay, Diary of an Ending explores the break-up of a relationship, combining extracts from Scheynius’s diary – written in Swedish and translated by Saskia Vogel – with reflective essays written in English five years on, exploring ideas about art and photography, sex and passion, the act of diary-making, destructive relationships, motherhood and home. Interspersed with black-and-white photographs, and written with the same unashamed and unfiltered honesty that defines Scheynius’s photography, Diary of an Ending is an intimate hybrid of memoir and autofiction, a meditation on the passage of time and the transformative power of creativity.

A5, 32 pp Veer Publication 101, April 2024  "Astrophil and Stella was published by Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum press in 1999. Bonney had been attending the WF workshop for some time and had been impressed by Cobbing’s various energies. His later statement that he 'loved the way he would focus on the text as material, would blow up the words till they fell apart, become simply marks on the page . . .' illuminates this collection. Here the passionate frustrations of Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence are translated into feverishly-worked grids of improvised spattered charcoal markings. Bonney later moved to a more explicitly revolutionary rhetoric; this text—along with Baudelaire in English (Veer 012)— witnesses a strikingly original response to Cobbing’s practice."

Jean-Christophe Thomas (born 1959), trained at the Paris Conservatory (CNSMP) electroacoustic composition class, is research associate at the Ina-GRM with François Delalande (perceptive analysis in music), in particular in charge of studying approaches in composition. His musicological studies concern acousmatic repertoire. Maison ONA, September 2024 bilingual edition (English / French) Softcover, 184 ppJean-Christophe Thomas analyzes François Bayle's complete work in 52 recurring features (book augmented with 151 sound examples to download). Diabolus in musica offers a guided and commented listening experience through François Bayle's catalog. Augmented with 151 sound files (examples), it can be approached in a non-linear way, through the listening or the concept it illustrates. The 52 thematics are characteristic traits or recurrences in the way he creates, conceives or organizes his materials—making his art unique. One of the major contributors to acousmatic music, François Bayle (born 1932 in Tamatave, Madagascar) strives to promote the GRM and its values, as well as pursuing the development of the acousmonium, a multi-speaker apparatus designed for the performative projection of sounds. As far as his music is concerned, he is known for his vast compositional cycles whose style unites articulation and fluidity, color, and energetic creation.François Bayle studied with Stockhausen and Messiaen. He joined the ORTF Groupe de Musique Concrète in 1960. He later led the group when it became the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1966. Most of his compositions are electronic, and his first important work, "Espaces inhabitables" (1967) is suggestive of an imaginary world in which nature is distorted in a dream-like fashion. He later utilized natural and synthetic sounds in his compositions, such as the recorded sounds made in a Lebanese cave. He has stated that his purpose as a composer is to enable the listener to feel the motion and vibration of energy in the universe.

Softcover, 128pp DisVoir, 1993 Peter Greenaway (born, 1942 in Newport, Wales, lives and works in Amsterdam) trained as a painter for four years, and started making his own films in 1966. He has continued to make cinema in a great variety of ways, which has also informed his curatorial work and the making of exhibitions and installations in Europe from the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice and the Joan Miro Gallery in Barcelona to the Boijmans van Beuningen Gallery in Rotterdam and the Louvre in Paris. He has made 12 feature films and some 50 short-films and documentaries, been regularly nominated for the Film Festival Competitions of Cannes, Venice and Berlin, published books, written opera librettos, and collaborated with composers Michael Nyman, Glen Branca, Wim Mertens, Jean-Baptiste Barriere, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, Borut Krzisnik and David Lang. His first narrative feature film, The Draughtsman's Contract, completed in 1982, received great critical acclaim and established him internationally as an original film maker, a reputation consolidated by the films, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover, The Pillow Book, and The Tulse Luper Suitcases.       The libretto to the opera Rosa, with music by the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. Imagined as a “novel-opera”, Rosa introduces the reader into a new relationship with the narrative through the visual and auditive qualities of language, creating a kind of mental opera: an opera directed by Peter Greenaway but in which the reader must make his own music. This tale is the first of a series devoted to the violent murders of ten composers during the twentieth century. The first investigation surrounds the death of J-M. de Rosa, a Brazilian who became successful in the 1950's by writing music for Western films. This experience naturally led to the realization of a genuine opera (performed in Amsterdam in 1994).

Duke University press, 2003The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena organized as "sound" and "not sound." In The Audible Past, this history crisscrosses the liminal regions between bodies and machines, originals and copies, nature and culture, and life and death. Blending cultural studies and the history of communication technology, Sterne follows modern sound technologies back through a historical labyrinth. Along the way, he encounters capitalists and inventors, musicians and philosophers, embalmers and grave robbers, doctors and patients, deaf children and their teachers, professionals and hobbyists, folklorists and tribal singers. The Audible Past tracks the connections between the history of sound and the defining features of modernity: from developments in medicine, physics, and philosophy to the tumultuous shifts of industrial capitalism, colonialism, urbanization, modern technology, and the rise of a new middle class. A provocative history of sound, The Audible Past challenges theoretical commonplaces such as the philosophical privilege of the speaking subject, the visual bias in theories of modernity, and static descriptions of nature. It will interest those in cultural studies, media and communication studies, the new musicology, and the history of technology.

Fugitivity pervaded American slavery, propelling slaveholders into acts to prevent the self-liberation of enslaved people. The paradox of free and slave states simultaneously enabled the freedom of uncaptured runaways and criminalized the act of seeking freedom with sanctions and state laws that controlled slave travel. A central paradigm of this counteraction to freedom was runaway ads. Fugitive slave advertisements illuminated the flight of the absconder. Within the brevity of ad lines, lives of the enslaved were laid bare in descriptions of physical scars, character depictions, labor competences, and speculations about their destinations, which often revealed kinship ties. With no definitive way of knowing the plight of particular runaway slaves, the poems in Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound reimagine and reconstruct narratives through ekphrastic responses to runaway ads and other documented artifacts. Embodying the aesthetics of the poetic forms haiku and tanka, poems in this collection embark on an inquiry into the natural world experienced by the enslaved. This approach extends beyond the traditional Zen-inspired approach to haiku writing. For the enslaved, nature was captivity. Runagate is a cartographic exploration into those who found courage in bondage and who gave their lives to build our country.

Softcover, 256pp Duke University Press, 2001In Atmospheric Noise, Marina Peterson traces entanglements of environmental noise, atmosphere, sense, and matter that cohere in and through encounters with airport noise since the 1960s. Exploring spaces shaped by noise around Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), she shows how noise is a way of attuning toward the atmospheric: through noise we learn to listen to the sky and imagine the permeability of bodies and matter, sensing and conceiving that which is diffuse, indefinite, vague, and unformed. In her account, the “atmospheric” encompasses the physicality of the ephemeral, dynamic assemblages of matter as well as a logic of indeterminacy. It is audible as well as visible, heard as much as breathed. Peterson develops a theory of “indefinite urbanism” to refer to marginalized spaces of the city where concrete meets sky, windows resonate with the whine of departing planes, and endangered butterflies live under flight paths. Offering a conceptualization of sound as immanent and non-objectified, she demonstrates ways in which noise is central to how we know, feel, and think atmospherically.

Softcover, 448pp Duke University Press, 2001Hold On to Your Dreams is the first biography of the musician and composer Arthur Russell, one of the most important but least known contributors to New York's downtown music scene during the 1970s and 1980s. With the exception of a few dance recordings, including "Is It All Over My Face?" and "Go Bang! #5", Russell's pioneering music was largely forgotten until 2004, when the posthumous release of two albums brought new attention to the artist. This revival of interest gained momentum with the issue of additional albums and the documentary film Wild Combination. Based on interviews with more than seventy of his collaborators, family members, and friends, Hold On to Your Dreams provides vital new information about this singular, eccentric musician and his role in the boundary-breaking downtown music scene. Tim Lawrence traces Russell's odyssey from his hometown of Oskaloosa, Iowa, to countercultural San Francisco, and eventually to New York, where he lived from 1973 until his death from AIDS-related complications in 1992. Resisting definition while dreaming of commercial success, Russell wrote and performed new wave and disco as well as quirky rock, twisted folk, voice-cello dub, and hip-hop-inflected pop. “He was way ahead of other people in understanding that the walls between concert music and popular music and avant-garde music were illusory,” comments the composer Philip Glass. "He lived in a world in which those walls weren't there." Lawrence follows Russell across musical genres and through such vital downtown music spaces as the Kitchen, the Loft, the Gallery, the Paradise Garage, and the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. Along the way, he captures Russell's openness to sound, his commitment to collaboration, and his uncompromising idealism.