Dark Rides is like the best carnival dark ride you've ever been on: funny and frightening, short and shocking. Dark Rides is a collection of stories about gay teenagers growing up in a small city in Canada in the 1950's.   There's a different kid in each of the stories: the kid that loves Hank Williams, the kid that works at a haunted hayride, the kid that thinks he's Caligula and so on. They don't meet, but they share similar attributes: they're all named Derek McCormack, and they all fall for the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Published for the first time in 1996, Dark Rides was Derek McCormack's first book. This thirtieth anniversary edition features new illustrations and a foreword by Lisa RobertsonSoftcover, 110pp Pilot Press, 2026

Practicing Dying is a literary anti-memoir documenting life in a Zen Buddhist monastery in rural France where the protagonist, a woman in her late twenties, attempts to overcome chronic drug addiction and mental illness. Broken and severely unwell, our protagonist arrives at the monastery from London: starving, drug-addicted and disillusioned, having exhausted every conventional treatment route available to her. The book examines how, habituated to a life of benefits assessments, petty-crime and sex work, she struggles to adjust to the rules, discipline and religious life of the monastery—at times to devastating and comedic effect. As the story unfolds, she reflects on her addictions and past experiences, raising critical questions about what it means to be “an addict” and why there may be vested corporate and societal interests in maintaining a narrow, individualistic understanding of addiction. Anarchic and provocative, tender and self-deprecating, Practicing Dying differs from other contemporary memoirs in the genre of addiction-recovery by simultaneously challenging the dominant narratives surrounding mental health while proposing an alternative approach to treating the “sickness of self” from which we all increasingly suffer. ‘Practicing Dying is brilliant, rewarding and difficult. Northall offers the most brazen and shocking account of addiction I’ve ever read. Committing herself to the practice of Mahayana Buddhism, she eventually finds a way out, but only on the most rambling, circuitious path. Her account of addiction and loss, displacement and grief is profound and it proves that nothing is ever one thing.’ — Chris Kraus, author of The Four Spent The Day Together Practicing Dying is a literary anti-memoir documenting life in a Zen Buddhist monastery in rural France where the protagonist, a woman in her late twenties, attempts to overcome chronic drug addiction and mental illness.softcover, 345pp Pilot Press, London 2025

A little-known classic of twentieth century queer literature and a masterpiece of eccentric detail, poet Kenward Elmslie’s only novel The Orchid Stories presents us with interwoven stories as delicate and exquisite as the flowers for which they are named, conveying a dreamlike, otherworldly beauty.  Afterword by Robert GlückSoftcover, 264pp Pilot Press, 2025

Pilot Press, 2020, 14 x 20 cm, 44 pages, PB 'Sam Moore addresses what it feels like growing up queer and British in the 1990s when most of your teachers are either dead, and-or American. An important and evocative personal essay on archival absences and erasures, and, in Moore's own words, refusing to die of ignorance even though that's what so many wanted.'    - Isabel Waidner Moving through time and across oceans, writer Sam Moore takes us on a poetic journey of self-discovery through queer history, pop culture and (auto)biography in this deeply personal encounter with queer identity a generation after the AIDS crisis.    Examining the violent political legacy of right-wing governments, the search for liberation through art and the endless quest for self-discovery, All My Teachers Died of AIDS serves as both eulogy and rallying cry, asking us to mourn the dead while lighting a torch to help guide us through grief towards a brighter queer future.

Publisher Pilot Press Pages   Dimensions 150 x 200 mm Format Softcover Year 2022 Responses to Love's Work by Gillian Rose is the fourth publication in a series of anthologies from Pilot Press seeking contemporary responses to works of art made during the AIDS crisis.In this fourth iteration, responses were sought to the 1995 philosophical memoir Love's Work by Gillian Rose.Contributors:Cookie MuellerIan PattersonDodie BellamyKatherine FrancoJames McDermottLotte CrawfordMoss PepeJames MainNick BlackburnThea PetrouJosiah MoktarRoelof BakkerChristopher MaddenKashif Sharma-PatelMadeleine Pulman-JonesLucy SwanLou CollinsTed SimondsMolly GoughEdward ThomassonRichard PorterAlexandra Symons SutcliffeCecilia PavónKate MorganOlivia LaingAshleigh A. AllenReverend Joyce McDonald

“This is a collection of attempted manifestos whose composition began in 2011. It does not pretend to be completed and any life it has is in its capacity for change, movement and instability. These manifestos are described as such because at the time of their composition they felt like attempts of preservation; of life and of the capacity to struggle against life. They are all improvisations. They have not been heavily edited, and they are untidy. We're unsure what we are." — preface by the author   Verity Spott is a poet, teacher and care worker from Brighton, England. She is the author of the books Gideon, Click Away Close Door Say, We Will Bury You, The Mutiny Aboard the RV Felicity, Prayers Manifestos Bravery, Poems of Sappho (in translation), Hopelessness, Coronelles Set 1 and 70 Sonnets. Verity’s poetry has appeared in The New York Times and has been translated into French, German and Greek.First published in 2018, Prayers Manifestos Bravery is a collection of Verity Spott’s “Trans* Manifestos”. Written from 2011 and originally published on her blog, the book’s content ranges from concrete poetry to long-form dispatches, confessions and manifestos touching on questions of identity, gender, justice and society.

Reprinted for the first time in over twenty years, Kevin Killian’s first book of poetry is an audacious, operatic dive into the darkest recesses of the AIDS crisis. In 1991, Killian reported he was “frozen, unable to think of a way to write about AIDS crisis”. A year later, his friend Kathy Acker suggested the “films of Dario Argento as a prism through which to take apart horror of living and dying in AIDS era”. The result is Argento Series, framing Killian’s real-life experience of losing his friends and lovers to the disease through the camera lens of Italian horror filmmaker, Dario Argento. Here, AIDS is cast as the horror film monster, wreaking cold, unfeeling chaos and destruction wherever it finds itself. Blending a chilling, impersonal observation of death with Killian's typical high camp, tenderness and O'Hara-like wit, the poems use unflinching honesty and gallows humour to devastating effect. In Argento Series, Killian finds expression for a crisis, and moment in history, that changed everything, forever. --- Kevin Killian (1952-2019) was a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, playwright, and art writer. Recent books include Fascination: Memoirs and the poetry collections Tony Greene Era and Tweaky Village. He is the coauthor of Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, the first biography of the important US poet. With Dodie Bellamy, he coedited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing, 1977–1997. He died in 2019.

‘John Wieners has been described as both ‘the greatest poet of emotion’ (by Robert Creeley) and ‘the poet laureate of gay liberation’ (within the Gay Liberation press). Solitary Pleasure delivers us this poet raw with mid-century queer feelings. Here, we encounter a writer preoccupied with the power and magic of poetics to profoundly render love, loss and survival in the face of destruction.’— Nat Raha, from the introduction 'Any "selected poems" is going to reveal the tastes of its editor, especially when those poems are selected from among an extensive body of work like the one John Wieners left us. Richard Porter's taste is exquisite, and his selection covers great ground, from the torch song poems of Wieners' early career to the rich, tessellated works of his beautiful and anguished late-sixties period. If I wanted a friend to fall in love with John Wieners, I'd give them this book.' — Michael Seth Stewart, editor of Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners (City Lights) 'This book is a great love held on paper, groaning out of Black Mountain and Boston. You are hit accurately by the poet flying around you as a reincarnated bow and arrow cherub. John Wieners is a fever dream where the poems forever maintain their mystery, releasing a flood of spontaneity in the reader's imagination. Let's get in the magic with both feet; let's do it now!' — CAConrad, author of Amanda Paradise and While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books)Solitary Pleasure is a new collection of poetry, journal entries, letters and ephemera by the American poet John Wieners, edited by Richard Porter with an introduction by Nat Raha. --- John Wieners (1934-2002) was a poet, a Black Mountain College alumnus and an antiwar, gay rights & mental health activist.