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Michèle Bernstein
Translated by John Kelsey, Introduction by John Kelsey, Afterword by Odile Passot

All the King’s Horses (1960), is one of the odder and more elusive, entertaining, and revealing documents of the Situationist International. At the instigation of her first husband, Guy Debord, Bernstein agreed to write a potboiler to help swell the Situationist International’s coffers. She turned it instead into a witty and sensitive, yet anything but sincere, youth novel at once glamorizing and lampooning their own Parisian cultural environment. The result was mesmerizing. All the King’s Horses is a slippery rewrite of Dangerous Liaisons, casting Debord as a cool libertine and herself as his willfull cohort, with Cobra painter Asger Jorn in tow.

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Guy Debord
Translated by Stuart Kendall and John McHale
Introduction by McKenzie Wark

This volume traces the dynamic first years of the Situationist International movement—a cultural avant-garde that continues to inspire new generations of artists, theorists, and writers more than half a century later. Debord’s letters—published here for the first time in English—provide a fascinating insider’s view of just how this seemingly disorganized group drifting around a newly consumerized Paris became one of the most defining cultural movements of the twentieth century.

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Félix Guattari
Edited by Sylvère Lotringer, Introduction by François Dosse

Chaosophy is an introduction to Félix Guattari's groundbreaking theories of "schizo-analysis": a process meant to replace Freudian interpretation with a more pragmatic, experimental, and collective approach rooted in reality. Unlike Freud, who utilized neuroses as his working model, Guattari adopted the model of schizophrenia—which he believed to be an extreme mental state induced by the capitalist system itself, and one that enforces neurosis as a way of maintaining normality. Guattari's post-Marxist vision of capitalism provides a new definition not only of mental illness, but also of the micropolitical means for its subversion..”

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Peter Sloterdijk
Translated by Amy Patton

According to Peter Sloterdijk, the twentieth century started on a specific day and place—on April 22, 1915, at Ypres in Northern France. That day, for the first time in the history of humanity, the German army used against the Franco-Canadian forces a chlorine gas meant to indiscriminately exterminate the enemy. This kind of terrorism became the matrix of modern and postmodern war, from WWI toxic gas to the Nazi Zyklon B used in Auschwitz, from the bombing of Dresden to the attack on the World Trade Center. But Sloterdijk doesn’t stop there, but goes on to evoke a cultural counter-offensive: “the offensive of modern aesthetics, from the Surrealists to Dalí, and Malevich to André Breton in their relation to the double emersion of the idea of the environment and of this terror “from the air.”

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Abdellah Taïa
Translated by Frank Stock

Salvation Army is a coming-of-age novel that narrates the story of Taïa’s life with complete disclosure — from a childhood bound by family order and latent (homo)sexual tensions in the poor city of Salé, through an adolescence in Tangier charged by the young writer’s attraction to his eldest brother, to his disappointing “arrival” in the Western world to study in Geneva in adulthood—and in so doing manages to burn through the author’s first-person singularity to embody the complex mélange of fear and desire projected by Arabs on Western culture, and move towards restituting their alterity.

“Abdellah Taia is a brilliant young Moroccan who writes in French … He has a captivating way of taking us into his confidence and telling us essential truths.” — Edmund White

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Mercury Station

Mark von Schlegell

Published by Semiotexte in 2005, Mark von Schlegell’s debut novel Venusia was hailed in the sci-fi and literary worlds as a “breathtaking excursion” and “heady kaleidoscopic trip,” establishing him as an important practitioner of vanguard science fiction. Mercury Station, Book 2 in Von Schlegell’s System Series, continues the journey into a dystopian literary future. Like Venusia, Mercury Station tells a compelling story, drawn through a labyrinth of future-history sci-fi, medieval hard fantasy and cascading samplings of high and low culture. The book is a brilliant literary assault against the singularity of self and its imprisonment in Einsteinian spacetime.

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Eileen Myles

Poet and post-punk heroine Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Like Baudelaire’s gentleman stroller, Myles travels the city—wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit—seeing it with a poet’s eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing about art and culture has always been a social gesture. Culled by the poet from twenty years of art writing, the essays in The Importance of Being Iceland make a lush document of her—and our—lives in these contemporary crowds.

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Paul Virilio
Introduction by Jonathan Crary

In The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Paul Virilio traces out the relationship of biological optics to the technological "production of appearance." In the perceptual gaps demanding illusions of continuity, Virilio posits a hyper-opportunity for the production of art in speed. Jumping from Old Testament parable to the history of contemporary cinema, to the history of philosophy and contemporary technology, Virilio teleports among an irregular constellation of high-speed artifice where love is a motion faster than light and the paradoxes of empiricism mire science in "motion without mobility."