preorder now : the amphitheater of the dead, by guy hocquenghem; translated by max fox

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SHIPS FEBRUARY 2019

Join Max Fox & Wayne Koestenbaum at McNally Jackson for the launch of The Amphitheater of the Dead on February 18, 2019!

GUILLOTINE SERIES #15 : THE AMPHITHEATER OF THE DEAD : GUY HOCQUENGHEM; TRANSLATED BY MAX FOX

Chapbook/Novella | 112pp. | 4.25” x 6.25” | January 2019

“Anyway, there’s only one way out this time. To denude myself. Not to undertake but to write, in this state of exaltation which rejuvenates me, to recount my earliest unfulfilled promises, my anguishes, to myself who will disappear. Because this time, I know the next infection will take me." A science-fiction memoir by the French thinker Guy Hocquenghem, written in the last months of his life with the intention of prolonging it. From May to the end of June 1988, Hocquenghem worked on this last book, writing in pen from his bed until complications from AIDS developed into paralysis and “his hand no longer responded to commands from his brain,” as his comrade Roland Surzur writes in the preface. He did not get to the end. Set in 2018, the novel dramatizes the task of living with death, imagining a future of chronic deferral remarkable for depictions of AIDS at the time. With the original preface by Roland Surzur and an introduction by the translator.

GUY HOCQUENGHEM was born in 1946 and arrived at the Sorbonne in time to occupy it in 1968, militating over the years with a series of communist and other left formations including the Front homosexuelle d’action revolutionnaire. His first book Le Désir homosexuel appeared in 1972, and he produced journalism, films, magazines, and novels until his death in August 1988. He is considered one of the forebears of queer theory. 

MAX FOX is a writer, translator, and a founding editor of Pinko Magazine. He lives in Philadelphia.

bastille day weekend giveaway!

Happy Bastille Day weekend, witches! 

In celebration of unsurrender, guillotine is giving away one copy of Mimi Thi Nguyen and Golnar Nikpour’s legendary, completely-sold-out, available-nowhere-and-will-never-be-reprinted guillotine chapbook Punk and its accompanying broadside! 

Here’s how to win:

* Make a donation to an abortion fund of your choice before 12pm ET on Monday, July 16 (any amount is fine! but shit is getting real out there so I encourage you to dig as deep as you are able!)

* Screenshot proof of your donation

* Email it to mccarry.sarah at gmail.com

That’s it! A winner will be chosen at random on Monday evening. 

And please enjoy 20% off all guillotine orders through Monday with discount code BURNITALLDOWN.

xoxoxox 

on sale now: the assassination of kathy acker, by matias viegener

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GUILLOTINE SERIES #13 : THE ASSASSINATION OF KATHY ACKER : MATIAS VIEGENER

Chapbook | $8 | 32 pp. | 4.25” x 6.25” |  April 2018

The day before she dies: Kathy wakes from a nap and tells me that the door is open. I tell her all the doors in the room are shut. But she is suspicious, and asks me to close the door. Which door? I ask. She looks around the room and then behind her bed. I think there’s a door behind me, she says. She dreamt that it was open and all the animals would get out.
No, I say, I think it’s closed.

Kathy Acker’s literary executor & friend Matias Viegener on her death & afterlife.

MATIAS VIEGENER is a writer, artist, and critic working solo and collaboratively in the fields of writing, visual art, and social practice.

dear friends and chosen family,

“I need anything, anything that will stop me from living in the kind of death the bourgeois eat, the death called comfort.”  –kathy acker, from in memoriam to identity

happy spring! well, almost. in some places, anyway. lennie briscoe and i are thrilled to bring you the newest installation from guillotine, Matias Viegener’s beautiful and haunting The Assassination of Kathy Acker. equal parts unsparing account of her death and transcendent meditation on her life, Assassination is a singular window into the interior world of this ferocious and magnificent patron saint of the queer, the fearless, and the furious. here's to kathy, who made so many of us possible.

keep loving, keep fighting

xoxo sarah

new & forthcoming from guillotine

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ON SALE NOW  
ALEJANDRA OLIVA
DECLARATION

Chapbook | $8 | 32 pp. | 4.25” x 6.25” | January 2018

“I love that almost everyone who has chosen to stay at Our Lady Queen of Angels is a woman. And these Catholic women, they make do. One of them blesses each of the others in a tiny weekly sacrilegious act. They lead each other in song, tell each other the sermon, help each other interpret the words of the reading. They make their voices heard in the service. Their voices are the service.”: An essay on faith, family, resistance, & communion.  

ALEJANDRA OLIVA is an essayist and embroiderer currently studying for her Masters in Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Follow her on Twitter at @olivalejandra_

dear hearts,

like many of you i've spent most of the last year in mourning; a grief so massive it felt annihilating; a horror that seems to require an entire new language of its own to describe. i struggled to do the most mundane imaginable things: get out of bed, drink water, go to work, eat, across the span of this, the longest year i can remember in my lifetime, a year that left my hair streaked silver and new lines mapping outward from the corners of my eyes and new kinds of nightmares, new sorrows, a whole new kind of pain.

there are many ways to live with despair kicking around you like an unwanted houseguest who refuses to leave and i believe art is one of them. art, and love, and art made from and in love; art that speaks the unsayable, that builds homes in which we can gather, that dreams worlds for which we can yearn. art that names those who we have lost and those who we are losing; art that demands we stand on the front lines with our arms linked together or make meals for friends and strangers or knit cosies for penguins or print signs for street protests: art that says there are many bodies and ways to be in the world and we will leave none of them behind on our way to the other world that is still possible. unlikely, maybe, but possible.

alejandra oliva's new guillotine chapbook, Declaration, is a moving testament to the power of faith and resilience and resistance. in january of 2007, the catholic archdiocese of new york city shuttered fifteen churches around the city in an effort to save money, nearly all of those in poor neighborhoods of color. among them: our lady queen of angels, a tiny church in the heart of east harlem, dwarfed by the neighboring thomas jefferson houses--the projects--that surround it. 

the women parishioners of our lady queen of angels--all of them black, latinx, immigrant, of color; nearly all of them elderly--were undeterred. every sunday for over eight years they met on its steps and led the lay services themselves. facing hostile church authorities, excommunication from the church, the police, the brutal new york winters and hothouse new york summers, enduring arrest and harassment, the women of our lady queen of angels organized and protested and served jail time and came back every sunday to say grace. it's a beautiful chapbook that i'm proud to publish on the eve of the winter solstice: the long night of dreaming before we wake once more into the light.

here's to new fights in the coming year, new strength, new faith, new language, new love. here's to making art. & as a special treat if you made it this far, use discount code ROSETICO for 15% off your entire order until december 31.

keep loving, keep fighting
xoxo sarah

coming soon from guillotine | 2018

Guillotine is fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas! You can make a tax-deductible donation to Guillotine here. Your contributions go directly to pay our writers, printers, designers, and the other amazing small businesses that make possible our production line. (Our production line is Sarah watching Vampire Diaries and sewing 400 chapbooks.)

MATIAS VIEGENER | THE ASSASSINATION OF KATHY ACKER
Chapbook | $8 | 32 pp. | 4.25” x 6.25” |  January 2018

“The day before she dies: Kathy wakes from a nap and tells me that the door is open. I tell her all the doors in the room are shut. But she is suspicious, and asks me to close the door. Which door? I ask. She looks around the room and then behind her bed. I think there’s a door behind me, she says. She dreamt that it was open and all the animals would get out.

No, I say, I think it’s closed.” Kathy Acker’s literary executor & friend Matias Viegener on her death & afterlife.

MATIAS VIEGENER is a writer, artist, and critic working solo and collaboratively in the fields of writing, visual art, and social practice.

KRISTEN STONE | THAT WHICH GIRLS CONJURE WILL HELP THEM SURVIVE
Novel | $12 | 112 pp. | 4.25” x 6.25” | March 2018 | ISBN TK

“Joan knows it was much easier for her grandparents, but doesn’t know much about exactly how it happened. In the fifties they licked sealed and locked the records. They simply transferred babies from girls to women, quick, anonymous. And her Mimi is dead now and cannot be asked. ” A haunting, rich, & gorgeous story of families found, lost, & chosen.

KRISTEN STONE is a writer, educator, and social worker living in Gainesville, Florida. They are the author of Domestication Handbook (Rogue Factorial, 2012) and self/help/work/book//The Story of Ruth and Eliza (Birds of Lace, 2014). Their poetry and essays appear at Mutha Magazine, Entropy, and elsewhere.

LOLA PELLEGRINO | LIE TYPES
Novel | $12 | 88 pp. | 4.25” x 6.25” | Summer 2018 | ISBN TK

“Lies my friend Estelle calls, ‘Credible, but a little magnificent.’” A taxonomy of feminist falsehoods. 

LOLA PELLEGRINO is “a lesbo slut with scary friends” (–9th grade classmate). LIE TYPES supported in part by a FACE OUT grant from the Community of Literary Magazines & Small Presses.

Hou/Hunter/Taylor : Book Party

Gramma Poetry, Guillotine, and Ugly Duckling Presse present a book party in celebration of new books (and a new edition) by: 

Christine Shan Shan Hou
Lyric Hunter
Catherine Taylor

Saturday, April 22 at 8 PM - 11 PM

The Old American Can Factory

232 3rd Street, Brooklyn, New York 11215

RSVP

ON SALE NOW: MOTHERWORT BY LYRIC HUNTER

dear ones! at long last (and after long hiatus) guillotine is deeply proud to present MOTHERWORT by LYRIC HUNTER. forty-eight gorgeous pages about loss, longing, language, and revolutionary time. orders will ship in mid-february.

xoxo sarah

48PP. GUILLOTINE SERIES #11. FEBRUARY 2017.

"How do you explain black people in
America how do you explain you were raised by a white woman how
do you explain your Middle Passage in limping French how do you say
my family’s first ancestor with a name was Griffin Lewis born before
the end of the civil war and before that names weren’t recorded it was a
practice of erasure a practice of commodification it was very efficient so
I can’t tell you anything except what I am now so I say more baguette
please je suis pompette."

"Fearless poem-essay of a black girl abroad, mixed novel, radiant almanac. It left me breathless." -Sofia Samatar

LYRIC HUNTER is a writer from new york city. She received her BFA in Fine Art from the Cooper Union in 2012. Her chapbook Swallower was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2014 and her work has also appeared in Poems by Sunday, Belleville Park Pages, and Arava Review. Motherwort (Guillotine, 2017) is her second chapbook. 

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: AFRO-DIASPORIC HERBAL

the sublimely brilliant lyric hunter is editing an herbal by/for african-diasporic folks with production support from guillotine. please circulate the call for submissions widely!!!

B R U J A  B E L L O W

W I T C H E S  B L O O M

C O N J U R E  B L O S S O M

You’re magic-makers, believers, writers, healers, community activists, health professionals, artists. You’re a black woman, you’re queer, you’re transgender, you’re genderfluid, you’re femme, you’re non-conforming. You’re differently-abled, you’re neuro-diverse, you’re thriving. 

A traditional herbal is a recipe book that teaches how to recognize, cultivate, and make medicine, from plants. The writing you create in response to the questions below will form part of a creative, contemporary African-diasporic herbal. In this case, the herbal will be a collection of writings exploring both historical and contemporary herbal and spiritual practices intended to heal the body and spirit, in an effort to decolonize mind, body, and soul, and to reclaim healthcare for many people of the African diaspora in the U.S. Contributors whose work is selected to be included in the herbal will be compensated.

If you have a plant-tending, herbal healing, plant-spiritual practice; if your self-care intersects with your writing or art, I’m collecting poems, stories, anecdotes, recipes, rituals, spells, manifestos, analyses, maps, songs, memoirs, dreams-- 

in short, creative-theoretical-hypothetical-real-magic responses framed by the questions:

Are plants central to, or do they intersect with, your self-care practice?

Where do you find your plant (do you buy it, grow it, or forage for it)? 

What does it look like, what are its properties? What drew you to it? 

What emotional/spiritual/magical/practical significance does it carry

(how do you use it)? How do you feel when you see it, use it, share it with others? 

How do you see the natural world intersecting with black health?

My name is Lyric Hunter and I am a writer from Queens, NY, and a graduate student in the MFA in Writing and Activism program at Pratt Institute. This herbal will be made available and easily accessible to black women and LGBTQ people in New York City.

Email lyric.hunter[at]gmail.com to submit or to ask questions. 

Accepting submissions until February 15.

HI. WELCOME TO OUR FANCY NEW HOME.

we're still getting things up & running on our brand-new website. you can look forward shortly to new chapbooks from lyric hunter, lola pellegrino, alejandra oliva, & more. we'll be at AWP in washington, dc from february 9–11 wandering around, paneling with the fine folks at CLMP, & reading with our friends at ugly duckling presse on thursday and friday night.