Read Our Interview of Love Me Tender Author Constance Debré →

Until Semiotext(e) published Love Me Tender, Constance Debré was unknown in the United States. Like most French novelists, Debré’s life and literary career happen in Paris, a city she’s called home since birth, a city that seems to have shaped her classic French distaste for many current American cultural exports and obsessions. And perhaps it’s that Parisian je ne sais quoi that helps explain, in part, Love Me Tender’s splashy reception among American literati. Few foreign novels get translated and even fewer receive glowing reviews in The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The LA Review of Books. So, why is this novel appealing to Americans? And what does its embrace say about US literature? 

Love Me Tender follows an unnamed narrator who abandons her bourgeois marriage and law job to become a writer. Along the way, the protagonist loses custody of her young son after her spurned ex-husband weaponizes her newfound lesbianism against her. In a surreal literary twist, the ex-husband’s attorney convinces the courts that her collection of books by Genet, Bataille and de Sade prove her degeneracy and the embittered ex wins full custody. As the narrator’s legal appeals inch through the French courts, she writes, swims and takes many lovers, her months punctuated by awkward, chaperoned visits with her son at a state-run center once every fifteen days. Love Me Tender is a painful examination of motherhood, family, and the lines an artist must draw between themself and the world. But it’s also a punky take on sex and freedom drawn from Debré’s own biography, though the novelist provocatively insists that the book is not ‘about’ her.

Reading the novel in LA during the waning days of 2022, I couldn’t help but see in it a rebuke of the current literary moment, one often critiqued as straight-jacketed by moral and social objectives. On the other hand Love Me Tender is deliciously French, the narrator unsentimental, blasé even about choosing literature over motherhood, responsibility, and the trappings of upper-middle-class life. 

Originally, Debré and I met at the LA launch of Love Me Tender in October, 2022. After inhaling the novel, I invited her to read at my reading series Casual Encountersz — I was curating one in Paris and Debré enthusiastically accepted. Though a health issue ultimately kept her from the event, we met the following afternoon at Chez Jeannette, a bistro in Strasbourg Saint Denis popular among Parisian artists, writers, and glitterati. Debré, like the narrator in Love Me Tender, has a swimmer’s build and in person she’s warm and intellectual, kind of grand in her own way, gently tapping sugar crystals into an espresso, often palming her buzzed head of hair. Despite the lousy January weather, we sit outside, Debré across from me with her back to the street, just beyond Chez Jeannette’s awning. Though it drizzles throughout our conversation, Debré seems indifferent to the rain. Read more.

Summa: A New Journal On Realms Of Protection Published By Tabayer Jewelry

text by Lara Schoorl

What do you keep close—in your pocket, hanging around your neck, or passing through your fingers—to feel more safe amidst the mystery and reality of our world; which routines—burrowed in your tread, your thoughts, the sky, in the background—allow you comfort within your wandering mind? Those objects and presences of protection, that render wonder and convince significance, form the fabric of Summa, a new literary journal published by Tabayer jewelry. 

Echoing Tabayer’s philosophy to connect the metaphysical and tangible in their designs, Summa delves into ancient materials and contemplates forms of guardianship. The editor’s letter introducing the first issue tells us that summa “was a medieval literary genre that aimed to cover the whole terrain of a subject.” Following this intention, the contemporary journal sets out to publish stories on “the collective imaginary of protection—from the magical properties of amulets and talismans to ancient rites and private divinations.” For its inaugural issue, subtitled “Singularity and a Totality,” eight writers, artists and philosophers share texts and imagery on personal, societal and natural talismans and symbols. Their objects of study and care are rooted in yet transgress the material realm through the words that contextualize them in their personally attributed significance. 

Circles, gold, a potato, water, garlic, a symbol, a meteorite, time, and deities, worlds apart, transcend time and space and become the humble protagonists of these pages. Their histories strung together not only through a collective theme, but through the recurring materials in its content, of its pages and binding, and through the generous inserts—on the barely light blue pages—by the editors illuminating certain topics. Together these material and conceptual layers form a connected totality: Summa. 

No wonder then that the journal opens with “Primary Spheres” a visual essay by Batia Suter on round shapes as found in archival materials; a preface to the continuity of content that challenges the linearity of turning pages. Circles, as seen in (what appear to be) the eye of a parrot, the back of a child’s head, a cell, a shell, an instruction manual, a planet, and diagrams cover full pages. The images, that otherwise seem to exist independently from one another, cleave together through their found origin and circular forms, also foreboding, visually, how the all contributions subtly touch in language, references or content. 

In her essay “A gift from the stars,” Chloe Aridjis wonders, as she wanders through the Natural History Museum in Vienna, if the meteorite that her father gave to her as a child belongs to the same mother asteroid as (some of) those displayed in the museum exhibits. The fragments of meteors, once whole, once existing in a place beyond our imagination, could now inhabit our planet separated in museums or people’s homes and pockets. For Aridjis, the meteorite became an amulet when picked up from the earth in Durango, Mexico and placed in her hand. Pausing at this change, she also briefly references fertility figurines as the oldest “sacred scarabs.” While Aridjis obfuscates our sense of scale through her wonder—small, enormous and their proximity wax and wane in her essay akin to how the universe does as well—she plants a seed that grounds us in these pages with the mention of the ancient Venus talisman, who later on recurs in Fiona Alison Duncan’s text in the role of Inanna. Literal points of connection like these are scattered throughout the journal. 

Duncan proposes the story of Inanna to be the oldest documented Hero’s Journey, a narrative device as conceptualized by Joseph Campbell. A goddess from ancient Sumer, known for love, sex, power, justice and protection among other attributes (hence her association with Venus) has hymns recording her adventures dating from more than 2000 years BC. In one of them, she receives eighty mes—“an untranslatable term that means something like, ‘being, divine properties enabling cosmic activity; office; (cultic) ordinance,’” Duncan explains—from her father. These mes, Duncan continues, “bestow agency, free will, and protection against dependency.” Highly valuable immaterial talismans that emphasize that protection. Duncan also recognizes that Campbell mostly has studied male heroes for his theory, listing works such as the Odyssey and those of James Joyce are exemplary. Both of which, coincidentally, occur in conjunction with each other earlier on in the journal as a case study to connect the talismans that protect Odysseus from Circe, a root called Moly, and Bloom from Zoe by a black potato. 

Be it coincidence, thoughtful editing or life, the unintentional linkage between the texts in this first issue sparks excitement in your mind with its rhythmic interplay between new and then familiar information. Reading Summa is like following a choreography, allowing you to create your own narratives between the given ones. It soothes: to feel as though the world in some way can be, is, connected through a lattice of protection. It soothes: to experience that knowledge is fluid and our true armature, wisdom and questions. 

This takeaway is embedded within Tabita Rezaire’s poetic essay, “The Tongs of Gold.” The value and power of (inner) knowledge flows as an undercurrent in Rezaire’s essay, in which she recounts practices and memories of her ancestors and of other cultures and characters in history to illustrate the damage and violence inflicted upon earth and people by the gold mining industry. “When will you understand the true gold is water?” she dreamed her grandmother told her. And, “She knew a seed of wisdom was worth more than a mountain of gold,” referencing the journey of Queen Makeda visiting King Solomon. Carrying the past, she bears words of hope for the future (considering our current time a threshold) and encourages us to challenge the attributed meaning of wealth, treasure, scared, sacred and gold: “one can mine more gold from the depth of the heart than the from the core of the earth.” Her language so full and genuine that the words become precious in their own regard. I will keep them with me.

In a different context, Federico Campagna also questions the use of gold; gold that covers the background in medieval paintings: Fondo Oro. Moving away from material explanations—such as wealth, ornamentation, (lack of) technical skill—towards a metaphysical understanding—that what is both known and not, the omnipresence of God—to argue for the function of the gold backgrounds, Campagna begins to efface the distance between mystery and reality. In doing so, however, he circles back to what Rezaire came to as well: gold provides a space to rethink reality. It is impossible to fully grasp the ever changing space around us. Rather than attempting to grasp, medieval painters painted gold backgrounds because the gold became a symbol for the impossibility of one static background. Instead the gold offers endless imagination to those who perceive and construct space. Thus Campagna ends his argument that “Here lies the talismanic function of these images [fondo oro], as a tutamen (Latin for “protection”) rather than a mere decus (Latin for “ornament”): they strive to keep their viewers within the realms of “subjectivity” where reality is endlessly revealed and reimagined and to preserve them from the blindness that befalls those who become dead “objects.””

In each of the texts and imagery mentioned above protection seems to align with the ability to change oneself or what surrounds you via meaning and position. These concepts of protection, ethics, and origin, at the core of Tabayer’s philosophy, have translated so beautifully into their literary project Summa through the words and images of a profound lineup of authors hailing from disparate fields and places: Batia Suter, Laynie Browne, Chloe Aridjis, Federico Campagna, Tabita Rezaire, Daisy Lafarge, Fiona Alison Duncan, Shumon Basar. This first issue of Summa, more an anthology than a journal, contains many more texts to read and knowledges to uncover than what I have highlighted here. The journal is available on antennebooks.com and tenderbooks.co.uk. It is released annually in print and is accompanied by two blogs, MATERIA PRIMA and WHAT PROTECTS ME, where some of the texts are published online as well.

Embodied Resonance: Read Our Interview Of Pop Sensation Mandy Harris Williams →

Mandy Harris Williams is a renaissance woman working across more media than one could reasonably hyphenate. On social media, in her monthly #brownupyourfeed radio hour on NTS, and with her myriad published essays, she challenges us to consider critical theories on race, gender, sexuality, and above all, privilege. She dares us to meet the most divisive aspects of our charged political culture with a caring ethic that prioritizes those most deprived of our love and compassion. Offline, her DJ sets are like a blast of Naloxone to the automatic nervous system with the power to reanimate the rhythm in even the shyest of wallflowers. After studying the history of the African diaspora at Harvard and receiving a masters of urban education at Loyola Marymount, Harris spent seven years as an educator in low-income communities. From there, she expanded her educational modalities to include a conceptual art practice, musical production informed by years of vocal training, and a lecture format of her own dialectic design. These “edutainment” experiences are one part college seminar, one part church sermon, and one part late-night talk show with a heavy dose of consensual roasting. It’s a Friar’s Club for an intellectual, intersectional, and internet-savvy generation. These performances draw us in with their vibey bass lines and hooks before they throw us under the quietly segregated bus that we’re still struggling to rectify. Mandy and I sat by the fire one lovely winter night in Los Angeles to talk about the contours of fascism, algorithmic injustice, her latest film for the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, and her upcoming residency at MoMa PS1.Read more.

Thought Girl Winter: Read Our Interview Of Nada Alic →

interview by Annabel Graham
portraits by Paige Strabala

I first met Nada Alic in the fall of 2019, in New York, at a literary reading held at the Nolita headquarters of a women’s sleepwear brand. The small storefront was packed, and readers perched on the edge of a gigantic feather bed in the center of the room. Most of the guests were there to see a certain Instagram poet with an especially rabid fan base—I witnessed actual tears of joy when said poet opened her mouth—but it was Alic who captured my attention. Radiating her trademark blend of confidence, self-deprecation, and deadpan humor, she read from a short story in progress. In it, an anxious, painfully cerebral young woman questions “this whole business of being alive,” pursues an obsessive friendship with a woman named Mona, and considers the pros and cons of lightly grazing her hand across a stranger’s penis. At a cocktail party with her husband’s business associates, Alic’s narrator muses: “They all looked so vulnerable, so up for grabs; concealed only by a thin layer of fabric. I imagined them as windchimes waiting to be struck. The impulse wasn’t sexual, it was destructive. I just stood there, not touching anyone’s penis, quietly frightened by who I was and what I was capable of.” Suffice it to say that I was riveted.

Alic and I struck up a conversation after the reading, exchanged email addresses, and made loose plans to get together for a coffee next time I was in Los Angeles, where she lives. What followed almost immediately was a global pandemic, a government-imposed lockdown, and a 19th-century sort of pen-pal correspondence conducted over the entire year of 2020. Alic’s emails are just as surprising and enjoyable as her short fiction—witty, dark, vulnerable, sharp-edged; weird in all the best ways. The story she read that night in New York (featuring the penis-windchime simile that’s eternally burned into my brain) is now entitled “My New Life”—this past year, it was published in the literary journal No Tokens, where I serve as fiction editor. You can read it here.

2021 was a landmark year for Alic—she married her partner (Ryan Hahn, of the indie band Local Natives), and sold her short story collection, Bad Thoughts, to Knopf, in a two-book deal (her second book, a novel, is slated for release in 2023). The title Bad Thoughts stems from the eponymous Instagram series Alic created in 2020 during quarantine, wherein she posted bimonthly lists of Tweet-like aphorisms that were at once wildly humorous, razor-sharp, and deeply relatable. The stories in the collection—which will be published in July 2022—are brash and heady, breaking established rules of narrative and form. Like the Instagram series, they’re also delightfully funny. In one, the spirit of an unborn child hovers over the bodies of its future parents, willing them to copulate and bring it into embodied existence. In another, a woman’s musician boyfriend goes on tour, leaving her alone in their home for the first time ever; she proceeds to question all of her life choices and tumble down a frighteningly familiar Internet rabbit hole; chaos and body dysmorphia ensue. Alic is well-versed in the awkward, writing into our most neurotic, shameful habits and thought patterns with an unparalleled acuity.

For Autre, I sat down with Alic in her Mount Washington living room to talk about the holiness of humor, becoming an artist with no formal training, and the archetype of the eternal child-god. We’re real-life friends now—a true privilege!—but sometimes I miss our extremely long emails.  Read more.

Nicole Della Costa Celebrates The Release Of As Serious As A Hiccup @ Des Pair Books In Los Angeles

As Serious as a Hiccup is the book version of artist and writer Nicole Della Costa’s journal; a journal in which she herself, as well as other friends and writers, jot and mark the musings of the day.

Nicole Della Costa, a Brazilian native currently living and working in New York City occupies a social milieu that intersects art, film, writing and music. An intimacy excavator, collaboration is at the heart of Della Costa’s practice, inviting fellow writers, friends and strangers to transcribe their poetry into her journal. Like the scanned fragments of writing on napkins and the pictorial ephemera included in the text, the collaborators’ own writing impacts Nicole’s experience, as her writing impacts theirs.

Through Della Costa’s eyes and uncensored way of looking, we experience the discovery inherent in moving to a new city, orienting yourself, and falling in love with the quotidian. Despite her now several years in New York and prevalence within its cultural scene, Della Costa’s ‘enthusiasmo’ remains and functions as an unpretentious guide throughout.

[AUTRE ARCHIVE] Read Gideon Jacobs' Crisis-Predicting 2020s Meditation From Our Winter 2019 Issue →

Settle into a slightly uncomfortable position. For example, hold your arms above your head as if you’ve just finished the ascent of a rollercoaster and are about to begin the descent, or bite your cheek hard the way some nervous people do when they’re nervous, or cross all of your fingers like a child desperately hoping to avoid retribution for telling a lie. Most meditations suggest the meditator find a neutral posture, but neutrality is a halcyon myth for our species. So, today, we’re not even going to pretend, not even going to kid ourselves. Click here to meditate more.

[AUTRE ARCHIVE] Read An Excerpt From Françoise Hardy's Memoir Published In Autre Summer 2018 →

Venice, Italy, September 1966, © Steve Schapiro, courtesy of A. Galerie Paris

Since his break-up with Jane Birkin at the end of 1980, we had been seeing a lot more of Serge Gainsbourg. He was smitten with Thomas and telephoned me regularly as a distraction from his gloominess. I always more or less managed to lift his spirits although I don’t know how. After a bit of random chatting on one thing and another, I would hear his little short laugh, and the battle was won. Temporarily. His existential angst was an innate part of him and Jane’s departure had multiplied it tenfold. Click here to read more.

Read The Final Chapter of Brad Phillips' and Gideon Jacobs' Serial Novella →

Gideon did a great job above finishing his last chapter of this project. You can see that right? Don’t take it for granted that Gideon has talent.

He wrote about the beginning and the ending of things. When you exit a room, you end the experience of being within it, but of course when you exit a room you just enter another one. You are never not in a room. Click here to read more.

Read The Eleventh Chapter Of Gideon Jacobs' & Brad Phillips' Serial Novella →

People emphasize the importance of beginnings and endings. One always wants to “get off on a good foot,” “go out with a bang,” “start strong,” “leave them wanting more,” etc, etc. These truisms are, at their core, about manipulation, and manipulation is, at its core, about control. If our “exquisite corpse serial novella” has taught you anything, which it really shouldn’t have, it’s probably that control is for suckers. Click here to read more.

Read The Tenth Chapter Of Gideon Jacobs' & Brad Phillips' Serial Novella →

Hi Summer and Oliver,

Thanks for this. I don’t like when people ‘break the fourth wall,’ but maybe Gideon and I have done that already? click here to read more.

Read The Ninth Chapter Of Gideon Jacobs' & Brad Phillips' Serial Novella →

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

To: Brad and Gideon

From: The Editors

Dear Brad and Gideon, 

To start, we want to thank you for writing your “exquisite corpse serial novella” with us. When you mentioned the concept back in winter, we were immediately intrigued. It sounded like the perfect sandbox for writers like you two to play in, a recipe for something unusual and surprising. Over these months, it’s been fun to watch you ping-pong the novella back and forth, unaware of the other’s intentions and ideas, fingers crossed that it will result in something cohesive and whole. We’ve laughed out loud at some point while reading every single chapter. 

All that said, we’re emailing today just to express a few concerns. Click here to read more.

Read The Eighth Chapter Of Brad Phillips' & Gideon Jacobs' Serial Novella →

They recommend that when dealing with rapists and murderers you say your name or your kids names, talk about them - “Our son Oscar just started walking!” They even suggest telling your attacker you’re pregnant when you aren’t, which Bobby didn’t like the dishonesty of. When he robbed people he told the truth about what he wanted and what might happen and preferred his victims be honest in return. Considering the circumstances he knew it was an unreasonable expectation. The personalization strategy made sense objectively. Criminals who aren’t set on murder could possibly change their minds in the heat of the moment if their victims could transform themselves from objects into subjects. Click here to read more.

Read The Seventh Chapter Of Brad Phillips' & Gideon Jacobs' Serial Novella →

Chapter 1 

I’ll write the first chapter, but please know that I am very wary of being someone who takes charge of group projects, someone who breaks the silence after the teacher asks for a volunteer to captain the science olympiad team with an earnest “I’ll do it,” or even worse, an “I’ll do it” of feigned reluctance. I was never that guy in school. No way I wanted to do that much work. But I also didn’t want to be associated with any projects that I considered poorly executed, so unless my “I’ll do it” volunteer was smart, I tended to give so little effort that I could not, in any scholastic court of law, be considered a bonafide collaborator. Click here to read more.

Read The Sixth Chapter Of Brad Phillips' & Gideon Jacobs' Serial Novella

Dear Ms. Jacobs,

If you’re reading this letter it means your son is dead, along with a much older man named Brad Phillips he was working with on some obscure writing project - a project which I think tested their endurance for suffering, a test they seemed to have failed. Typically, when you receive a letter like this, it will say, ‘If you’re reading this I AM dead,” and comes from a loved one in the form of a suicide note, or it comes from a friend or family member who is being stalked by the American Intelligence Apparatus (see Danny Casolaro). I wish for your sake your son had it together enough to write an ‘If you’re reading this’ (Dear John becomes Dear Mom) letter himself, but please try not to judge him too harshly — only now am I beginning to understand the amount of pressure he and his friend Mr. Phillips were under to — as they described it  somewhat pretentiously — ‘revolutionize contemporary literature’. Attached is a letter Mr. Phillips wrote to your son Gideon. Perhaps more letters will be unearthed. I wish you the very best and am sorry for your loss.

-Detective Leslie Morris

Click here to read more.

Read The Fifth Chapter Of Gideon Jacobs and Brad Phillips Serial Novella "Cheaters" →

Dear Ms. Jacobs,

Below, see a transcription of one of many handwritten letters Gideon sent Brad in the days leading up to what the two writers were flippantly referring to as their “groundbreaking innovation for the murder-suey industry.” It seems they weren’t exactly following the rules of their exquisite-corpse serial novella, and were secretly corresponding behind their editors’ backs the whole time. I hope these words give you some insight into their mental states during this period, and that some insight affords you some solace. 

-Detective Leslie Morris

P.S. For the record, we’re still figuring out who did the murdering and who did the suey-ing. It’s…complicated. 

Click here to read more.

Read the Fourth Chapter of Brad Phillips' & Gideon Jacobs' Serial Novella →

Over the next year, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 4.

Tea Hacic-Vlahovic's Debut Memoir-Cum-Milanese Fever Dream Is Now Available

Tea Hacic is an MDMA-fueled Oscar Wilde with fake eyelashes and this book is a Fear and Loathing for the late Berlusconi-era; a deep walk of shame that tiptoes between a bewildering Bildungsroman and a fever dream of social climbing and social embarrassment. Click here to order now online and in print.

Read The Third Chapter Of Gideon Jacobs' & Brad Phillips' New Serial Novella →

Over the next year, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 3: Luridly Liminal / Liminally Lurid.

Read Our Review Of Kim-Anh Schreiber's New Book Fantasy

text by Summer Bowie

When planning a pregnancy or discussing the process of birth, we often hear about the rebirth that the mother experiences—her renaissance as woman with child, giver of life, and newborn unto herself. It’s such a beautiful image when you ignore the suicide that was planned for the woman who once was. Thus is the balance of life and death, and it's one that some of us contend with more readily than others. Nothing is more apparent than this in Kim-Anh Schreiber’s Fantasy, wherein the book’s titular figure is the daughter of a mother who never stops mourning the life she should have had; her inescapable Karma. 

This cross-genre novel is a disembodied lung desperately inflating and deflating itself with stale cigarette smoke and the decades-old dust of whatever room you’re sitting in. It’s a work of autofiction that is equally exposed and pregnable as it is a fictitious hallucination woven like a cosmic braid with scenes from Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 film, House. The intergenerational sorority of aunts, mother, and grandmother that represent the author’s Vietnamese refugee matrilineage become interchangeable with Obayashi’s highly Westernized depiction of archetypal Japanese schoolgirls and the dubious matriarchs who haunt them. The spaces within the house hold formative and traumatic memories alike. They contain cultures of sexually repressed, sisterly perversions that are devoid of sexuality, yet brimming with desire. Schreiber is wont to illustrate scenes in much the same way as Obayashi—little comedic horrors that drip with Agent Orange and irradiated uranium (respectively) over postwar rubble both seen and unseen. House makes a perfect companion for this book in the way that it depicts the domicile as a metaphor for the body. A cell that contains the bodies of all the women who have kept it.

In Fantasy, mother tongue is laced with the mysterious motherland in a braid that spans the Pacific Ocean. A language spoken between grandmother and granddaughter flourishes and fades in this boat they call home, its orbit so wide one forgets that it’s indeed moving. Only her mother’s constant motion is detected as she skirts in and out on an outlet designer dingy, leaving an inexplicably large wake each time on her way out. You can trace the roots of words that have died in the wisps that fly out of one loop or the next, having provided the foundation of their intercontinental bridge, they take an unceremonious bow and quietly escape the lexicon of their nomadic identity. “Ever since I was a little girl, I have lived in a fantastic theatron: a seeing place whose walls keep disappearing, transforming to mask, fly, tease, or torment, and beyond the walls are nothingness, and three generations of women live with me, entering through the door to rehearse their magical future, every character brought down by their character, by the desire to look good as themselves for themselves, and I alone see them, I alone beholding my house, my body, my ghosts and my gods, and my screen that is suddenly a cannibal.”

Am I really so porous that someone could just bleed into me? asks Khaos, a recurring figure whose only identifying characteristics are Daughter Flower, pregnant. Flowers constitute the form of certain characters at times, nourish them at others, and press their withering bodies into the pages of a history book from a forgotten land. Having meticulously studied a smorgasbord of allegories that portray women stuck in houses such as Mekong Hotel, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Pretty Little Liars, The Virgin Suicides, and so on, Schreiber takes an incisive look at the corporal quality of our deepest psychic understandings and the umbilical cord that carries our identity from one body to the next. She is indefatiguably distinguishing one X from the other in her chromosomal set, knowing that there isn’t a corpus callosum dividing her dual identities, but rather an extensive sequence of yins and yangs swirling; an infinite loop of chain-smoking daisies propelling the turbine of life and death. Like the avatars of an ancient goddess, they circulate the dust that gathers in the corners of the epigenetic house, floating ubiquitously through the air, carrying traces of every dead and living thing that ever graced it with their presence.

Fantasy features cover art by Sojourner Truth Parsons and is published by Sidebrow Books. Click here to preorder. Follow Kim-Anh Schreiber on Instagram.

Read The Second Chapter Of Brad Phillips' & Gideon Jacobs' Serial Novella →

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 2: Guillermo’s Funeral.