Search results for ""Cipher Press""

Juliet Jacques was one of the first trans writers in the UK to contribute broadly to both British and foreign media, writing widely about the trans experience. Spanning over a decade, Jacques' ground-breaking journalism about selfhood, society, art, politics, freedom, and gender identity, tracks the backlash against emerging trans rights and the rise of a new and more explicit form of media transphobia. Front Lines is a seminal collection of writings on trans and queer art, politics, and media, from a period in which the relationship between trans and non-binary people and the British media was exceptionally turbulent. Jacques navigates the tension between wanting to simply write about art and culture and needing to counter the dishonest, damaging rhetoric being published about trans people in virtually every national newspaper in the UK. 'I never believed any journalism was objective, nor that there was any point in even trying to be,' writes Jacques in her introduction. 'Above all, activism is needed to fight this, with journalism to support it: there is no point in pretending to be objective in our work, as the stakes remain just as high as they were back in 2010, perhaps even higher... We're entering a new phase of collective struggle, with new fronts and new tactics needed: I hope this book can help to inform that.' This crucial collection asks what we can learn from the last decade and, importantly, what we can do now. How can new writers take up the struggle for trans liberation? And what will the future of trans writing look like?

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A twisty thriller about the fate of a sprawling family in Lagos, Lakiriboto is a queer, feminist revenge thriller like no other, in which murder, betrayal, and witchcraft collide - with explosive results. When her grandmother dies in the night, Moremi's fate falls to her uncle, the grasping family chief who sends her off to work as a housemaid in Lagos. On arriving there, Moremi finds that the big city is not all she thought it would be. But she's not alone. After another family death, Kudirat, accused of bringing misfortune to her close family, has also been sent to live as a maid in the same house, scrubbing floors and folding laundry for long-suffering Tola, whose abusive doctor husband refuses to treat. Together, with the help of her queer aunt Morieba, the four women must wrestle back control of their lives as the patriarchal traditions that govern the family push back against their freedoms. When Tola's condition worsens, someone new emerges, someone with revenge and redemption in mind. Mixing family saga, mobster pulp, and queer coming-of-age, Lakiriboto is a staggeringly original and surprising novel about Nigeria's queer and feminist communities, the struggles they face, and the lengths they will go to to overcome them.

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''The whole Division will sneer when they read this, I know it. But how, pray tell, was I to discern just how wrong it would go?'' Pip Property is no stranger to disaster. Typically, they''ve got a plan, but now Dallyangle''s favourite dandy & part-time criminal is locked in the morgue of the crime-fighting Division gone rogue, accused of far more crimes than they''ve actually committed, with (at least) two bucolic burglars out to strangle them with their own cravat. Their lover - the semi-feral Welsh heiress Rosamond Nettleblack - has disappeared into dangerous hands. Enlisting the Division to save Rosamond might be Pip''s only hope, but the cravat designer and the chaotic vigilantes have never seen eye to eye. The Division is looking to prove themselves to a potential new patron - and trusting schemers like Pip is a risk the detectives don''t want to take. Armed only with a borrowed notebook, threadbare charm, suits without cravat pins and a swordstick everyone keeps confiscating, Pi

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Transgressive, foulmouthed, and wildly funny, Brontez Purnell's 100 Boyfriends is a filthy, unforgettable, and brutally profound ode to queer love in its most messy of variations. From one-night stands to recurring lovers, Purnell's characters sleep with their co-worker's husbands, expose themselves to racist neighbours, date Satanists, and drink their way out of trouble, all the while fighting - and often losing - the urge to self-sabotage. A horny, punk love song full of imperfect intimacies, 100 Boyfriends takes readers on a riotous journey through dirty warehouses and gentrified bars, from dysfunctional houseshares to desolate farming towns in Alabama. Drawing us into a community of glorious misfits living on the margins of a white supremacist, heteronormative society, iconoclastic storyteller Brontez Purnell gives us an uncompromising vision of desire, desperation, race, loneliness, and queerness that will devastate as much as it entertains.

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It's 1992 in Portland, Oregon. Fifteen-year-old Julie Winter moves through her days as if underwater - watching skaters through the constant rain, detached from her best friend's crushes, listening to the same B-side REM song on repeat. The rest of the world is caught up in the AIDS crisis, the war in Yugoslavia, and grunge. But to Julie it's all background. No one at home talks about her older brother, a once-champion swimmer who could be living in Berlin, or could be anywhere. And although she spends her time searching for pictures of him in the pages of Swimmer's World magazine, she'd never considered swimming herself. Until Alexis, captain of the swimming team, tries to recruit her. What starts as a flirtation and an infatuation becomes a chance to join in with the world, find out what really happened to her brother, or finally let him go. Yearning, stifled, and sharp, Dryland is an anti-coming out novel that captures gauzy queer exploration at its quietest and its most loud.

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A raw, dirty, hilarious, and often poignant cult classic, Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger paved the way for a new kind of queer writing that changed how we talk about sex, relationships, drugs, identity, race, HIV, and what it means to be gay in the 21st Century. Recounting the life of an artist and 'old school homosexual' who bears more than a small resemblance to author Brontez Purnell, Johnny Would You Love Me takes us cruising in late night parks and bath houses, searching for sex and intimacy in a newly gentrified city where even the gays are getting fancy. A collection of short, hilarious, profound, and filthy vignettes, Johnny Would You Love Me is a radical thrill ride through the nuances of queer sex and queer love that shows truly what it means to live on the fringes of a conservative society as a black, working-class gay man.

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The histories of the trans and sex worker rights movements are closely intertwined and, particularly in the UK, it's rare to find a carceral feminist who isn't also a rabid transphobe. What does it mean to write as part of a community that is under attack? Where, in fiction, is the line between exploring harmful ideology and humanising it? In Morbid Obsessions Alison Rumfitt and Frankie Miren explore these questions and talk about the crossover in the ways they chose to approach them in their novels Tell Me I'm Worthless (Cipher Press) and The Service (Influx Press), covering the pornographic interest in sex workers and trans women, online violence, moral panic, creative representation, and paying tribute to sex worker and trans activism through fiction. Frank, funny, and hopeful, and featuring two new stories, an introduction by writer and historian Morgan M. Page, and an interview with Natalia Santana Mendes, Morbid Obsessions is an urgent and vital conversation about making art as collective struggle. All proceeds (after production costs) from the sale of this book will be donated to Babeworld, a collective which seeks to create a more representative art world, and will go into direct grants to marginalised artists.

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A frantic love letter to love itself, Romeo & Seahorse is a sexy, frightening, tender, and visceral rush through Berlin''s chemsex scene. Romeo has Hepatitis again. It''s no surprise, and when you haven''t slept for days staying awake is easy. And anyway, there''s the promise of more drugs, more sex. Leaving his boyfriend at home he heads out for hookups, getting abjectly high and pushing his body to grotesque extremes in an urgent but dissociated quest for romance. What follows is a delirious trip through squalid rooms, hospital wards, and nighttime parks, broken by memories of first loves, European travels, and meditations on what it means to be a Romeo. With chaotic chemsex escapades and musings on romantic love, art and belonging, Romeo & Seahorse takes us to places not often explored in fiction. Written in a relentless, frenzied first-person narrative with moments of mind-bending wisdom and poignancy, this is a one-of-a-kind novel about addiction, desire, belonging, and want that'

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Welcome to your new favourite genre: the fucking fantastic. In these ten stories, everything is sex: walls, wax, the past, your future, your neighbours, hankies, candles, circuit boards, petri dishes, scrap metal – and language itself. Conjuring experiences for which there are no words, our amazing queer authors generate new tongues from the heat of their communing with a wild variety of lifeforms. From Diriye Osman’s spiritualised Peckham to Jem Nash’s time-travelling trans multiverse, these stories transport you to new ways of being and feeling. In a word, it’s CruiserShimmeringLipophilicNeckingerCircuitGirlboss. Whether you get horny from aliens, ghosts, robots, utopia, possession, ritual, or the completely surreal, there’s a story here for you. But why stop at one when you can taste pleasure in each and every one?

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Part hallucination, part queer bildungsroman, Never Was is a beautifully strange novel about grief, addiction and working-class masculinity, taking us from a limbo of lost dreams to a small salt-mining town and exploring the way identity is both inherited and re-invented. Daniel sits on a clifftop in the aftermath of a party at Fin's mansion, looking out over a junky sea. Daniel's not sure why they're there, or who Fin is, even though Fin seems to be somebody famous. To find out, Daniel must tell Fin the story of their childhood, going back to a small salt-mining town in The North, a visit from their now-estranged cousin Crystal, and the life and losses of their salt-miner father, Mika. Taking us from bus shelters to playgrounds to McDonalds, from the depth of a salt mine to a nightclub toilet, Daniel describes their world of soap operas, sunglasses, newspaper clippings and Princess Diana, steering Fin through the events that led up to The Great Subsidence, when their town and the mine that sustained it collapsed. As Daniel tells their story, they come to learn they're in a place called Never Was, a limbo for lost dreams and disappointments, a landfill for things that never came to be, but also a place of change and transition. Dreamy, poignant, and revelatory, Never Was is a bold and inventive novel by an inimitable voice in literary fiction.

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Cornish mermaids take to the football pitch to protest warming seas. Trans students in Manchester searching for the perfect dick accidentally warp the fabric of spacetime. England's worst pogrom comes for York's particle collider, powered by bread and gender energy. On Bournemouth beach, a storm delivers an ancestor across oceans of time to sire a drowning descendant. The devil stands a drink at London's famous gay pub, The Black Cap, while Artemis, in the guise of Joan of Arc, roams a life-or-death night in East Sussex. Remember the Witchcraft Act of 1927, and the refugees that fled via cinema to defend the Republic of Catalunya? Of course not, it's been written out of history. This is England, (but not?) as we know it. A queer quantum tour through what was, what is, what could have been and may yet still come to pass, in a collection that braids high-wire believe-it-or-not memoir with cutting-edge science fiction from alternate timelines that vibrate very close to ours. Truth or dare? Both, always.

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An electrifying novel about the creeping reality of political terror, and the violent pleasures found in Brooklyn's queer heartlands. Part noir, part erotic thriller, X is a vivid, moody and darkly funny portrait of those living on the margins of an increasingly hostile society. Broke and discontented, amateur sadist Lee spends their days working for a big corporation and their nights searching the warehouses and dungeons of Brooklyn looking for the mysterious, seductive, and bloodthirsty X. In a sly purging of migrants, refugees, sex workers and queers - any citizens they claim to be undesirable - the US government has started exporting people, and Lee has heard X might be among those about to disappear. As their obsession with X grows, Lee becomes further enmeshed in the crimes and dramas of the city's queer community, following ex-lovers, playmates, clients, best friends, and accidental accomplices through damp and shining bars and parties looking for any lead that might bring them closer to X, before she vanishes for good.

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Emerson Whitney writes, ''Really, I can''t explain myself without making a mess.'' What follows is that mess - electrifying, gorgeous, defiant. At Heaven''s center, Whitney seeks to understand their relationship to their mother and grandmother, those first windows into womanhood and all its consequences. Whitney retraces a roving youth in deeply observant, psychedelic prose - all the while folding in the work of thinkers like Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and C. Riley Snorton - to engage transness and the breathing, morphing nature of selfhood. An expansive examination of what makes us up, Heaven wonders what role our childhood plays in who we are. Can we escape the discussion of causality? Is the story of our body just ours? With extraordinary emotional force, Whitney sways between theory and memory in order to explore these brazen questions and write this unforgettable book.

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In Ten Bridges I've Burnt, Brontez Purnell - the bard of the underloved and overlooked - turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil within. 'The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in,' Purnell writes, 'is simply existing.' The thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges Ive Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with packaging his trauma for TV writers' rooms; wrestles with the curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members; and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses on everything from love and loneliness to capitalism and Blackness to jogging and the ethics of art, always with unpredictable clarity and movement. With the same balance of wit and wisdom that made 100 Boyfriends a sensation, Purnell unleashes another collection of boundary-pushing writing with Ten Bridges Ive Burnt, a book as original and thrilling as the author himself.

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Daring, witty, and strange, the twelve stories in Large Animals confront what it means to have a body. Jess Arndt's often-unnamed narrators battle with inhabiting a form that makes them feel both deeply uncomfortable and detached, constantly challenging the limits of gender and reality as they try to connect with other people and with themselves. These are stories that rebel against accepted ideas of human identity and present a new normal that is as ambiguous as it is messy. In 'Moon Colonies' the narrator's disconnect with their body leads them on a masochistic gambling spree. In 'Jeff', Lily Tomlin mistakes Jess for Jeff, triggering a hilarious and unhinged identity crisis. And in 'Contrails', a character calls each of their ex lovers the night before surgery, confronting a gut-twisting fear of becoming non-existent. Soupy, visceral, and often disconcerting, Large Animals sets a new standard for language, challenging our concepts of gender and body in a way that feels radical, insightful, and incredibly relevant.

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When Deshawn hears news of his uncle's death, his riotous big-city life in San Francisco is abruptly put on hold while he travels back to his Alabama hometown for the funeral. While there, he's hit by flashbacks of growing up queer and black in the '80s South, of a youth filled with strong women, bewildered boys, and messed up queers. Wading through prickly reminders of his childhood, of sweltering Sundays, church, family, and the men he once knew, Deshawn reconnects with his old self and the ghosts of his past. A raw, dirty, hilarious, and heart-breaking novel about the experiences that shape us, Since I Laid My Burden Down asks the intimate question: who deserves love?

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When a TERF bombs Frankie's workplace, she blows up Frankie's life with it. As the media descends like vultures, Frankie tries to cope with the carnage: binge-drinking, sleeping with strangers, pushing away her friends. Then, she meets Vanya. Mysterious, beautiful, terrifying Vanya. The two hit it off immediately, but as their relationship intensifies, so too does Frankie's feeling that Vanya is hiding something from her. When Vanya's secrets threaten to tear them apart, Frankie starts digging, and unearths a sinister, depraved conspiracy, the roots of which go deeper than she ever imagined. Shocking, grotesque, and downright filthy, Brainwyrms confronts the creeping reality of political terrorism while exploring the depths of love, pain, and identity.

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Limbic is Peter Scalpello's glittering ode to sex, intimacy, and queer discovery. Taking us on slippery nights out fuelled by chemsex, on drunken lads' holidays, and into the quiet violence of small domestic moments, this is a world where tracksuits hide queer desire, where shame masks vulnerability, where wallets hide wraps of crystal meth. From the eager trepidation of teenage sex, to the ecstasy of parties, to the stigma around HIV, Limbic is at once a therapy and a celebration, showing how queer learning can be both soft-edged and brutal at once. An exploration of masculinity, addiction and trauma, this is a revelatory collection of poems; wise, tender, and vital.

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After a decade-long relationship with a dominatrix he called Daddy, Emerson Whitney began to crave something besides submission. It came as a full surprise: submission had been so central to his early adulthood. Now what? Dizzied by new questions of transness and aging, living in a tent while his relationship ends, Emerson stumbles upon an advertisement for a storm chasing tour. 'For thrill seekers,' it says. Unsure what else to do, he signs up. Daddy Boy follows Emerson as he packs into a van with a group of strangers and drives up and down America - staying in Days Inns and eating bags of carrots from Walmart and hunting down storms like so many white whales. Steeped in the prairie landscape of his childhood, Emerson recalls his adoptive dad, Hank, unflinching and extremely Texan; and his biological dad who, with his cowboy hats and puppies, always seemed so sweet and absent. From the van's trash-strewn backseat, and in the face of these looming figures, Emerson begins to wonder: Did he want to be Daddy now?

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Three years ago, Alice spent one night in an abandoned house with her friends Ila and Hannah. Since then, things have not been going well. Alice is living a haunted existence, selling videos of herself cleaning for money, drinking herself to sleep. She hasn't spoken to Ila since they went into the House. She hasn't seen Hannah either. Memories of that night torment her mind and her flesh, but when Ila asks her to return to the House, past the KEEP OUT sign, over the sick earth where teenagers dare each other to venture, she knows she must go. Together Alice and Ila must face the horrifying occurrences that happened there, must pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences aside, and try to rescue Hannah, who the House has chosen to make its own.Cutting, disruptive, and darkly funny, Tell Me I'm Worthless is a vital work of trans fiction that confronts both supernatural and real-world horrors as it examines the devastating effects of trauma and the way fascism makes us destroy ourselves and each other.

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