[en] The Zabriskie Rewind 2025: The favourite books of authors, artists, publishers, editors, musicians, booksellers, friends – from the sphere of the Zabriskie Bookstore. Texts are in english or german.
[de] Das Zabriskie Rewind 2025: Die Lieblingsbücher von Autor*innen, Künstler*innen, Verleger*innen, Herausgeber*innen, Musiker*innen, Buchhändler*innen, Freund*innen – aus dem Dunstkreis des Zabriskie-Buchladens. Texte sind auf englisch oder deutsch.
~~~~~
With contributions by / Mit Beiträgen von:
(In alphabetical order / In alphabetischer Reihenfolge)
David Bergé / davidberge.info
Kim Bode / kimbode.com
Ale Borea / aleborea.bandcamp.com
Carla Boregas / carlaboregas.com
Miguel Buenrostro / miguelbuenrostro.net
Federica Bueti / federicabueti.org
Lorena Carràs / Zabriskie
Chago / codex-editora.bandcamp.com
Siouxzi Connor / siouxziconnor.com
Jean-Marie Dhur / Zabriskie
Ben Glas / thankyouforyourunderstanding.com
Berta Gutierrez & Alkistis Thomidou / forty-five-degrees.com
Magdalena Jadwiga Härtelova / mjhartelova.com
Till Hormann / soundcloud.com/tillhormann
Bethan Hughes / bethanhughes.com
Kilian Jörg / kilianj.org
Kallia Kefala / kalliakefala.com
Alberto Morreo
Weston Olencki / westonolencki.com
Linn Penelope Rieger / linnpeneloperieger.online
Lea Schneider / leaschneider.net
Tillmann Severin / tillmann-severin.de
Sarah Shin / silverpress.org
Cassie Thornton / feministeconomicsdepartment.com
Yuri Tuma / yurituma.com
(If you are interested in some of the titles without links to our shop, let us know - we can order almost all available books)
___
△ David Bergé △
artist and founder of kyklàda.press
davidberge.info
kyklada.press
Banzeiro Òkòtó: Amazonie le centre du monde, by Eliane Brum
Originally published by Companhia Das Letras in 2021.
Éditions du sous-sol, 2024
A real confrontation with the destruction of the Amazon by a journalist who decided to move her life from São Paulo to a small city in the heart of the forest to work on this book. Written against the backdrop of uncertainty, gerontoiatric authoritarianism, environmental corruption, and rising social injustice, this book is a fierce document for transformation arguing for the centrality of the Amazon in all our lives, human and non-human.
Tropical Truth, A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil, by Caetano Veloso
Originally published by Companhia Das Letras in 1997.
Da Capo Press, 2003
How to resist a book when its sentences are "(...) he understood at once that the magical and ordinary reality were reaffirming each other, that the symbolic and the empirical were not to be distinguished - that at this great moment, reality was pregnant with myth. (...)" ? --- A memoir, written by the Brazilian musician and powerful performer Caetano Veloso (b. 1942), exposing his role in the 1960s Tropicalismo movement, his arrest and captivation together with Gilberto Gil during the Military dictatorship, and consequent exile in London. Written with quiet elegance and regard for fellow artists and friends, the book traces the intimate entanglement of music, politics, and revolution.
The position of Spoons and other Intimacies, by Deborah Levy
Hamish Hamilton, 2024
A constellation of brief texts subtly woven together into a book-length journey, exploring a writer's everyday life and universe, and the imprint left by literary and artistic influences. Levy’s writing opens up long corridors for me as a reader, to move through. At times I felt my hand was held.
△ Kim Bode △
visual artist working at the intersection of sculpture, sound and photography
kimbode.com
Queer Ecologies - Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson
Indiana University Press, 2010
I ordered this book a while back at Zabriskie, and since then it has accompanied me throughout the year, as I’m a somewhat slow reader when it comes to academic texts. Though the book was already published in 2010, I found the included texts helpful to understand queer lives in both global and historical contexts. It has also supported me to understand the suppression of minorities (queer, disabled, migrant, Black and brown peoples and anything that is often put into the category of „the other“), what is happening in current times, and the rise of new fascist and identitarian streams that are so fond of eugenic wording to describe „nature“. Against this stand three larger, and well structured, sections, namely, "Against Nature?" Queer Sex, Queer Animality“, „Green, Pink, and Public: Queering Environmental Politics“, and „Desiring Nature? Queer Attachments“ that make visible how queer and intersectional „nature“ actually is and always has been. One of the citations that Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands used resonated for a while with me: "It is as if the land secretes pheromones testifying to its abuse, detectable only by those who are themselves damaged" - Jan Zita Grover.
A Book of Noises - Notes on the Auraculous, by Caspar Henderson
Granta Books, 2024
zabriskie.de/a-book-of-noises
A fun compendium of everything that makes noise! Sectioned in smaller chapters and easily readable for the smaller breaks in between, I am astonished about all the things that make noise and how much I love the detail and wit that Henderson included. Sometimes I feel that the geekiness of this book served me well, and that I often got excited to read about the next noisy thing, which always had the right dose of information and science. One remembers the vinyl that is travelling around space as well as the whales that also made it on another vinyl, which sold over 10 million copies, to the song of the nightingale in Berlin, bat sounds, harmony, rhythm and frontiers.
When I sing, mountains dance, by Irene Sola
Granta Books, 2022
zabriskie.de/when-i-sing-mountains-dance
zabriskie.de/singe-ich-tanzen-die-berge
Imagining the story from the eyes of someone else who might walk within the mountains and towns comes very easy in this book by Solà. Though it was sometimes hard to follow all the different characters and the timeline, I enjoyed this book so much during my recent residency. In my mind I was able to open up to otherworldly creatures and their perspectives (really loved that dog scene) and to understand the gloomy atmosphere not as something cold or dangerous, but as something that can incorporate empathy, warmth and interconnectedness of small things, myth and matter. I’m looking forward to reading the new book from the same author, hopefully sooner than later!
△ Ale Borea △
percussionist and sound artist
aleborea.bandcamp.com
Parar la oreja. Notas sobre una política de escucha, by Gabriel Giorgi
Tenemos las Máquinas, 2025
Gabriel Giorgi’s book is one that unsettles, and in the best possible way. It is one of the few Spanish-language works on politics and listening that confronts the contemporary political condition without turning listening into an abstract metaphor of democracy or a ready-made gesture of ethical openness. Written as a series of notes, it analyzes collective "aturdimiento" as a symptom of a problem of listening, while also offering a sharp (and self-critical) reflection on the political left: the rise of the far right, Giorgi suggests, emerges from the failure of effective political listening, allowing what was unheard and unarticulated to find expression in new ultraconservative formations.
The book “opens like an ear” to what is actually there. Giorgi calls it an experiment, and indeed the notes (are born from) and function as exercises in listening, for both writer and reader. It offers a lucid reading of the present, grounded in a mode of listening that pauses, shifts, becomes uncomfortable, and reorganizes itself. It holds a tense, uneasy faith: in the voracity of late capitalism and the thrombosed masculinity embodied by figures like Milei, silence becomes tempting while noise has already been co-opted by neofascism. Avoiding commonplaces, this book insists on understanding listening as the arena where attention and dissent are contested.
Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear, edited by Irene Revell and Sarah Shin
Silver Press, 2024
zabriskie.de/bodies-of-sound
If I may be allowed to cheat a little (after all, what does it truly mean to have “read” a book?... Reading is less a finished act than an ongoing process, something that remains open, like listening should remain open. Books hold us in suspension beyond their beginning and end, circulate socially, and become works we return to. In that sense, Bodies of Sound, edited by Irene Revell and Sarah Shin, is such a work. This anthology explores, playfully and beautifully, themes of memory, gender, politics, decolonization, other ways of knowing, and therefore, ways of facing this hypercapitalist world and its threats, in struggle and resistance, but also in tenderness, in imagination, and in collective work. It is a fantastic book precisely because it does not close. It becomes a kind of community of reflections, like a group of amigas to whom one returns for advice, poetry, mutual inspiration, and ideas. You go back to it, revisit it, let it rest. It is a book to read when one lies exhausted in bed, overwhelmed by a collapsing world, as much as when one is ready to head out into the streets. It both inspires and accompanies. It unfolds in a suspended temporality. Its instructions, questions, essays, and exercises reorient you and readjust the very act of listening, ultimately allowing listening itself to become a feminist ear.
△ Carla Boregas △
musician and sound artist
carlaboregas.com
I chose 3 books that made a great impact in my year from authors that made me think why I haven’t read those authors before, even though I knew their names and popularity for a long time. The 3 books enchantment me, giving me a fantastic and dreamy yet present and intense way of looking at daily life.
The Hearing Trumpet, by Leonora Carrington
Originally published in 1974.
Penguin, 2015
zabriskie.de/the-hearing-trumpet
“Sleeping and waking are not quite as distinctive as they used to be, I often mix them up.”
The Hour of the Star, by Clarice Lispector
Originally published in 1977.
Penguin, 2014
zabriskie.de/hour-of-the-star
“We live exclusively in the present because forever and eternally it is the day of today, and the day of tomorrow will be a today. Eternity is the state of things at this very moment.”
The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin
Originally published in 1963
Penguin, 1990
zabriskie.de/the-fire-next-time
“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”
Plus regularly reading pieces and bites of "The Gulistan" by Saadi de Shiraz, sufi poetry as a daily oracle!
△ Miguel Buenrostro △
artist and filmmaker
miguelbuenrostro.net
Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, by Eduardo Galeano
Nation Books, 2013
When I read Los hijos de los días (Children of the Days), Eduardo Galeano gives me hope, just like every single one of his books. I return to this book every year; it reminds me of a world I wish to inhabit daily, a poem a day, a story a day, a way of looking and listening to the invisible, learning and living with our contradictions. From Galeano, I went directly to John Berger. His Ways of Seeing films led me to Permanent Red, unfolding an embodiment of looking at art. Berger helps me understand how I see art, how my perception itself is affected by regimes of history and power.
Un destino común (en: A Common Path), by Lucrecia Martel
Caja Negra Editora, 2019
Connecting this, I find a breath of fresh air in Lucrecia Martel, she always hits the spot for me. As a filmmaker, I resonate with her insistence that the image is informed by sound (in cinema). Un destino común gathers texts, interviews, and talks in which she reflects on sound as a guiding principle for image-making. By listening, she disconnects from the visual regimes imposed on us; thinking cinema through sound is how she begins to unlearn the dominant visual grammar shaped by Hollywood’s propaganda machinery.
Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing, by John Berger
Originally published in 1960.
Verso, 2025
zabriskie.de/permanent-red
Noise : The Political Economy of Music, by Jacques Attali
Originally published in french in 1977.
University of Minnesota Press, 1985
La tierra del faisán y del venado (en: The Land of the Pheasant and the Deer), by Antonio Mediz Bolio
Contreras y Sanz, 1922
△ Federica Bueti △
writer, educator, editor
editor with kyklada.press
federicabueti.org
Traces of Enayat, by Iman Mersal
And Other Stories, 2023
Iman Mersal is one of my favorite poets; her direct style, dark humor, and interest in archives and archival practices resonate strongly with my own research interests. This summer, in preparation for my trip to Cairo for a literary residency, I read Traces of Enayat, first published in Arabic by the amazing Kotob Khan in 2019 and later translated into English. The book retraces the life of the Egyptian writer Enayat Zayyat, whose only known novel, al-Hubb wa-l-Samt (Love and Silence), was published posthumously in 1967, four years after she died by suicide in 1963. More than a biography, the book offers a layered portrait of Cairo’s cultural and intellectual life, Mersal’s own trajectory. Reflecting on the limits of institutional archives, Mersal writes: “To trace a person that the institutional archive does not acknowledge or permit to remain among its important files means entering the personal archive and its shadow maze: unlit, unforthcoming, and complex.” The book merits close reading for its experimental composition and lucid prose, and for the way Mersal shows what it means to read—and write—within the gaps and silences of official archives.
L'Oasi (Romanzo Arabo), by Leda Rafanelli
Originally published in 1921.
Corsiero Editore, 2017
This book was a real discovery for me, as I had never encountered the life or work of this fiercely unconventional figure. A typographer by trade and a self-taught essayist, novelist, short-story writer, and publisher, Rafanelli was also an anarchist and anti-colonial activist, a feminist, and a committed Muslim—positions that relegated both her life and work to obscurity for far too long. Recently, her novel L’Oasi was republished in an edition curated by Milva Maria Cappellini. L’Oasi tells the story of a doomed love affair between a French writer engaged in colonial propaganda and a Bedouin woman who abandons her community and sense of belonging in the name of love and devotion, only to be left with a longing that can never be fulfilled. What begins as a romance steadily unravels the very myths it appears to stage, exposing the comforting fictions Europe invented about itself and about others. Although the novel is not free of Orientalist tropes or moments of romanticization, its exotic atmosphere is persistently undercut by Rafanelli’s sharp awareness that intimacy, like empire, is never innocent, but structured by power, desire, and projection.
Our Women on the Ground: Essays By Arab Women Reporting From The Arab World, edited by Zahra Hankir
Penguin Books, 2019
Once I started reading this gripping collection of essays, anecdotes, and personal reflections, I couldn’t stop. The book bears witness to the experiences of nineteen Arab women writers and journalists reporting from across the Arab-speaking world. It is worth saying here that the label "Arab" here should be used within brakets since it is a pretty abstract concept, since each woman expresses a different experience of her identity as an Arab woman. As Zahra Hankir, editor of the book, sums the question up in the introduction: "They intrepidly crush stereotypes of what it means to be an Arab or Middle Eastern woman today, especially in the year of U.S. President Donald Trump, the rise of populism and the far right in Europe and elsewhere, and ISIS." Coming from diverse backgrounds and professional trajectories, these women have endured—and defied—multiple forms of violence, repression, and suspicion, both in their work as reporters and in their lives as women. The collection moves between political and deeply personal registers: the challenges of reporting on political issues as a woman in Egypt; the paradoxes faced by Saudi women forced to buy their underwear from conservative male vendors; or the intimate struggles between a daughter and her father around her political activism and her feminism. What distinguishes this book from other accounts of conflict reporting is its attention to less-explored spaces of living and working in zones of crisis—the intimacy of a kitchen, a beauty parlor, or a bra shop. Through these everyday sites, the essays reveal how power, gender, and violence shape not only larger historical events but also the textures of daily life. It was a pleasure and a moment of learning to spend time in the company of these amazing women and their powerful voices.
Journal of an Ordinary Grief, by Mahmood Darwish
Originally published in 1979.
Archipelago Books, 2010
I never get tired of reading Darwish's poetic prose and poems. Like Iman Mersal, his prose has something razor-sharp and uncompromising about it—at once lucid and lyrical, hopeful yet deeply disillusioned. There is also a dark, understated humor that continues to surprise and haunt the reader, emerging precisely at moments of political and emotional extremity. Recently I got a copy of Journal of Ordinary Grief a few weeks ago, and I am reading it as I write these lines and as Palestinians continue to be exterminated across historic Palestine. I was drawn to this book by what its title promises: a “journal” of “ordinary grief.” Written in the aftermath of the 1967 defeat, the text records the everyday textures of loss under occupation—the repetition of small humiliations, the erosion of language, the persistence of memory, and the fragile insistence on life itself. Grief is thus lived daily, embedded in routine, gesture, and speech. Darwish refuses sentimentality and heroic posturing. Instead, his writing dwells in the space of contradictions and uncertainty, reminding us how literature can bear witness to the quiet and quotidian manifestations of history's ruptures, and how art itself inevitably becomes a form of resistance.
△ Lorena Carràs △
co-founder of Zabriskie
curator, educator, listening enthusiast
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, by Olga Tokarczuk
Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024
zabriskie.de/the-empusium
zabriskie.de/empusion
Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story is dark, playful, and quietly disturbing novel that interrogates history, gender, and the power structures hidden within storytelling itself. Set in a remote sanatorium in the early twentieth century, the book echoes the tradition of The Magic Mountain while deliberately undermining it, transforming the health resort into a space of quiet menace and ideological decay.
The setting is central to the novel’s power. Cut off from the outside world, surrounded by watchful forests, the sanatorium becomes a liminal zone where illness, routine, and repetition slowly erode certainty. The health resort feels like a world apart and as days fill up with the same conversations, the same rituals, and the constant reminder of sickness, ordinary logic starts to slip. Tokarczuk masterfully cultivates unease not through overt terror, but through accumulation: fragments of speech, recurring motifs, and subtle distortions of reality.
A key theme of The Empusium is its incisive critique of misogyny embedded in Western intellectual traditions. The men at the sanatorium spend a lot of time talking, and at first their conversations sound philosophical, cultured, even profound. But over time, their ideas about women and bodies reveal themselves as narrow, smug, and often ugly. Tokarczuk exposes these patterns through dark irony rather than moralizing. She lets the men talk themselves into exposure, using irony, repetition, and excess to show just how hollow their thinking is. Illness becomes more than a physical condition, it is a way of describing a whole mindset, one that infects not just individuals but an entire way of seeing the world.
The Empusium isn’t a typical horror novel. Its unease creeps in slowly, working on the reader as much through ideas as atmosphere. Tokarczuk leaves us with the sense that what truly haunts the sanatorium is not something supernatural, but a way of thinking that is been allowed to persist for far too long.
El invencible verano de Liliana, by Cristina Rivera Garza
Literatura Random House, 2021
El invencible verano de Liliana by Cristina Rivera Garza is a deeply moving and quietly powerful book. Written in response to the murder of the author’s sister, Liliana, it weaves together memoir, personal investigation, and literary reflection. Rivera Garza uses language itself as a tool to confront violence, absence, and institutional silence.
Rivera Garza builds the narrative through fragments: letters, notebooks, official documents, and remembered conversations. What comes through is the act of searching itself: moving through language, archives, and memory in a way that feels both deeply personal and morally necessary. The book insists that telling the story is not about closure, but about refusing erasure.
One of the most moving aspects of the book is its deep attention to language. Legal and bureaucratic terms are exposed as insufficient, even complicit, in their failure to name gendered violence accurately. Against this, Rivera Garza proposes a form of writing rooted in care, precision, and solidarity. The personal becomes inseparable from the political, as Liliana’s life is reclaimed from the narratives that sought to reduce it.
Despite its devastating subject matter, the book resists sensationalism. Its voice remains clear, measured, inviting the reader not to consume pain, but to sit with it and bear witness. In doing so, El invencible verano de Liliana becomes more than a memoir of loss: it is a powerful meditation on how writing can honor the dead while speaking urgently to the living.
Theory of Water, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Haymarket Books, 2025
zabriskie.de/theory-of-water
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Theory of Water is a fluid, genre-defying work that moves between poetry, prose, theory, and storytelling with deliberate ease. The book invites readers into a way of thinking and feeling shaped by Indigenous knowledge, relationality, and deep attention to land and body.
Structured as a series of fragments, the text resists linear progression.Water functions as both metaphor and method: knowledge flows, gathers, and returns. Simpson’s writing refuses the rigidity of Western academic theory, favoring instead a form that is embodied, emotional, and grounded in lived experience. Reading the book feels less like following a thesis than like learning to listen.
At its core, Theory of Water is concerned with resistance—quiet, intimate, and persistent. Love, grief, kinship, and survival emerge as political acts, inseparable from struggles against colonial extraction and erasure. Simpson’s language is lyrical yet precise, often using repetition and rhythm to build meaning rather than explain it outright.
This is not a book that seeks to instruct or convince. It asks for patience and openness, rewarding readers willing to sit with uncertainty and complexity. lt offers a powerful reminder that other ways of knowing, and other ways of living, are not only possible, but already here, flowing beneath the surface.
Urban Soundscapes - A Guide to Listening for Landscape Architecture and Urban Design, by Usue Ruiz Arana
Routledge, 2025
Urban Soundscapes – A Guide to Listening for Landscape Architecture and Urban Design by Usue Ruiz Arana invites readers to rethink the city through sound rather than sight alone. In a field largely shaped by visual tools, the book makes a compelling case for listening as an essential design practice.
The book bridges landscape architecture, urban design, and sound studies, presenting sound as both an environmental condition and a cultural expression. Rather than offering fixed solutions, Ruiz Arana provides a framework for understanding how sound reveals spatial relationships, social dynamics, and ecological processes.
Usue Ruiz de Arana encourages a slower, more attentive relationship with urban environments. Reading it feels less like learning a new tool and more like training a sensibility. It prompts the reader to notice how everyday soundscapes, often dismissed as background noise, carry cultural meaning and spatial intelligence. This shift feels less technical and more perceptual, inviting designers to reconsider how urban spaces are experienced through the body.
Urban Soundscapes reminds us that cities are experienced through the body as much as through the eye, and that listening can be a form of care.
A Year of Deep Listening - 365 Text Scores for Pauline Oliveros, edited by Stephanie Loveless
Terra Nova Press, 2024
zabriskie.de/a-year-of-deep-listening
A Year of Deep Listening – 365 Text Scores for Pauline Oliveros, edited by Stephanie Loveless, feels less like a book to read straight through and more like one to live alongside. Rooted in Pauline Oliveros’s practice of Deep Listening, it invites a daily meeting with sound: sometimes subtle, sometimes challenging, and often unexpectedly grounding.
Rather than offering instructions in any strict sense, the 365 text scores function as open invitations. Each one creates a small space for attention, encouraging listening that is shaped by context, curiosity, and presence. This openness feels true to Oliveros’s legacy, honoring her work while leaving room for interpretation, variation, and personal experience.
For sound artists in particular, A Year of Deep Listening works as both practice and philosophy. It affirms listening as material, method, and ethical stance, reminding us that sustained attention can itself be a form of artistic and socialengagement.
As a reader, and listener, I found myself returning to the book as a way of recalibrating my attention. Some scores sharpen awareness of everyday soundscapes, while others gently unsettle familiar habits of listening and making. Over time, the practice begins to feel less like an exercise and more like a way of being, with sound, with others, and with the world.
That spirit was especially present during the book’s 2025 presentation at Zabriskie, which felt closer to a shared listening event than a traditional launch. The atmosphere intimate and attentive, with an audience clearly attuned to experimental sound and to Oliveros’s wider legacy. It reinforced the sense that this book is not a static object, but a living, communal practice.
With a Bird - A Reader on Avian Kinship, edited by Marjolein van der Loo
Onomatopee 2025
zabriskie.de/with-a-bird
With a Bird - A Reader on Avian Kinship, edited by Marjolein van der Loo, approaches birds not as distant subjects to be studied, but as fellow inhabitants of shared spaces, beings with whom relationships are constantly forming. The book unfolds as a gathering of voices from the visual arts, onithology, philosophy, and cultural theory which collectively explore what it might mean to live, think and feel alongside birds.
Many of the texts encourage a patient and non-extractive way of looking and listening, an approach that resonates with contemporary artistic and ecological practices seeking alternatives to human-centred ways of thinking.
Reading the book encouraged me to slow down and reconsider my everyday encounters with birds, moments that are often overlooked or romanticised. Here, kinship is not sentimental, but rather something that is carefully examined through observation, care, and ethical responsibility.
With a Bird feels less like a book to finish and more like a space to spend time in. It offers a quiet but steady reminder that our relationships with non-human life are shaped by how we pay attention, how we respond, and how open we are to forms of kinship that are delicate, complex and ever-evolving.
△ Chago △
curator, facilitator, label operator
codex-editora.bandcamp.com
Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan, edited by Dakin Hart & Mark Dean Johnson
University of California Press, 2019
This fantastic book brings to life the friendship between Isamu Noguchi and Saburo Hasegawa as they explored postwar Japan and its artistic traditions, balancing tradition and modernity in landscapes, sculptural forms, and experimental materials. The sections on abstract calligraphy and ink-based work were especially inspiring for me and sparked lots of curious ideas for my own illustrations, posters, and covers.
An Essay On Negation: Towards a Linguistic Anthropology, by Paolo Virno
(orig: Ensayo sobre la negación Por una antropología lingüística)
Seagull Books, 2018
I read this book knowing that maestro Paolo Virno had passed away in November 2025, which made me approach it with a certain consciousness. He takes something as simple as the word “no” and shows how negation shapes language, thought, and social life, creating the space where we can step into a public sphere of negotiation. It’s a subtle and surprisingly humane reflection on how denial structures our social and political existence. I read it in Spanish, in a very nice translation by “Tercero Incluido” (a publisher I’ve been paying special attention to lately), published in 2025.
Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal, by Mohammed El-Kurd
Haymarket Books, 2025
zabriskie.de/perfect-victims-and-the-politics-of-appeal
It’s amazing to see the way El-Kurd shows that Palestinians are expected to present a “perfect” suffering just to be heard, while their anger, resistance, and dignity are erased in the process. He critiques the way media, politics, and Western narratives demand a sanitized version of pain, and urges us to see Palestinians fully as people resisting colonialism with courage and clarity. (I read it in Spanish, “Víctimas perfectas y la política del encanto”, published by Capitán Swing in a very nice translation)
Mitos e imágenes. Tradiciones y leyendas a la luz de la cultura, edited by Marta Piñol Lloret
Sans Soleil Ediciones, 2024
This book dives into myths, traditions, and legends, exploring how they shape the way we think and see the world. With the aim of revisiting these times and places, it brings together complex, distant stories to rethink them in the light of our present and explore different ways of approaching reality. This one is in Spanish from the fantastic Sans Soleil, which also published COSMOLOGÍA ESOTÉRICA. One of the artists mentioned there, Josefa Tolrá, has been one of the most fascinating discoveries for me in recent years!
La mirada del jaguar, by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Tinta Limon, 2014
This one also in spanish, sorry! But is a must :) This book introduces you to “perspectivismo amerindio”, a way of thinking that breaks down the usual divisions between humans, animals, and spirits. Through conversational interviews, Viveiros de Castro shows how Amazonian peoples see the world not as one fixed reality but as many overlapping perspectives, where jaguars, vultures, or spirits have their own ways of being and knowing. I read it in Spanish, and as far as I know, there isn’t an English translation of this iconic book yet someone really should do it!
△ Siouxzi Connor △
writer and experimental filmmaker
author of Your Body of Water
siouxziconnor.com
A Language of Limbs, by Dylin Hardcastle
Verve Books, 2025
I came across Hardcastle’s honeyed, heartbreaking book just as it was released this year, thanks to a mutual friend with the author who knows that I cannot resist a gut-wrenching tale of queer teen limerence. Beginning in the sticky summer heat of Australia in the 1970’s, this sexually electrifying, boundless love story told in alternating timelines will hit home for anyone who has had a taste of the violence that love can inflict on us when we try to outrun it. Or for those who know just how bone-deep love can go.
Paradise Rot, by Jenny Hval
Verso Books, 2018
zabriskie.de/paradise-rot
I revisited Hval’s 2018 debut novel this year for a writing class I was teaching, as I was looking for works which make the boundaries palpably porous between the human body and the more-than-human worlds we inhabit. The main setting of Paradise Rot is a mysterious urban apartment which becomes more and more blurred with the ‘natural’ world, just as the two bodies cohabitating within it, also become increasingly, sensuously porous to their surroundings. As boundaries dissipate and disintegrate, vivid sexual awakenings and unprecedented desires take over, all described in a way that seems akin to the searing, endearing honesty of Hval’s stage presence.
Strangers: Essays on the Human & Nonhuman, by Rebecca Tamas
Makina Books, 2020
zabriskie.de/strangers
Reading this essay collection goes beyond what most non-fiction writing aims to achieve: it not only opens new, thoughtful pathways like a lot of good essay collections do, it also awakens an entirely new, ‘creaturely’ way of walking through the world. I found myself treading through forests and urban spaces alike with newly loving footsteps, and my eyes and ears attuned to the pulsating, fragile life-forms of all kinds that so urgently need our attention. The attunement brings both a more lively presence in the here and now, along with a sense of traversing time: understanding the folklore and lineage of more-than-human-knowledges that have ensured our survival until now.
Physica, by Hildegard von Bingen
Originally written between 1150 and 1160.
Inner Traditions and Bear, 1998
Although written in the 12th century, reading this in the 21st is another mind-altering exercise in traversing time. The lucidity and clarity which the mystic and visionary wrote this, moving from plant wisdom, to knowledge of stones, trees and animals, and how we might live in benefit to one another, seems to close the gap of time. At times the prose is written in ways as if Hildegard could be that intriguing next-door-neighbour who brings you soup when you’re ill. I’m grateful to the dear one who gave this to me as a birthday gift and brought all of this age-old natural knowledge into my present.
△ Jean-Marie Dhur △
co-founder of Zabriskie
music lover, radio host, dj, wilderness educator
The Empusium, by Olga Tokarczuk
Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024
zabriskie.de/the-empusium
zabriskie.de/empusion
2025 began with a deep dive into the work of Olga Tokarczuk. I read one book after another and found everything brilliant so far, except for "Flights", which I couldn't really connect into. The two highlights for me so far have been "Primeval and Other Times" and "The Empusium". The former is masterly example of the literary style that is commonly referred to as Magic Realism, where humans and more-than human beings and entities living in and around a certain polish village, experience the many changes that happen between the beginning and the end of the 20th century. And the second is a another masterpiece – inspired by Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, O.T. brings together (in a remote sanatorium in the mountains of southern Poland at the beginning of the 20th century) a group of stiff, pedantic, misogynic and sickly men who believe themselves to know exactly how the world works, and don't stop their mansplaining for one single moment. But things turn out differently. It's wonderful how subtly the author builds the tension, and also how strange and unexpected elements slide into the story. O.T. rightly won the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years ago. One project for this year is to continue reading The Books of Jacob, of which I only managed to read about 150 pages out of the approximately 900 last year before I became too intimidated by the sheer volume of the book.
Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez
Granta Books, 2023
zabriskie.de/our-share-of-night
zabriskie.de/unser-teil-der-nacht
The book that caused the strangest dreams. I haven't read horror fiction in ages, but since so many people raved about this novel, I had to read it. The argentinian author is rightly celebrated: although the book is pure genre fiction, it is of the highest literary level. A conspiracy by a powerful secret society, occult rituals, family relationships which spiral out of control, eerie and haunting things happening, and everything skilfully linked to historically documented figures and events, oftentimes to the argentinian military dictatorship. A gloomy parable about human greed and its destructive power, and a really scary page-turner.
The World After Gaza, by Pankaj Mishra
Fern Press, 2025
zabriskie.de/the-world-after-gaza
zabriskie.de/die-welt-nach-gaza
This book is highly recommended for anyone who wants to gain a historical context for the situation in Palestine, Israel and the genocide in Gaza. Captivatingly written and meticulously researched, the author zooms out from the contemporary moment and reveals the broader context that led to the catastrophic events of the past two years in Gaza, giving voice to Palestinian, Jewish, Israeli and other perspectives. He describes the history of modern anti-Semitism, especially in Europe, the history of Zionism, the events that led to the founding of the State of Israel, and the subsequent illegal displacement of and cruelty to the Palestinian people. Germany gets its own chapter in the book, in which both the atrocities of the Nazis and the double standards of the current government are examined.
James, by Percival Everett
Doubleday, 2024. Picador, 2025.
zabriskie.de/james
The winning novel of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is a magnificent reclaiming of history: Percival Everett retells the story we already partly know from Mark Twain's novel ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ – but from the perspective of James, or Jim, the slave who flees with Huck Finn from Hannibal Missouri, because he does not want to end up on a plantation, and be separated from his family. Stylistically brilliant and highly gripping, the book draws a picture of a grotesquely racist 19th century society (which the current US government would like to reinstate), in which the clever and educated James must use all his skills to escape the mob pursuing him. A devastating story, but one in which the main character's agency and dignity are upheld through frequent flashes of humour and wit. I was so captivated by the book that I finished reading it in two days.
Wild - An Elemental Journey, by Jay Griffiths
Penguin, 2008
zabriskie.de/wild
A book that has been in our store for several years, but it was only this summer that I heard a voice persuading me to read this book, possibly due to my wilderness mentoring training which I did the year before. A truly fantastic book by a brilliant writer and activist who travels around the globe to meet people who have a profound and respectful connection to the wild elements. J.G. weaves her sensual experiences and observations, her conversations with forest guardians, shamans, indigenous elders, conservationists and other friends of the wild, with social and philosophical reflections to create a highly poetic book that thoroughly challenges our modern way of life, which is largely disconnected from the rest of nature - and highlights the beauty of the wild and untamed.
Volcanic Tongue, by David Keenan
White Rabbit Books, 2025
zabriskie.de/volcanic-tongue
David Keenan, author of the excellent book "England’s Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground", about the bands Coil, Nurse With Wound and Current 93, has more or less turned his back on music journalism for several years now (and writes novels). So it is exciting that a compilation of his journalistic work has now been published. Keenan has always seen himself more as a writing music fan, and he has never been interested in analytically dissecting sounds, but rather in sharing his enthusiasm with others through the use of a woundrous and poetic language. This collection of passionate essays on experimental and underground music includes texts on John Fahey, Shirley Collins, Coil, Faust, PIL, Japanese enka music, The Dead C, Jandek, Sun Ra, Ellen Fullman, french underground music, and much more ... his very personal paeans really make you want to dive into the music he writes about.
△ Ben Glas △
compostmodernist, psychoacoustic composer, absurdist
thankyouforyourunderstanding.com
The Hawkline Monster (a Gothic Western), by Richard Brautigan
Originally published in 1974.
Canongate, 2017
One of the classics. I return to Brautigan every year (around this time of year, too) to bathe in his hippy wisdoms and absurdist takes, replenishing my personal sense of primordial and homesick americana-ness, whose vapours barely waft across the proverbial pond. There’s something about Brautigan, and this book (absolutely), that allows me, the reader, to fill in blank spaces. Brautigan writes with both the precision of a pointillist painter (think: Seurat) and the obtuse linguistic spread of a Mad-Libs ghostwriter.
Quantum Listening, by Pauline Oliveros
Spiral House / Silver Press, 2024
zabriskie.de/products/quantum-listening
A bit cheeky - but I have read this book (initially thumbed, dogeared and purchased at Zabriskie!) more times than I can recall. One part reminder to “listen beyond”, one part manifesto for a new and heart-based listening experience, one part breaking down any esoteric barriers between “musicians” and “non-musicians”: its framework, if practiced and followed or philosophically chewed, removes the need for a musical education for the act of enjoying music and its discovery. This writing belongs in my yearly revamp and rejuvenation of my own approach to music (making and listening) and, no doubt and no duh, Oliveros’ open eared and hearted approach to ecological concerns makes this a very timely meditation.
Tours of the Black Clock, by Steve Erickson
Originally published in 1989
Simon & Schuster, 2005
Oh my - this must be my favourite book I read this year. Its plot and structure strike me as the lovechild of Charlie Kaufman and Kurt Goeddel: both time and truth are folded upon themselves, and interlaced within one another, in a painstakingly thought out strirating narrative. This fabric of the plot weaves the narratives of a silent tugboat captain, his lover, his mother, a smut author and peddler, a mysterious ice machine and a painter gone dictator together into one juicy onion (I totally cried) of literary genius and genuss. I rabidly enjoyed the character development in Erickson’s writing: he has an uncanny ability to reveal the myriad masks of love (patience, forgiveness, acceptance, grief, etc.) in a very down to earth way.
△ Berta Gutierrez & Alkistis Thomidou △
Alkistis is architect, researcher, and educator
Berta is architect, curator, and researcher
both are co-editors of Radical Rituals
forty-five-degrees.com
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C Scott
Yale University Press, 1998
At a time when the fate of disputed territories is increasingly determined by how legible they are to regimes of extraction, we recommend this book for its insight into the origins and inherent pitfalls of a model based on homogenization and productivity of the land.
Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times, by Carla Bergman & Nick Montgomery
AK Press, 2017
In ongoing times marked by gloom and violence this book argues that joy, as an active form of resistance, is essential to sustaining movements by rooting struggle in care, creativity, and collective power without reproducing the harms they seek to dismantle.
Care‑Arbeit räumlich denken: Feministische Perspektiven auf Planung und Entwicklung, by Barbara Zibell
eFeF‑Verlag, 2022
Projecting into a not-that-far future, Barbara Zibell’s vision for 2071 explores how the built environment might change once care work is centered in social life, reframing planning through feminist perspectives on care, interdependence, and responsibility.
A Moratorium on New Construction, by Charlotte Malterre‑Barthes
Sternberg Press, 2024
Both a manifesto and a provocation, this book frames construction as inherently political and calls for a pause on new building to challenge architecture’s ties to extractive capitalism. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes advocates refusal, adaptive reuse, and care for planetary limits as ethical design imperatives.
Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life, by Adam Bobbette, Amy Donovan
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019
In relation to the Earth’s sources and resources, the editors of this compilation of essays show that planetary governance is deeply entangled with the earth’s strata—an ethos that has entirely terraformed the planet. They argue that by making geology a political discipline, a new disciplinary realm might emerge, one that opens up alternative relations to the mineral world.
Magdalena Jadwiga Härtelova
curator, conflict facilitator and art producer
co-founder of Casino for Social Medicine
co-author of It's Too Late. Do It Anyway!
mjhartelova.com
The Politics of Birth, by Sheila Kitzinger
Elsevier, 2005
I’ve been gifted this book when recovering from an abortion this summer. Asking myself whether to become a parent or not felt so cramped with the injustices of the world, the rise of fascism, and the environmental crisis, a little space was left for personal desires. It was a sad summer. Somehow, this book was the perfect answer to the aftermath of this complex decision. Birth giving is one of those pressure points that unfurls the whole state of our society, if you have a good guide. Sheila Kitzinger has been a politically engaged midwife in the UK since the 80s. She has Silvia Federici's diligence in recognizing patterns and Maggie Nelson's skill of mapping complicated matters. In chapters like "The clock, the bed and the chair", she shows how the "technocratic" way of giving birth practiced in institutionalized health care stands on the dehumanization of women, denying both our generational and embodied knowledge and turning us, and the babies, into machines. Through advocating for imprisoned mothers, she speaks against prisons in general. You can read this book if you need to feed your anger against patriarchal capitalism. You can read it as an example of a study. You can read it to find hope in those forging alternative ways of doing and relating. But you should read it regardless if you want to or can become pregnant.
Seeing Like a Smuggler - Borders from Below, edited by Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi
Pluto Press, 2022
Anthropology at its best here. This collection of ten studies of different smuggling practices and autonomous border crossing systems had me obsessed for a while. It theorizes smuggling as a conscious push against the nonsensicality of borders, of the "magical" constitution of them where by a declaration (and subsequent violent enforcement) a state suddenly "changes our perception of the real" -neighbours turn into enemies, value of goods changes because they crossed a line, small distance is impossible to bridge, a piece of paper determines whether you can pass or not, etc. The studies show the creative ways in which people work against, with and around this magic, but the researchers don't romanticize or demonize these practices. It just tickles me to see the many facets of human craftiness, to remember the given order can change.
Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. le Guin
Originally published in 1985
Gollancz, 2016
zabriskie.de/always-coming-home
This book came to me via Jean giving the best book recommendations. I'm a lifelong le Guin fan and she still surprises me. Always Coming Home is an anthropological study of a tribe that will have to live in Northern California some time in the future. A future where we pay for poisoning the planet, where much of the life has shrunk back to localized communities that are now more dependent on and in touch with the land. It is absolutely a utopia. If you ever spent any time in Northern California, you might get an additional thrill from the descriptions of nature and guessing which current localities are now under water or re-populated. The book is delightfully slow, more an atmosphere than a story. Similarly thrilling is the thoroughness with which le Guin thought through what a scientific study of a past future could look like - she talks about translation difficulties and digs, limits of present concepts of life or value when applied to the past-future, etc. She channels the best of her father, Alfred Kroeber, the founder of anthropology at the University of Berkeley, famous for documenting the disappearing native tribes (see the movie: Ishi, the Last Yahi for more). I'm nearly at the end. It's making me melancholic for a future we might never experience...
△ Till Hormann △
musician, composer, graphic designer
coordinator of operations at Valiz
soundcloud.com/tillhormann
The History of Bones, by John Lurie
Random House, 2021
This was pretty much the first book I read in 2025, and it happened to be a memoir. I don’t usually read memoirs (for no particular reason), but I was, and still am, a huge John Lurie fan. His music with the Lounge Lizards has heavily influenced my own saxophone playing. I loved Fishing with John, I loved Painting with John, and if I could, I would hang one of his paintings on my wall. Who knows, maybe one day. The book mainly focuses on John Lurie’s life in New York in the 1980s and depicts a vibrant, rebellious art, film, and music scene in which Lurie quickly became a central figure among artists such as Jim Jarmusch and Jean-Michel Basquiat. It’s a great read, full of gritty and funny stories. Maybe John Lurie wasn’t the nicest guy, and somewhat unexpectedly the book is also a lot about money, especially about how Lurie never seemed to make much of it from his music. You might think he’s holding a grudge, but then again, there are beautiful passages about music, and especially about playing the saxophone. One story that really stuck with me was Lurie talking about going into the forest at night to practice the sax, completely alone in the darkness, just him, and the trees listening. Beautiful.
Die Billigesser, by Thomas Bernhard
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988
I think it was around 2020 when I discovered Thomas Bernhard and bought pretty much every book of his that I could find in bookstores in Amsterdam, which was surprisingly a lot. Later, I realized that I either had friends who went through the same obsession and fascination, buying tons of Bernhard’s books, or friends who were completely untouched by it and dismissed his work after a couple of pages. Anyway, when I picked up Die Billigesser, I was reminded of one particular aspect that made me love Thomas Bernhard’s books so much. Maybe it’s just me, but I can find his books very funny. The way Bernhard describes things and constructs his sentences in such extreme detail, almost as if to avoid any possible misunderstanding, becomes so absurd at times that I actually have to laugh. Bernhard’s writing feels as if it never stops, driven by a need for ridiculous precision, which somehow makes it a real page-turner. I felt that this book depicts, in a very powerful way, a madness caused by isolation, absolute introversion, and drifting to the margins of society.
The Lonely City, by Olivia Laing
Canongate Books, 2016
This is a great book about loneliness, and in particular about the different faces of loneliness explored by Laing through the New York art world. Laing writes about the kind of loneliness that can exist even when you are surrounded by many people (as in the case of Andy Warhol); the loneliness that stems from not being understood (as in the case of Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol); or the loneliness created by deep traumatic experiences, isolation, and a society that simply does not tolerate otherness and neglects people such as David Wojnarowicz or Henry Darger. Laing writes in a deeply compassionate and investigative way, which I found very inspiring and refreshing. I started to develop much more interest in many of the artists Laing discusses than I ever had before. For example, her book finally made me pick up a picture book by Edward Hopper at my mom’s place again, and I now think about his paintings quite differently, through the lens of isolation and alienation.
Piecing Pages - On Working in Fragments, by Line Arngaard
Self-published, 2025
I wanted to bring attention to this very special book not only because I witnessed its creation and process over the years, but also because it is truly a unique visual reader and a collection of artworks that are all, in different ways, about working in fragments. The book takes its starting point from women’s craft techniques such as patchwork and quilting, which influence and inform fragmented working methods among designers and artists today. Line Arngaard has collected works by fifteen contributors in this book. Some of the contributions are written texts, such as FEMMAGE, in which Melissa Meyer and Miriam Schapiro propose that women’s arts and crafts ought to have a methodology of their own. Other works, such as Ronja Andersen’s contribution, can be seen as an insight into her research on the practices of female film editors. Works like Joke Robaards’s FORECAST, AFTERGRASS function as both a timeline and a playful engagement with archival images and text. The form keeps changing, and it is an incredible gathering of strong visual artists and thinkers.
Bethan Hughes
artist, working in the fields of research, audio-visual installation, sculpture, writing
bethanhughes.com
Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear, edited by Irene Revell and Sarah Shin.
Silver Press, 2024
zabriskie.de/bodies-of-sound
I began 2025 with this book. We explored it in a Diffrakt reading group inside the exhibition the world in a glass hat. at Neun Kelche, a fitting setting for a book you can open anywhere and begin reading. Blending poetry, fiction, memoir, and essays across decades and geographies, it’s a beautifully noisy compendium. It’s also where I read this excellent line by Daniela Cascella that I think about often!
“Sometimes even a short sentence holds a long arc of time between one word and another.”
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals, by Saidiya Hartman
Serpent's Tail, 2021
Later in the year, I read Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, a breathtaking work of what she has dubbed critical fabulation. Expanding archival fragments relating to Black women and queer lives in early 20th-century cities through rich, imaginative storytelling feels like the ultimate empathetic act. I only wish I’d read it sooner!
The New Fascist Body, by Dagmar Herzog
Wirklichkeit Books, 2025
zabriskie.de/the-new-fascist-body
zabriskie.de/der-neue-faschistische-koerper
Short and sharp, Dagmar Herzog’s The New Fascist Body was another favourite: an unsettling analysis of how contemporary authoritarian movements weaponize sexuality, gender, and religious sentiment. I’m deeply grateful to writers like Herzog who help make sense of the accelerating insanity of our world.
I Am Still Alive - Dispatches from Gaza, by Mahmoud M Al-Shaer
K. Verlag, 2025
zabriskie.de/i-am-still-alive
And finally, Mahmoud Al Shear’s One Day, I’m Still Alive: Dispatches from Gaza, a profound and harrowing first-person account of life under siege. A book as a means to communicate a reality that exists beyond the headlines and political speeches and instagram posts and the news cycle…
△ Kilian Jörg △
artist and philosopher
co-author of Durchlöchert den Status Quo
kilianj.org
A Half-Built Garden, von Ruthanna Emrys
St. Martin's Press, 2023
Die Erde ist in den 2080er Jahren im desolaten Zustand und die Menschheit hat sich in verschiedene Segmente aufgeteilt: manche träumen immer noch von der Flucht ins All und der technischen Lösung, andere leben immer noch offiziell im Rahmen der erodierten Nationalstaaten. Die Protagonist*innen des Romans leben allerdings in einem bioregionalistischen Watershed-Network, welches versucht, die Erde belebbar zu belassen und einen positiven und reparierenden Bezug zur Erde als menschliche Kultur herzustellen. Und dann besuchen Aliens die verwüstete Erde und stellen ein Naturgesetz auf, dass jede intelligente Spezies ihre Biosphere früher oder später vernichtet. Sie bieten Rettung an, doch die Watershed-People verweigern sich und kämpfen für einen anderen Begriff von intelligenten Umgang mit der Welt. Eine der spannendsten SF-Geschichten, die mir in den letzten Jahren untergekommen sind und eine der originellsten Umsetzungen der Alien-Metapher.
Utopie Radicale, von Alice Carabedian
Séuil, 2022
Eine sehr kluge Untersuchung davon, was utopisches Denken im Klimakollaps bedeuten kann und eine überzeugende Kritik an neueren Zukunftsfantasien, die nur von mehr von solidarischen Preppen, ZADs und selbstgezimmerten Hütten träumen. Für Alice Carabedian träumen nur diejenigen von den Sternen, die geerdet und gelandet sind. Wir müssen also erstmal Halt auf dieser Erde finden, um wieder von den wahnwitzigsten Zukunftsphantasien träumen zu können.
Hope Matters, von Elin Kelsey
Greystone, 2020
Ein bewegendes Essay für das Gefühl der Hoffnung als politische Haltung, welches wir in Zeiten des allgemeinen climate doomism brauchen. Kelsey kritisiert die Annahme eines "informational gaps" (das die Leute noch zu wenig wissen vom Kollaps und deswegen nicht handeln) und formuliert stattdessen einen "hope gap", an dem sich die Klimabewegung ausrichten sollte: wir sollten daran arbeiten, Szenarien der Hoffnung und Handlungsermöglichung für immer mehr Menschen plausibler zu machen, um sie aus dem Defaitismus ins Handelns zu bringen.
△ Kallia Kefala △
artist working across costume & stage design, installation, and performance
kalliakefala.com
The New Fascist Body, by Dagmar Herzog
Wirklichkeit Books, 2025
zabriskie.de/the-new-fascist-body
zabriskie.de/der-neue-faschistische-koerper
This book which examines the ideal of the fascist body, is both a super interesting read and a valuable tool for understanding the specificities of past and present fascisms. Primarily, though not exclusively, in the German context. Herzog offers an analytical account of the foundations on which fascism is built: racial supremacy and eugenics, and more specifically their articulation through sexuality and ableism.
One of Herzog’s most striking take is her refusal to explain fascism solely as a reaction to economic crisis, resentment, or social decline. Instead, the book foregrounds fascism as something that also derives from pleasure. The pleasure of violence and libidinal pleasure. What Herzog calls “sexy fascism” permits and even encourages certain forms of sexuality insofar as they serve the production of the fascist body: white, strong, intelligent and fertile.
Understanding fascism not as purely repressive but as permitting, as a sort of a libidinally charged form of social Darwinism was new to me. In this framework, the persistent fascist preoccupation with disability, its exclusion and eradication, becomes especially revealing. Herzog’s analysis makes visible the continuities in right-wing thought that shape ableist discourses in Germany up to the present day. In other words, the book helped me better understand the historical roots of German ableism.
Spanning from late nineteenth-century eugenic discourses in Germany, through National Socialism, and up to the present-day institutionalization of the AfD and its hate-driven rhetoric, Herzog traces the fantasy of a strong, potent “folk” and its necessary counterpart. This counterpart, variously defined according to historical and sociopolitical context, includes people with disabilities, Jews, Muslims, racialized social groups and particularly racialized brown and black men. The latter is not only central to fascist imaginaries but also runs through the history of “enemy” white feminisms. But more on this follows below in my impressions of Sophie Lewis’s Enemy Feminisms.
Enemy Feminisms - TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation, by Sophie Lewis
Haymarket Books, 2025
zabriskie.de/enemy-feminisms
As someone politicised within white feminist traditions, this book was a revelation for me. In Enemy Feminisms, Sophie Lewis traces a genealogy of reactionary white feminisms, primarily in the US and Britain, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each chapter centres on a particular feminist figure that embodies a reactionary feminist position, such as the Femmonationalist, the Pornophobe or the Girlboss, to name just a few.
Rather than treating these positions as simply “not feminist,” Lewis insists that they have fundamentally shaped the history of white feminism, whether we like it or not. It is therefore important for white feminists to recognise those enemy feminisms as part of their legacy, as their “bad kin”. Only from this position of historical understanding and accountability can a genuinely radical and liberatory feminist practice emerge.
And what bad kin they are: white supremacists, class supremacists, fascists, imperialists, nationalists, trans haters, sex-work haters, cops, neoliberal girlbosses, christians, you name it.
Enemy Feminisms ultimately gestures toward a feminist praxis rooted in abolitionism and a critique of both cisness and whiteness. By mapping feminism’s enemies from within, the book simultaneously outlines the political practice that stands in opposition to them: an anticolonial, anticapitalist, abolitionist and trans feminism.
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, by Irene Solà
Granta, 2025
zabriskie.de/i-gave-you-eyes-and-you-looked-toward-darkness
zabriskie.de/ich-gab-dir-augen-und-du-blicktest-in-die-finsternis
The darkness promised by the book’s title roams consequently through its pages. I must be honest and admit I chose the book exactly because of its title and of its promise of darkness. It didn’t fail me.
Irene Solà guides the reader through the day of death of Bernadetta, a woman living in a remote farmhouse in mountainous Guilleries region of Catalonia. In the literary timespan from dawn until night I got to acquaint myself not only with Bernadetta but with all women of her family line. Women who, willingly or not, became entangled in the repercussions and complications of making a pact with the devil. Each of them as well as their offsprings missing physical or non physical (perhaps even meta physical) traits.
Through a non-linear but ghostly narration, I encountered not only the ancestral line of Bernadetta but also Catalan myths and legends and the mountains themselves. In this book everything speaks: the house, the natural environment, history, God and the Devil. The family’s story unfolds polyphonically, through the voices of the women, who are omnipresent as they defy time and binaries such as human and non-human, living and dead, nature and culture, good and evil. Here, darkness refers less to evil than to human desire in all its forms, to the defiance of social rules and norms, to violence and death as integral parts of life. Darkness becomes something deeply human, situated not only in the characters, but perhaps also within the reader.
It felt as though the time of the book -one single day- mirrored the time it took me to devour it. At first, I struggled to impose order and logic on the narrative, but once I surrendered to its temporal drift, the text swept me away. I arrived at Mas Clavell as an imperceptible witness to past, present, and future at once. A pure indulgence!
△ Alberto Morreo △
writer, art producer, bibliophile, collector
The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men, by Catherine Lord
no place press, 2023
The start of the year blew me away with The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men by Catherine Lord. Besides the brilliant queering or detournement of its title that the book engages, for me it quietly let loose a dam, and watermarked a style or affection, a way of note-taking that allows intimate excavations of one’s own interior and cultural inheritance.
Lord, artist, curator and well known for her image–text experimental writing, glosses Caribbean history and culture of Dominica through investigations of flora, fauna, cooking, colonial painting, and what she herself calls “bad art objects” left behind by European colonizers or those who have left the Caribbean to Western countries. The book is a beautiful object, but also a self-critique: across more than four hundred pages and nearly a thousand color images, all taken by the author, the book is laid out like a ledger, reminiscent of imperial commonplace books and plantation registries. Drawing from a wide range of archival sources alongside her own family history, what emerges is not a reconstruction of Dominica, Lord’s land of birth, but a disfiguration of the genre itself, a blood-sucking exorcism of bleeding out the system. Personal and national histories become spaces of contested inquiry. The systems of colonial recordkeeping — those attempts to present subjective power as objective knowledge — are slowly hollowed out, drained of authority, and reinhabited through poetic entries, quotations, and critical musings. A queer reading of the historical record, or at least its imperial form of memory notation, troubling how memory is written, catalogued, and inherited.
Asmodeo, by Rita Indiana
Periférica, 2024
My year moved into two extraordinary literary encounters; Asmodeo by Rita Indiana and Chamanes eléctricos en la fiesta del sol by Mónica Ojeda, as of the time I write both novels yet to appear in English, and Chamanes most likely in 2026. Indiana’s Asmodeo unfolds as a kind of Caribbean heavy metal opera. A personal highlight of the year with the unforgettable Asmodeo, a waning, millennial demon that possesses the body of a middle-aged heavy-metal singer named Rudy and abandons him to search for something younger, plunging us into a Santo Domingo of 1992. An extravagant story switching between witches, drugs, angels, malefices and demons, possessions and political repressions, an insular story that tells how the devil, in its entire universality, took residency in Santo Domingo. Bordering on the dark riddims of the Island, where sound, the Others, and power as ritual and possession collide across hendecasyllabic verses in the best style of Quevedo, Héctor Lavoe and Black Sabbath.
Chamanes eléctricos en la fiesta del sol, by Monica Ojeda
Random House, 2024
Ojeda’s Chamanes eléctricos takes place in the year 5540 of the Andean calendar. Fleeing the violent rhythms of the city, its protagonists travel to a retro-futuristic shamanic festival inside a volcano — Ruido Solar — where musicians, travellers, poets, and shamans gather. Steeped in mysticism, psychedelia, amerindian and Andean mythology, the novel remains anchored in very real contemporary violence: necropolitics, state power, and the omnipresent forms of violence in Ecuador and the region. The body becomes the medium through which music, death, sacredness and a mystical anti-oedipus or savage metaphysics of life are experienced and transformed.
Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy, by Robert Farris Thompson
Knopf, 1983. Random House, 1984.
zabriskie.de/flash-of-the-spirit
I was also lucky to recover a precious book thanks to a birthday gift from the Zabriskie operators, one of my all-time favorites, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy by Robert Farris Thompson. Thompson traces the deep metaphysical and aesthetic continuities of African civilizations — Yoruba, Kongo, and others — across Afro-American cultures throughout the hemisphere. A living classic, this book reveals across so many vivid examples its presence as a living philosophical and aesthetic system, shaping gesture, rhythm, ritual, and form.
The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, Bruce Albert and Davi Kopenawa
Harvard University Press, 2013
zabriskie.de/the-falling-sky
zabriskie.de/der-sturz-des-himmels
As I research and prepare a project for 2026, several readings took on particular urgency. Among them, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, the long conversation between anthropologist Bruce Albert and shaman and spokesperson Davi Kopenawa, proved profoundly moving. It is both testimony and warning — a cosmology articulated from within, against the ongoing devastation of Yanomami lands in Brazil and Venezuela. I was also thrilled to find its German translation at Zabriskie and to be able to give it to colleagues and friends.
Forms of the Visible: An Anthropology of Figuration, Philippe Descola
Translated by Catherine Porter
Wiley, 2025
zabriskie.de/die-formen-des-sichtbaren
Alongside it, Forms of the Visible: An Anthropology of Figuration by Phillipe Descola, who has been doing deep ethnography of ontological archipelagos of creative pluralism, finally presents what will likely become a foundational text for anthropology and art alike. Through an expansive comparison of figurative regimes, from Yup’ik masks and Aboriginal bark paintings to Song-dynasty landscapes and Dutch interior scenes, Descola shows how images figure relationships between humans and nonhumans. Images are not representations but modes of worlding, revealing distinct ways of inhabiting reality.
Journeys into the Invisible: Shamanic Technologies of the Imagination, Charles Stépanoff
Foreword by Philippe Descola, Translated by Matthew H. Evans
HAU, 2025
Equally accompanying me into 2026 is Journeys into the Invisible: Shamanic Technologies of the Imagination by Charles Stépanoff, with a foreword by Descola. Rather than approaching shamanism metaphorically, Stépanoff treats it as a set of concrete technologies of imagination: techniques for navigating uncertainty, transformation, and perception across cultures and histories.
One can only hope that such readings illuminate not only personal transformations but also the present moment, as Indigenous peoples — particularly Yanomami communities — continue to endure broken political promises and ongoing system violence.
Shamans of the Blind Country. A Picture book from the Himalaya, by Michael Oppitz
Galerie Buchholz, 2021
I close the year with another gift, received in December from my boss: a confession of good fortune and wishes for the unfolding year. Shamans of the Blind Country by Michael Oppitz, edited by Galerie Buchholz. This brilliant re-edition as a photo-book of image and poetic entries makes it feel timeless. Notes, records, documents, and all the critical artefacts of knowledge and evidence are laid bare in such elegance. Based on decades of field research in the Himalayan region of Nepal, the book documents ritual healing, myth, and transformation with extraordinary visual testimony. More than an ethnographic record, it is a meditation on seeing, knowledge, and the experience of time.
△ Weston Olencki △
artist and musician
westonolencki.com
God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man, by Cornelia Bailey
Knopf Doubleday, 2001
Bailey’s storytelling is a fascinating lens into the cosmology of her childhood growing up in the Gullah Geechee communities of the Georgia Sea Islands. Equal parts sacred and mundane, her tellings of the islands' oral histories shed crucial light on an often-overlooked culture central to that of the southern United States.
A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, by Manuel De Landa
SWERVE, 2000
Recommended if you want to view the last millennia of Western history from the perspective of a block of granite. De Landa’s wide-ranging study offers fresh perspectives on ‘progress’, urbanization, and the organizational flows of matter. A dense but rewarding read, worth returning back to.
NOW! (Writings 1982-2021), by Peter Ablinger
MusikTexte, 2022
Peter Ablinger was an artist who relentlessly questioned many first principles of art and art music. A unique and idiosyncratic thinker, long based here in Berlin, his work continues to make formative marks on my own, now for almost 15 years. We lost him far too soon in April of 2025, and I've revisited his writings often over the last year. An essential read for those interested in the intersections between fine art, noise, and the fringes of 20th century experimentalism.
Capital is Dead - Is This Something Worse?, by McKenzie Wark
Verso, 2019
zabriskie.de/capital-is-dead-is-this-something-worse
zabriskie.de/das-kapital-ist-tot
Admittedly I started this in the very final days of 2025, and am late to the proverbial party of digging into Wark's work. I did get this in the shop though! A biting and mind bending analysis of modern ills, Wark gives fresh perspectives on the post-2016 landscape, particularly around the evolving relationships between class and information. I always appreciate this kind of scholarship whose ideas feel immediate and clear - low theory for use out in the world.
No. 91/92, by Lauren Elkin
Les Fugitives, 2021
A humble diary chronicling a year spent in transit, as told through the screen of Elkin’s phone and the windows of the Paris bus network. Her reflections, from profound to petty, slowly reveal her emotional landscape through personal and national tragedies, all situated in the fleeting thoughts and connective tissue of one’s weekly commute.
△ Linn Penelope Rieger △
Autorin, Dozentin, Literaturkritikerin, Moderatorin
Autorin von Zerbrochenes Feuer
linnpeneloperieger.online
Der Mond hat Durst, von Geno Hartlaub
Zweitausendeins, 1986
Ich fand diese schmale Erzählung in einer Kiste auf der Strasse und hielt sie für einen Lyrikband. Nachtblauer Leineneinband mit einer unauffälligen Prägung rechts unten — ein silbrig schimmernder abnehmender Sichelmond. Die Tatsache, dass man ihr Buch bereits bei Erscheinen für einen Lyrikband gehalten hatte, bedauerte die Autorin in einem Interview mit Sigrid Weigel. Es schien Hartlaub der Grund für die geringe Aufmerksamkeit, die das Buch seinerzeit erhalten hatte. Für mich war es hingegen die Ursache meines Zugreifens gewesen, und meine Erwartungen wurden nicht enttäuscht. Denn die Verdichtung und die Poesie, die ich erwartet hatte, fanden sich in Geno Hartlaubs Geschichte dennoch. Nini und Nino, ein Geschwisterpaar, einander wie aus dem Gesicht geschnitten und die Verkörperung des Kugelmenschen, den Platon imaginierte, überschreitet die Grenze geschwisterlicher Liebe hin zum Kern der Sprachlosigkeit: dem Inzest. Die jüngere, unterlegene Nini vergöttert den großen Bruder, lässt sich von ihm Formen, als wäre er Gott und Adam in einem. Ninos behauptete Unabhängigkeit kann das Band, das ihn an seine Schwester fesselt, nicht verdecken. Wer dieses Buch als eine Liebesgeschichte versteht, kann nur verlieren. Es ist eine Geschichte von Macht und Unterwerfung, über die Bedingungen der Selbstauflösung und Hingabe und dem großen Rätsel, warum es Menschen gibt, die sich von einander nicht lösen können und einander unentwegt schaden müssen. Nini und Nino verlassen das lieblose Elternhaus, spielen, selbst noch Kinder, ein unbeholfenes Erwachsenenleben nach. Bis es zur Katastrophe kommt, die eigentlich nur ein Nachbeben dieses Schreckens ist. So endet „Der Mond hat Durst“ auch nur augenscheinlich mit einer Befreiung. Das Echo der Erschütterung verklingt nicht, so wie die Sprache dieses gleichermaßen zarten wie monumentalen Textes nachklingt.
△ Lea Schneider △
Autorin, Übersetzerin, Literaturkritikerin und -wissenschaftlerin
leaschneider.net
Radical Runosong - Decolonizing Self and Tradition, by Vaim Sarv
OPA! Publishing, 2025
zabriskie.de/radical-runosong
This book was one of my beloved wild finds at Zabriskie: One of the many books I had no idea I needed before I walked into the bookshop and opened it out of curiosity. Vaim Sarv talks to three practitioners of Estonian Runosong, an ancient singing tradition that is linked to the land and can go on for days. In these three remarkable conversations, many fascinating topics come up: the inherent queerness of Runosong; the question if indigenous knowledge survived in parts of Europe; how to sing yourself into a hazel tree; how to sing yourself towards an insight. I learned a lot about Runosong, but I certainly learned a whole lot about many bigger topics, too! And I love the design: Like almost all Zabriskie books, this one is very, very beautiful.
52 Wilde Fermente, by Alexis Goertz and Jonas Grube
Kosmos, 2025
zabriskie.de/52-wilde-fermente
This book combines two of my favourite things: Foraging and fermentation. It's probably the book I picked up most often this year, and every time I did it made me happy. It has a very accessible introduction to both urban foraging and fermentation, followed by 52 recipes, one for each week of the year, featuring a wild ingredient you can forage around that time. It has kept me company throughout the year, helped me witness the seasons, and make some very tasty ferments (chickweed tabasco and cornel cherry olives are among my favourites).
Lengua hierba - Notas, interrupciones y ejercicios, by Diana del Ángel
Heradad Palabras, 2023
I bought this little book of genre-bending poetry/micro-essays/memoir at the queer-feminist bookstore „Ú-Topicas“ in Mexico City and read it slowly, looking up every second word in the dictionary. It's the most beautiful, deeply intelligent meditation on the political power of weeds and wild-growing herbs, and their entanglements with female knowledge and history, that I've read to date. Diana del Ángel writes about the grammar of weeds, about war nearing in the boots of poor soldiers, and about the definitive revolution of being small and indebted to others. „A estas alturas habrá notado que para hablar hierba no es necesario cambiar de idioma“ – „At these heights I noticed that in order to speak weed, it's not necessary to switch languages.“
You Are Here - Poetry in the Natural World, by Ada Limón
Milkweed Editions, 2024
zabriskie.de/you-are-here
I picked up this collection of contemporary nature poetry at „Unnameable Books“, a bookshop with an incredible used books, zines & poetry section in Brooklyn, and read it in one sitting, under a brightly coloured maple tree near the Hudson River. It's filled with poems and lines that stuck with me, like Erika Meitner's „Manifesto for Fragility“ or Laura Da's „Bad Wolf“ or Victoria Chang's „A Woman with a Bird“ or Eduardo C. Corral's „To a Blossoming Saguaro“. „A poem can seem so small, so minor, so invisible, especially when up against the daily crises and catastrophes that our planet is facing. How can a poem make a difference? How can a tree make difference?“, Ada Limón asks in her introduction. „Perhaps the answer to those questions is that poetry and nature have a way of simply reminding us that we are not alone.“
△ Tillmann Severin △
Autor, Verleger, Übersetzer
tillmann-severin.de
Greyhound, von Joanna Pocock
Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025
In Joanna Pococks Memoir „Greyhound“ schreibt sie unter anderem über einen unveröffentlichten Roman, an dem sie 2006 gearbeitet hat. Er sollte „Slow Drive“ heißen und alle haben ihr gesagt, so einen Titel würde eh niemand kaufen. Ich auch nicht. Außer von Joanna Pocock. Alles, was sie schreibt ist irre langsam und das Gegenteil von plottiger Unterhaltungsliteratur — und ich habe kaum eine Autorin mit mehr Drive gelesen. Und, ach ja, es geht um den Greyhound-Bus, der die US-Gesellschaft spiegelt und aus dem sich die USA mit ihren Menschen, ihrer Umwelt und ihren Umweltkatastrophen sehen lassen.
Acheiropoieta: The Vampire, von Ulrich Jesse K Baer
Sputnik & Fizzle + Atlas Projectos, 2023
zabriskie.de/acheiropoieta-the-vampire
Vampire sind ja von sich sehr verändernder Sprache umgeben. In den großen Erzählungen von ihnen ist die Sprache allerdings oft sehr homogen. So, als würden sie nur zu einer Zeit leben. Was für eine Sprache oder eher welche Sprachen einer Vampirsprache eigentlich näher kommen, das lässt sich so viel besser in Gedichten erkunden. Am besten in dem kleinen Sputnik & Fizzle-Chapbook „ACHEIROPOIETA. The Vampire“ von Ulrich Jesse K Baer. Und ich bin mir ziemlich sicher, dass Zabriskie der einzige Ort in Berlin ist, wo ihr dieses großartige Chapbook bekommt.
Petrosubjectivity. De-Industrializing Our Sense of Self, von Brett Bloom
Breakdown Break Down Press, 2018
zabriskie.de/petro-subjectivity
Öl verbrennt im Auto und im Flugzeug. Aber Öl entflammt auch unsren Verstand — oder überschwemmt ihn. Zeit mal darüber zu lesen. „Petrosubjectivity. De-Industrializing Our Sense of Self“ von Brett Bloom ist auch einfach ein wahnsinnig schönes Buch. Liest sich am besten am Fenster in einer gut beheizten Wohnung.
△ Sarah Shin △
publisher, curator and writer
Co-founder of Silver Press & Spiral House
silverpress.org
The Medium, by Alice Walter
Book Works, 2024
Dying before death opens up life as the medium, the bridge between worlds. ‘We will try and tell them about the mediumship. It’s not a ship, like I thought it was. No, it’s much more than that. It’s more like being a telephone. An internal telephone, that won’t stop ringing until you answer it. Is that what they call ‘the call’?’
This book of many voices is carried by the mesmerising one of its writer, Alice Walter, an artist, shamanic psychopomp and medium. The Medium tells the story of her long initiation, in a monologue moving between ‘I’ and ‘we’ and sometimes reminiscent of Sarah Kane, from falling into the black lake to a profound return to self, and to the work – the call – of helping others to return. ‘Guided by a bee, I had somehow gone beneath, deep into the past, and intercepted what was to come. By returning to the memory, I had retrieved another part of our soul. Back to our self.’
Bad Language, by So Mayer
Peninsula Press, 2025
Bad Language is ouroboric, repatterning the possibilities of meaning and living through speaking its way through words and their histories: ‘It is only by using language that we can change it – and, through it, the world in which we speak.’ This brave book reclaims and rewrites what was taken, not given. By unravelling and reweaving the matrices of what is – from the body and its vulnerabilities to the oneirism of childhood and memory – Bad Language is a spell for protection and transformation: an ethics.
‘One way of describing the work of language is walking a boundary; as with the pharmakon, what matters and makes it matter is not indeterminacy, but our determination as to how we direct our attention. It is not about drawing a line as a closed border, but redefining the boundary itself as a place where things can happen… Let no one be missing from our boundary… Working in this boundary feels like lighting (myself as) a soul candle, a pharmakon of fire that both burns me down and lights my way.’ So shows us the way, the antidote to hoarding, self-silencing and covering up: to allowing the dragons within us to transpire and let go.
Autobiography of a Performance: scores, essays, reflections, by Blue Pieta and Bhanu Kapil
87Press, 2025
‘Shame is agonising, but shame is also a threshold. To cross this threshold in a performance allows me to sincerely give something of myself away to others. A gift. The erasure of my outward identity to reveal that which is hidden and vulnerable. So that my audience can meet this place within themselves and thereby sincerely meet each other. To touch and be touched. An encounter that is raw, unending and heart-opening.’ Blue Pieta interviewed by Bhanu Kapil.
This gathering of performance scores, poetry, reflections and maps is tender and bloody: a gift that seeks to understand how to give more, more truthfully and more beautifully. Bhanu and Blue share their exchanges around metaphysics and materiality – through choreography, performance time, dream fascia – to meditate on performance as epistemology, performance as a portal: ‘how to offer water, how to offer earth, how to make a cut in the side of the work, the space that we’re in, that we share?’ I hope to always gather up the flowers after their performance.
△ Cassie Thornton △
artist and activist
co-founder of Casino for Social Medicine
author of The Hologram
co-author of It's Too Late. Do It Anyway!
feministeconomicsdepartment.com
The Deep, by Rivers Solomon
Hodder & Stoughton, 2020
This is the book based on one of my favorite songs (with the same title) by clipping. This song was based on an Afrofuturist myth by a Detroit techno group called Drexciya. All their songs were based on a myth of a Black Atlantis. This book is an aqueous folktale built through listening closely to these myths about what can go wrong in utopia, and the important work of holding and responding to memory. If you've ever left a community, or been pushed out, this book is very soothing, but also righteous.
Woman at the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy
Originally published in 1976
Cornerstone, 2019
I reread this book and also sent it to most of my best friends last year. Marge wrote it in 1976, but in 2025, she's going to teach you about the imaginative social politics that we are just beginning to dream of now. In this book about time travel, it seems like the author must have time traveled to be able to predict our specific relational desires for remaking the world in new shapes. For anyone who feels like they are time traveling as a way to survive their institutionalization, this one goes out to you.
Crocosmia, by Miranda Mellis
Nightboat Books, 2025
What if the decapitation of CEO's led to the most beautiful tall red flowers? What if this was the result of the most beautiful and considered long term social practice art project? And what if you were the daughter of that artist? This book will change your life. It is written by a dear friend who was the daughter of revolutionaries, so the plot is thiiiiick with interpersonal layers that are dense with lived experience, whimsical because they burst from someone who has felt the grit of revolution.
Feral Class, by Marc Garrett
Autonomedia, 2025
You're not a terrorist, you are feral class! My friend Marc wrote stories and made drawings about his life growing up as a working class punk in South London who generally chose chess over beer. But he's a white working class man, so he should just shut up right? Or, what if he gets vulnerable and tells us stories from his life, when he couldn't pretend to be "ok" as he witnessed all kinds of brutality caused by patriarchy, empire and capitalism? In this book, Marc carefully draws the silhouette of what he names the feral class, a class composed of those of us who can't smile or comply while the world is burning. We are a disorganized crew of dissidents who would never be a part of a club that would invite us. But we are also a class of people who are compelled to perform a type of sincere dissatisfaction with numbed reality avoidance that doesn't allow normativity to continue.
Care, by Mark Garavan
Cork University Press, 2024
Why does going to the doctor suck? Mark Garavan says that it is partly because no one is allowed to talk to each other. Mark is a scholar and a teacher for young medical students and peer carers in Ireland. After a long career of working to produce people with a power analysis who could contribute to a more just care system, Mark wrote this small book. Here he points out that what is missing in care is the possibility of real dialogue, of knowing people, and the possibility that within every person lies so many stories, and the unknown. He suggests that the Irish medical system use some version of The Hologram alongside UBI and other forms of support, to create the conditions for actual care. This was obviously very flattering since I birthed The Hologram! Mark is a great and concise writer and he has ways of looking at the mechanics of care that will give you ideas about how to remake your city.
△ Yuri Tuma △
multidisciplinary artist
co-founder of Institute for Postnatural Studies and Cthulhu Books
yurituma.com
instituteforpostnaturalstudies.org
cthulhubooks.com
All Fours, by Miranda July
Canongate, 2024
zabriskie.de/all-fours
zabriskie.de/auf-allen-vieren
Miranda July has been one of my favourite North American contemporary storytellers since the release of her first full-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, in 2005. The way she speaks about human interconnectivity, with equal parts lightness and depth, draws me in, as if my body were literally floating, following the scent of a pie cooling on a windowsill. All Fours offers hope for the present and future in the ways it imagines and enacts new narratives of affective dynamics. It’s liberating to encounter queer and feminist fiction that proposes non-heteronormative modes of aging and of being emotionally involved with others and the self, as a lover, a friend, and/or a parent.
Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar
Pan Macmillan, 2024
This book made me feel love. The author’s ability to open up my heart in such an embodied, physical way is awe-inspiring. By the end, after exploring intimate mental health landscapes, artistic practices, and death, I found myself breathing deeper throughout the day, as if oxygen flowed more freely into my lungs. Among many topics, this story about parallel and familial queer experiences within different systems of cultural and political oppression is traced through the protagonist’s heritage, trajectory, and relationships.
Radio as Radical Education, edited by Grégoire Rousseau & Nora Sternfeld
Station of Commons, 2024
zabriskie.de/radio-as-radical-education
As a sound artist exploring listening methodologies, this book has proven pivotal towards shaping my thinking on radiophonic pedagogies at the crossroads of artistic practice and contemporary ecological thought. Learning about the histories of radio in Europe and beyond pushed me to think in different alternative frequencies. It has illuminated the political sonic spaces of possibility that broadcasting opens up for collective knowledge-sharing via voice, sound-making, and oral storytelling.
Under the Eye of the Big Bird, by Hiromi Kawakami
Granta Books, 2025
zabriskie.de/under-the-eye-of-the-big-bird
An “apocalyptic” climate fiction envisioning shared technological motherhood, collective consciousness, and human–AI hybrids on the brink of extinction. Need I say more?
Compost Reader Volume II, edited by Yuri Tuma and Gabriel Alonso
The Institute for Postnatural Studies, 2024
zabriskie.de/compost-reader-2
The book gathers texts that explore queer, more-than-human, and ecological ways of knowing: from the cosmologies of water, fungi, and sound, to the affective textures of technology, bodies, and storytelling. Collectively, these texts compost identities, geographies, and temporalities into a moist soil where language, nature, and emotion intertwine, inviting us to read beyond the page and dwell within the shared hum of planetary life.
The Will to Change - Men, Masculinity, and Love, by bell hooks
Atria Books, 2004. Simon & Schuster, 2025.
Whether as a patriarchal, performative, queer, or feminist male, this book plants the seed (or a whole garden) of inner transformation and self-therefore-collective love. I can only hope for a world where bell hooks' work is implemented in high school curricula, and inspires new pedagogies centering emotional care and development. Understanding conscious gender dynamics from a young age might prove crucial for a future in which gender equality becomes not just a legal, economic, and political issue, but also an emotional and psychological endeavor demanding major cultural and behavioral shifts.
Sounds Wild and Broken, by David George Haskell
Faber & Faber, 2022
zabriskie.de/sounds-wild-and-broken
To a sound lover like myself, this book enlightens me in sonic ways beyond my practice of active and ecological listening. Haskell invites us to listen through deep time, tracing the evolution of life on this planet through its acoustic history. Not only does reading it give us scientific facts, but it also takes us on a factual yet speculative journey, imagining sounds from millions of years ago, or attempting to sense as a microorganism in transformation. It truly has been a beautiful opportunity to meditate on the sounds of the planet forming itself prior to the Earth becoming the “noisy” (or sound-filled) world we know today.
