Barbora BARONOVÁ, Dita PEPE

The stylized artistic literary and photographic documentary project Intimacy opens up important personal and social issues in women’s lives, such as disability, prostitution, depression, cancer, and dying. Individuals are often unable to respond to these topics in direct confrontation other than with stereotypes and prejudices. Intimacy seeks to describe some habitual patterns of behaviour and demonstrate their real content through the stories of six specific women. The book-object contains one book of text and six photographic notebooks with flaps and coated embossed motifs. The book got the highest Czech award Magnesia Litera for the publishing achievement and received the 2^nd place within Fine-press and Artist´s Books Category in The Most Beautiful Czech Books of 2015. The book was also shortlisted for the Les Prix du Livre – Prix Photo-Texte at Les Rencontres de la Photographie Arles 2016 in France and at the 28th International Biennial of Graphic Design Brno 2018 in the Czech Republic.

2015 - 588 pages - 17 X 24 cm - ISBN : 978-80-905239-3-7
Price : 698 CZK
Published in Czech only

Barbora BARONOVÁ ; Dita PEPE

The publication Voices of Women : Australia brings twenty-two narratives of prominent Australian women artists, writers, filmmakers, activists, photographers, scientists, politicians, and journalists, exploring themes inherent in women regardless of their different cultures, such as their status, career options, and the expectations placed on them. The book is based on interviews recorded during Barbora’s research stay at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, in 2017. Among the people telling their stories is prominent feminist Anne Summers, who describes her own abortion as one of the moments that initiated her activism. Anthropology professor Diane Bell tells the story of a struggle for respect for women in science. Alison Whittaker’s story is the tale of a young Australian lesbian poet’s journey from rural communities to Harvard Law. Publisher Susan Hawthorne thematises her transition from an employee at the global publishing house Penguin to a publisher of non-mainstream titles. The story of Olga Horak and Halina Robinson reflects the topic of the Holocaust – while Olga survived five concentration camps, Halina was thrown over the wall of the Warsaw Ghetto and was on the run from the Nazis for eighteen months. Barbora Baronova and Dita Pepe’s documentary book on Australia is part of a free-form literary and photographic series, Voices of Women, in which the authors explore the lives of contemporary women from diverse parts of the world.

2021 - 522 pages - 17 X 24 cm - price : 1 390 CZK
Published in English and Czech

Dita PEPE et al.

Borders of Love is a photographic and literary book from internationally renowned Czech photographer Dita Pepe that in thirteen chapters investigates the borders of love, trauma as motivation to create art, and photography as therapy. In this publication, which is also the creative part of her doctoral thesis at Tomas Bata University in Zlín, Dita combines an artistic approach with scientific research. She worked on the publication with many interesting artists and researchers as well as people who analyzed the topic from purely personal perspectives and experiences. Besides photos, the book contains dozens of texts in many forms – interviews, reports, personal diaries, letters, short stories, essays, passages from lectures, and specialized texts through which Dita together with invited guests look at various forms of love. These are interlaced with her photos – self-portraits, archival family photos, stylized portraits, photo collages, documentary photos, still lifes… The photographic part of the book typically involves an almost obsessive examination and repetition of motifs with the same form and content to strengthen the feeling of order and clarity the author would like in her life. The book is being published in a small printing of 700 in a Czech–English version as a cooperation between wo-men publishing and Tomas Bata University in Zlín.

2021 - 804 pages - 17 X 24 cm - ISBN : 978-80-907641-5-6
Price : 1 590 CZK
Published in English and Czech

Nasrin PARVAZ

Mabel ENCINAS-SANCHEZ

Rhiannon LEWIS

Wijaya HERLAMBANG

“When normality is built atop mass graves, and secured by terror and lies, a moral vacuum is inevitable. Wijaya Herlambang brilliantly analyses both the historical development and discursive dynamics of this vacuum.”
— Joshua Oppenheimer, director of the award-winning documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence

The persistence of anti-communism in Indonesia was not only a result of years of political campaigning by the New Order regime, but also of cultural aggression against communism, particularly through the justification of the violence against the alleged communist members in 1965-1966.
By discussing how the New Order and its cultural agents utilised cultural products –literary works, school textbooks and films—in legitimating violence against communists, this book attempts to explore the ways in which the 1965-1966 massacre was normalised.
A controversial bestseller upon its release, this book reveals the previously unknown ties between Indonesian literary giants like Goenawan Mohamad and Mochtar Lubis with CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom and its agents in Asia. It also analyses the resistance of contemporary cultural organizations in Indonesia against the anti-communist legacies of the New Order.

November 2013 (first published) ; third edition - 334 pages - 14 X 20,3 cm (paperback) - IDR85,000 - ISBN : 978 979 1260 43 5

Mahfud IKHWAN

Winner of the Khatulistiwa Literary Award 2017

“This is a story that happened not so long ago. A grim tale full of blood. Just about two times village chief’s elections ago, probably right after the government party won for the first time against Islamic party around here.”

Thus how Warto Kemplung began his story to whoever wanted to listen to him on the coffee stall : a love story between Mat Dawuk and Inayatun, an ugly withdrawn youngster and a beautiful flirtatious girl—controversial couple disdained by their own neighborhood, with social life in a remote Javanese village as a background, an idyllic life that was transformed heavily by cash crop, illegal logging and job as migrant workers in Malaysia.
The problem is : was there any truths on Warto’s story, or was it just a babbling nonsense to cover up his own past ?
A powerful novel told with humor, actions and rhytms of Hindi movies—from the erudite pen of a rising star in Indonesian literary scene.

June 2017 (first published) ; third printing - 182 pages - 14 X 20,3 cm (paperback) - IDR58,000 - ISBN 978-979-1260-69-5

Saras DEWI

Environmental ethics and movements have accurately demonstrated the various damages and degradation of nature due to human activities. The anthropocentric worldview has been blamed as the source of disequilibrium between men and nature.
However, ethical approach to the problem of disequilibrium is no longer sufficient. There must be a new and vigorous method to solve the crux of the matter. Ecophenomenology proposes new ontology towards human and nature. Through the philosophies of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, ecophenomenology aims to a more rigorous argument to investigate the relation between human and nature, enables us to think a more radical problem of disequilibrium.
“[The author] believes that philosophy is conscience, and intellectual arguments were built upon that. This book was written to defend Benoa Bay from the threat of reclamation.” — Bali Post

March 2015 (first published) ; second printing - 172 pages - 14 X 20,3 cm (paperback) - IDR54,000 - ISBN : 978 979 1260 42 8

Hartmut ROSA
Translation : Svetla MARINOVA

Hartmut Rosa (born 1955) is one of the most promising nowadays sociologists and social philosophers, and most of the academics agree his theories are just the “next step” in the brilliant tradition of the German Frankfurt School. The book has been announced to be a new stage of the critical social theory. In this new version it is based on the changing temporal structures of society and their ‘promise’ to solve the crises of the contemporary society toward a newly conceived “good life”.

2015 - 590 pages - 20 cm X 14 cm - ISBN : 978 954 587 194 8
Design : Yana LEVIEVA
Series : « Varius »

Georg SIMMEL
Translation : Theodora KARAMELSKA

Georg Simmel (1858-1918), a notorious German philosopher and sociologist of culture, has prodigiously influenced establishing the subjects of sociology as an university discipline. Our original collection of texts consists in essays in sociology of culture. This is namely in these “small sociological forms” that Simmel reaches to a brilliant (incl. in its literary style) representation of some aspects of his diagnosis of modernity. Simmel is presenting here a sort of „snapshots sub specie aeternitatis“ in order to manifest that the „sociological objective” is able to catch out social phenomena as “lie”, “fashion”, “gratitude”, “faithfulness”, etc. – ones that construct the life of the society in its dimensions of intelligibility and mysteriousness.

2014 - 268 pages - 20 cm X 13 cm - ISBN : 978 954 587 185 6
Design : Yana LEVIEVA
Series : « Varius »

Robert WALSER ; Giorgio AGAMBEN
Translation : Maria DOBREVSKA

This is the chef-d-oeuvre of the prose of Robert Walser (1878-1956) – a very sophisticated and incredibly fine, even fragile piece of text of an author who appeared to be the favourite one of genius like W. Benjamin, F. Kafka, H. Hesse. Our edition is unique because of including also a brilliant piece of text by one of the most famous nowadays philosophers, Giorgio Agamben.

2014 - 126 pages - 20 cm X 13 cm - ISBN : 978 954 587 179 5
Design : Yana LEVIEVA
Series : « Transversalia »

David AUSTIN

In the 1960s, for at least a brief moment, Montreal became what seemed an unlikely centre of Black Power and the Caribbean left. In October 1968 the Congress of Black Writers at McGill University brought together well-known Black thinkers and activists from Canada, the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean–people like C.L.R. James, Stokely Carmichael, Miriam Makeba, Rocky Jones, and Walter Rodney. Within months of the Congress, a Black-led protest at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) exploded on the front pages of newspapers across the country–raising state security fears about Montreal as the new hotbed of international Black radical politics.

Fear of a Black Nation won the 2014 Casa de las Americas Prize in Caribbean Literature in English or Creole and was a silver medalist in the 2014 Independent Publisher Book Awards - Best Regional Non-Fiction (Canada-East).

2013 ; 256 pages ; 152 x 228 mm ;
ISBN (Paperback) : 9781771130103 | $34.95 CAD
ISBN (Digital) : 9781771130110 | $23.95 CAD

Stephen D’ARCY

“What we must see,” Martin Luther King once insisted, “is that a riot is the language of the unheard.” In this new era of global protest and popular revolt, Languages of the Unheard draws on King’s insight to address a timely and controversial topic : the ethics and politics of militant resistance.
Using vivid examples from the history of militancy—including armed actions by Weatherman and the Red Brigades, the LA Riots, the Zapatista uprising, the Mohawk land defence at Kanesatake, the Black Blocs at summit protests, the occupations of Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park, the Indigenous occupation of Alcatraz, the Quebec Student Strike, and many more—this book will be of interest to democratic theorists and moral philosophers, and practically useful for protest militants attempting to grapple with the moral ambiguities and political dilemmas unique to their distinctive position.
Stephen D’Arcy is an associate professor of philosophy at Huron University College, Western University. A long-time social activist and protest organizer, he teaches and writes about democratic theory and practical ethics.

2013 ; 232 pages ; 152 x 228 mm ;
ISBN (Paperback) : 9781771131063 | $24.95 CAD
ISBN (Digital) : 9781771131070 | $17.50 CAD

Karen MESSING

In 1978, when workers at a nearby phosphate refinery learned that the ore they processed was contaminated with radioactive dust, Karen Messing, then a new professor of molecular genetics, was called in to help. Unsure of what to do with her discovery that exposure to the radiation was harming the workers and their families, Messing contacted senior colleagues but they wouldn’t help. Neither the refinery company nor the scientific community was interested in the scary results of her chromosome studies.
Over the next decades Messing encountered many more cases of workers around the world—factory workers, cleaners, checkout clerks, bank tellers, food servers, nurses, teachers—suffering and in pain without any help from the very scientists and occupational health experts whose work was supposed to make their lives easier. Arguing that rules for scientific practice can make it hard to see what really makes workers sick, in Pain and Prejudice Messing tells the story of how she went from looking at test tubes to listening to workers.
Karen Messing is an award-winning (including a Governor General of Canada award and YWCA (Montreal) Women of Distinction) and internationally recognized expert on occupational health. She is the author of more than 130 peer-reviewed scientific articles and the book One-eyed Science : Occupational Health and Working Women. She is also the editor of Integrating Gender in Ergonomic Analysis, which has been translated into six languages.

2014 ; 168 pages ; 152 x 228 mm ;
ISBN (Paperback) : 9781771131476 | $24.95 CAD
ISBN (Digital) : 9781771131483 | $17.50 CAD

Ruth WALTON

An educational resource to help children explore the issue of fair trade by allowing them to see through the eyes of the children of banana farmers in the Windward Islands. The author spent time with the farmers’ families and she uses the real-life narratives of two young children going about their daily activities to show how bananas grow, problems such as hurricanes which can affect the crop, how they are picked and transported and how they end up in our stores.

The main story is illustrated with colorful collages made from painted textures and photographs from the Islands. Interspersed in the story are boxes with maps, facts and photos giving more detail on the places and methods and challenges. Its ends with banana recipes and ’bigger picture’ descriptions, maps and photos of where bananas come from and examples of social premium funded projects.

With plenty of points for discussion Juliana’s Bananas will give girls and boys an insight into the lives of children like them in the Caribbean and how fair trade premiums help communities all over the world build better living conditions.

Ruth WALTON is skilled in many areas of book design, including illustration, layout and typography. She produces educational books using a combination of letterpress, illustration, collage and photography. She illustrated the « Let’s Find Out series » for Franklin WATTS.

September 2014 - pages : 32 - 212 x 178 mm (landscape) - price : £8.99 / £9.95 - ISBN : 978-1-78026-1-805 (eBook ISBN : 978-1-78026-181-2)

Richard SWIFT

An investigation of the alternatives to capitalism, including socialism, anarchism and deep ecology.

Financial collapse and crisis ; disgust at bankers’ greed ; the devastating effects of yawning inequality : all these and more have led to widespread dissatisfaction and disenchantment with capitalism. people are crying out for an alternative but are continually told that one does not exist.

Richard SWIFT proves this to be wrong with style and assurance. With capitalism vulnerable and out-of-step in the wake of financial crises this book investigates the alternatives that are on offer - including socialism, social democracy, anarchism, ecology and degrowth.

Combining the practical with the visionary, he shows that finding alternatives to capitalism is no longer an academic issue for the left – it is an urgent planetary necessity.

Richard SWIFT is a former editor of New Internationalist magazine and author of the « No-Nonsense Guide to Democracy ». In 2011 he won the Daniel Singer Millenium Prize for an original essay which helps further socialist ideas.

April 2014 - pages : 208 - 216 x 138 mm (paperback) - price : £9.99 / $16.95 - ISBN : 9781780261706 (eBook ISBN : 978-1-78026-171-3)

Peter HUDSON

The author has been visiting the same village in Mauritania on the remote edge of the Sahara for over twenty years. This is the story of his most recent journey there – an intense and engaging day-by-day account through which global change and inequality are made human.

The Sahel – the ‘shore’ of the Sahara – is where cultures, customs and climates meet, merge and clash. Through the numerous characters we meet and from the obviously deep and sympathetic nature of the relationship the author has with the local people, with whom he now runs agricultural projects, we learn of the realities of life in one of the harshest, most marginalised and but also quietly inspiring corners of the world.

Searingly honest and refreshing, this is a superbly written piece of travel writing about a little-known part of the world. The author gets under the surface and gives a sensitive account of what life is like. He understands not just the culture and complex social dealings but also how economics and geo-political forces that can profoundly affect the lives of individuals in a remote community.

Illustrated with maps and line drawings « Under An African Sky » is a unique journey – for the armchair traveller and those interested in development, climate change and global politics and economics.

Peter HUDSON runs an international development charity based in Mauritania in West Africa. He has travelled widely in the region and has written several books including « Leaf in the Wind », « Travels in Mauritania » and « Two Rivers ».

September 2014 - pages : 240 - 216 x 138 mm (paperback) - price : £9.99 / $16.95 - ISBN : 978-1-78026-178-2 (eBook ISBN : 978-1-78026-179-9)

Karen LAZAR

“Home is as old as one’s skin but as elusive as an object seen through the wrong end of a telescope.” It is this sense of a view, skewed, intangible, which echoes throughout Karen Lazar’s Hemispheres. Waking in hospital after a post-operative stroke, she finds one side of her body paralysed and her world knocked out of kilter. Spatial, perceptual and subjective changes force her to view her new life in facets. The fragmented view is made apparent by means of a triptych of clusters which charts Karen’s experience from Metamorphosis, through Rehabilitation and Adaptation. Quietly reflective, deeply lyrical, Hemispheres is concerned with returning separated parts into a whole and coming home to the self.

Praise from Isabel Hofmeyr, Professor of African Literature, Wits University :
“ ‘A stroke on one hemisphere of the brain crosses over to manifest … on the opposite side of the body’.

What does it mean to find oneself suddenly living at this lethal crossing ? This exquisite book illuminates how to live with and beyond loss. A superb filigree of acute and finely-crafted pieces, Hemispheres narrates the journey of re-composing life, joy and love from the ‘foreign citadel’ of a body made alien through stroke.

Wry, ironic, comic, joyous, desolate, celebratory, surreal, this mosaic of feeling reconfigures love from loss ; each subtle fragment a tessera against time.

As the pieces delve deep into the self, they reach beyond it. The rehabilitation hospital reeks of personal loss even as it becomes a microcosm of contemporary South Africa. Broken bodies deformed by carnage and violence accumulate in the ward. The medical hierarchy enacts deep-seated forms of South African authoritarianism, the losses of the past inflicted and self-inflicted in petty and cruel ways.

The book becomes a quiet odyssey of affirming life in the face of death. The pieces themselves, weightless and profound, light and dark, half and whole, mirror the contradictions of wrenching life from loss.”

Praise from Joanne Fedler :
“A collection of rare/nuanced and tender insights. Lazar takes us into the gyre of re-orientation post-stroke, sharing what is lost and what is claimed when what you’ve always been and known, changes. A book that pulses with quiet courage and celebrates it in others.”

Karen LAZAR is an English educator at the Wits School of Education. Her MA and Phd, both from Wits, are in South African gender studies. This is Karen’s first volume of (first person) creative nonfiction. Karen had a stroke in 2001, from which she has partially recovered. She lives in Johannesburg.

Publication date : May 2011 - 88 pages - format:136 x 210 mm - price : R145 - ISBN : 978-1-920397-24-1

Jennifer THORPE (author and editor) - the contributors include : Jen THORPE, Karabo KGOLENG (well known radio and media personality), Sarah BRITTEN, and Dorothy BLACK, as well as many other women.

Do you remember your first time ?
As women, we all have a story within us about a sexual experience that was unforgettable. Perhaps it was incredible, earth shattering, life-changing, and wonderful. Perhaps it wasn’t romantic or pleasurable, but awkward, painful or forced upon us. Many of us have kept our experiences secret because, by exposing our stories, we expose ourselves and our feelings around sex.

In My First Time, Southern African women have shared their stories about their significant first time experiences of sex and sexuality. This is a collection of honest, powerful, and brave accounts. Some joyful, others funny and some heartbreaking, but all of them important for women, and hopefully men, to read.

This is the perfect book for you to read to reflect on your own first times. This is the perfect book to share with your mother, siblings, and friends.

Jennifer THORPE is a feminist writer. She’s passionate about sharing women’s stories and women’s writing. She is the creator and curator of stories for the My First Time project and the editor of FeministsSA.com. Jennifer has an MA in Politics from Rhodes University and is studying towards an MA in Creative Writing at UCT. She lives in Cape Town with her boyfriend Mike and her two cats.

Publication date : September 2012 - 174 pages - format : 136 X 210 mm - price : R160 - ISBN : 978-1-920590048

Yewande OMOTOSO

Praise for Bom Boy from Nuruddin Farah, author of Links, Knots & Crossbones :
"This is a novel bursting with elegance, written by a young author
brimming with genuine promise. Yewande Omotoso is a stylist with a
literary vision."

Praise for Bom Boy from Joanne Hichens, author of Divine Justice :
’Bom Boy surprises and delights, sings at turns, as it straddles the past and the present, bringing into focus cultural beliefs while examining the intimacies and complexities of bonds of family and friendship. What strikes me most is the originality. This fine debut, firmly rooted in contemporary consciousness, is story-telling of note which whets the appetite for more.’

Leke is a troubled young man living in the suburbs of Cape Town. He develops strange habits of stalking people, stealing small objects and going from doctor to doctor in search of companionship rather than cure. Through a series of letters written to him by his Nigerian father whom he has never met, Leke learns about a family curse ; a curse which his father had unsuccessfully tried to remove. Bom Boy is a well-crafted and complex narrative written with a sensitive understanding of both the smallness and magnitude of a single life.

Yewande OMOTOSO was born in Barbados and grew up in Nigeria with her Nigerian father, West Indian mother and two older brothers. She and her family moved to South Africa in 1992 and have lived there ever since. She is an architect ; space and buildings being a passion of hers second only to words and literature. She currently lives in Cape Town working as a designer, freelance writer and novelist.

Publication date : September 2011 - 272 pages - format : 135 X 210 mm - price : R180 - ISBN : 978-1-920397-35-7