uncommon books at the intersection of art and literature

books

THREE SIX FIVE: PROMPTS, ACTS, DIVINATIONS by Lucy Ives  |  There are 365 exercises for writing in this book, but it is not simply a book of writing exercises. It is a “how-to” book of questions—not answers. It is an ars poetica of expanding possibility, a tarot deck of acts instead of images, a book of bending hours, a diary of contemplation and imagination, an antidote to consumption in the shape of care and attention.

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✼ events:

This year’s Los Angeles Art Book Fair (May 6-10) is now in Pasadena. And we’re heading back to where it all started (truly, the fair is just a few miles away from the garage in Eagle Rock where the first 21 siglio books were born). Book #47—Lucy Ives’s three six five: prompts, acts, divinations—launches at the fair! Find us at table A12. Printed Matter has all of the details.

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reviews

Hyperallergic  |  CANCELLED CONFESSIONS by Claude Cahun: “Cahun’s text itself is ravishingly myriad, split into nine sections that are themselves split into tributaries of declaration, dialogues, sketches, Wildean paradoxes, Cocteauian fables, Blakean proverbs… the writing is rambunctious with puns and made singular by its instinct to drive all syntaxes toward the plural. It’s also stylish, sexy, and funny, a kind of handbook of what Cahun called ‘angel slang’.” —Joyelle McSweeney

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reviews

The Brooklyn Rail  |  CANCELLED CONFESSIONS by Claude Cahun: “There is much about Cahun’s life—their gender-nonconforming presentation, their sustained work (with Moore) of anti-fascist resistance in Nazi-occupied France—that will feel familiar today. It’s another striking moment of doubling, perhaps: an uncanny (and possibly affirming) look in the mirror as history repeats itself. But, as always, the artist remains too capricious to draw an easy comparison.” —Daniella Sanader

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✼ natalie’s upstate weather report:

Coming soon: something about some of many things so far in 2026—a real winter for a long while, a frozen pond with a day-tripping eagle, a trilogy of Robin Hood-inspired artist-writer collaborations in the works, the very welcome whatever-the-auditory-equivalent-of-appearance of peepers, much avian reconnaissance but as yet not much nesting, and little gardens (beginning to grow) everywhere…

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books

THE SLEEPERS by Sophie Calle  |   In one of Calle’s first experiments, she invited friends, acquaintances, and strangers to sleep in her bed which would be continuously occupied for 8 days.

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reviews

Lit Hub | The Sleepers by Sophie Calle: “Like the sleepers themselves, Calle’s narratives reveal and occlude, beckon and turn away … [while] the photographs tell an intimate story.” —Karla Kelsey

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books

Suite Vénitienne by Sophie Calle  |   Intentionally losing herself in the labyrinthine streets of Venice, searching for Henri B., the city becomes a repository of her desires.

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books

THE Hotel by Sophie Calle  |  Working as a chambermaid, Calle stashes her camera and tape recorder in her mop bucket, sorting through and surveying the evidence of the guests’ lives.

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✼ natalie’s upstate weather report:

Weather? Nothing to report for the entirety of 2025 because there wasn’t a moment to look up much less look out. (Look out!) Whatever the weather was, everything’s been burning: the world is on fire. There was some comfort in spending time in the company of the brave and bravely imaginative resistance fighter-artist-writer Claude Cahun; and some hope stirs crossing through some of Lucy’s 365 portals to see that there are other ways to envision and make a world. That’s not nothing. But really, not quite enough.

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excerpts

“It Is What It Is”Introduction by author Richard Kraft: “One of the English tabloid newspapers summed it up with its Cockney-rhyming slang headline: ‘No, it wasn’t a dream folks … THE WORLD REALLY IS DONALD-DUCKED’.”

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affinities

Print this!  |  Richard Kraft invokes Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi to respond to the Trump Presidency: “And it’s your fault I’m stupid.”

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✼ ex libris:

We tried. We really tried. A 1600+ page cautionary tale bearing witness to Trump’s first term was insufficient caution, it seems. If it was “a heat map of proto-fascism,” now we’re no more proto.

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books

Intermedia, Fluxus and The Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins, edited by Steve Clay and Ken Friedman

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the improbable

No. 1 Time Indefinite TRACIE MORRIS: “There are intersecting communities of experimental artists … We are perpetually in conversation with each other across, time, space, beingness, perspective and geography”

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affinities

Appreciation  |  JOSHUA BECKMAN AT POETs HOUSE: “My hope is to share some of the exuberance I have found … in the things Dick Higgins put in the world.”

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affinities

List  |  Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press Lives On: A bibliography of Something Else Press reprints, facsimiles, etc. that evinces the enduring love for SEP

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✼ the improbable:

from Issue, No. 1 (Time Indefinite), “Dick Higgins, Publisher: Notes Toward a Reassessment of the Something Else Press Within a Small Press History” by Matvei Yankelevich: “To find connections between poetry, small press publishing, and the art scene of the early 1960s, one may look no further than Higgins’ own network.”

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the improbable

No. 3 Lingual MusicIN THIS ISSUE & INTRO: Guest edited by Alex Balgiu and Chloé Gourvennec, this issue is a catalyst, a manifesto, a conversation across time, language and musical propositions.

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