look inside$36.00

paperback, 6.75 x 8.75 in.
272 pages, 11 bw plates
978-1-938221-36-1
pub date: Oct. 2025

PDF Press Release

Read the (gorgeous) new review by Brian Dillon in 4 Columns! And an excerpt on Air/Light (part 1 and part 2)!

“Cancelled Confessions is surrealist, trans, queer, auto-fiction, (anti)memoir, and also none of those things…” —McKenzie Wark

First published in 1930 by anti-fascist, avant-garde publisher Éditions du Carrefour in Paris as Aveux non Avenus, Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) is Claude Cahun’s wildly radical answer to an invitation to write a memoir. Shattering the very premise of the “memoir”—the singularity of identity—into sharp and prismatic fragments, Cahun assembles an ever-mutating inquiry into the instability of “self” and its many masks.

Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.

Using a multitude of forms (fables, jokes, aphorisms, letters, dialogues, dreams, hymns, pronouncements, etc.), to plumb the subjects of desire, love, gender, sex, fear, faith, religion, and vanity (among others), Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) is a tour-de-force work of resistance: it provokes the reader to enter the capacious, provocative, playful, and deeply imaginative space constructed by Cahun in defiance of all categorization, to repudiate a delimited, censured world and embrace, instead, the outcasts and cast-offs, the unknowable and the unknown.

I believe, but in the conditional: I would like to believe.

Thoughtfully redesigned to emulate the original artist’s book, this revised edition of the out-of-print English translation by Susan de Muth—originally published in the UK by the Tate in 2007 and in the U.S. by MIT Press in 2008—includes novelist and critic Pierre Mac Orlan’s original 1930 preface along with contemporary essays by scholar Amelia Groom and translator de Muth. Almost 100-years-old, it is not only prescient, but urgent, in.

It’s not enough to be vanquished, you also have to know how to turn defeat to your advantage.

“Cahun was a pioneer of gender-bending role-playing… eerily ahead of her time, she has attracted an almost cult-like following. I am a huge fan.”   —David Bowie, 2007

Born in France in 1894, CLAUDE CAHUN (née Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob) was a writer, artist and anti-fascist activist, associated with the Surrealists, obscure for decades. Cahun’s shape-shifting, gender-bending, “self” portraits—made in collaboration with Marcel Moore (née Suzanne Malherbe, aka l’autre moi, “the other me”)—feature Cahun in androgynous garb with shaved head, or elaborately costumed and adorned with makeup or masks, often with mirrors or doubling, always multiplying the “I.” These are the most recognizable works in a highly subversive, multiform oeuvre that includes Aveux non Avenus (Cancelled Confessions) as well as more untranslated writings. Now embraced as a pioneer of queer and feminist expression and heralded for a daring and inventive, years-long resistance to the Nazi occupation of Isle of Jersey, Cahun created art—and a life—that aimed to disrupt societal, political and artistic orthodoxies with courage, wit and imagination.

“One of the most curious spirits of our times.”   —Andre Breton, 1932

“Cancelled Confessions is surrealist, trans, queer, auto-fiction, (anti)memoir, and also none of those things. It’s a text, and a life, felt as connection, and at the same time completely singular. Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore are the great, great aunts, or uncles, or whatever, that we wish we had—and now do.”   —McKenzie Wark, cultural critic

“Claude Cahun’s words, a broken mirror, mirror a shattering self whose twigs and tinsel draw the magpie eye of our attention, yet remind us nonetheless to mind the encompassing void, where the poetry lives, both in Cancelled Confessions and in the world we share with this powerful and beautifully framed translation.”   —Susan Stryker, historian and theorist

“Too hot for the flames of Hades, the reappearance of this glittering and dissenting semi-lost epic is a gift. Cancelled Confessions reads so much like a contemporary sacred text on gender and desire, that it’s hard to believe a century has passed since its composition. Claude Cahun’s writing is stylish, playful and prescient, peopled with angel slang, flowering disavowals, God’s lipstick, and an infinite layering of masks.”   —Daisy Lafarge, poet and novelist

“Claude Cahun is hugely important to me. Strikes me that her work—and her explorations within that work—are uniquely prescient and incredibly relevant today. As both an artist and activist, she shows us how to resist and reinvent.”   —Zoe Leonard, artist

“Cancelled Confessions, comprised of writings by Claude Cahun and photomontages by Marcel Moore, chronicles a dialogue between two artists, two lovers, for whom gender dissidence was both a creative wellspring and a strategy of resistance. It offers contemporary readers inspiration, affirmation, and models of cultural agency.”   —Tirza True Latimer, curator, author, and critic

“The interior space of Claude Cahun is constructed in the text through juxtaposition and superimposition of diverse angles of viewing, a prismatic vision reminiscent of Surrealist and Cubist collage. In the same way, the photomontages produced in collaboration with Marcel Moore enunciate the merciless mental exploration that cut Cahun’s body into tiny pieces.”   —Agnès Lhermitte, Secrétaire de la Société Marcel Schwob, Paris

“From pithy predictions, pronouncements and prophecies Cancelled Confessions is a revelation, a trip beyond the looking glass into a realm of sacrilege and sagacity. It is hard to believe it is a translation. The flow of writing, from jokes that make one laugh out loud to the aching beauty of solemn meditations, is a tour de force.”   —Marcia Farquhar, Régente d’angli-, Angeli- & Anguliculture Le Collège de ’Pataphysique, Paris