Beached: A Commonplace Book

The trilogy of novels by Samuel Beckett is his best known work outside the theatre, dating from the same period as Waiting for Godot, and as such is central to the main body of his work. This new edition has been corrected from the errors that appeared in some previous editions. Many people believe it to be the most important volume of prose in the English language after Joyce’s Ulysses, although written originally in French, a language that the author adopted to escape from the richness of Irish speech rhythms.

Most critics today consider the trilogy to be Beckett’s major achievement, more controlled than the brilliant early work, more easily readable than the complex How It Is and the later plays and texts. Malloy has two parts, the parallel narratives of the old Molloy, passing time by telling himself stories and remembering his past journeys, and of the waspish Moran, a private detective sent to find him, whose deterioration during his quest bears a strange similarity to Molloy’s. Malone Dies appears to be a continuation of Molloy’s narrative, only this time the speaker knows that the end is almost at hand. The additional poignancy of the stories he tells himself is largely related to the sense of time running our, and the prose seems heightened from the earlier book. In the third novel The Unnamable, the narrator, again under a different name or names, is aware of the approaching silence and tries to keep it at bay with thoughts, reveries, stories and inventions. The prose undergoes a complete change as we find ourselves listening to the sounds of panic, written in a punctuation of the human breath that the narrator has ever greater difficulty in drawing into his lungs, while the mind races giddily ever faster. The end is terrifying, bu t finishes, strangely, on a note of hope. Molloy has been translated by Patrick Bowles in collaboration with the author, the rest of the trilogy by Mr Beckett himself.

The first of its kind, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, gathers together a diverse range of 55 poets with varying aesthetics and backgrounds. In addition to generous samples of poetry by each trans writer, the book also includes “poetics statements”-reflections by each poet that provide context for their work covering a range of issues from identification and embodiment to language and activism.

This book is in Italian.

“Italian Performance Art” embarks on the adventure of rendering the unspeakable in performance through text, the revelation of a tension of being in a discursive and communicative mode that is like putting into words Lucio Fontana’s Gesture on canvas or John Cage’s Silence in music. Structured with contributions from leading researchers (Brunelli, Fontana, Frangione, Lupieri, Rossini, Sullo) and a substantial historical and bibliographical apparatus (Fontana, Merega, Rossini), the work is the first publication to comprehensively address the situation of performance art in Italy, offering a comprehensive framework and tracing the main historical reference points. Starting with Futurism, through the action poetry of the twentieth-century neo-avant-garde and Body Art, it defines the most recent relationships between creative gesture and new technologies. The volume includes a collection of theoretical and critical essays and a section of color monographic notes illustrating the work of those artists continuously involved in the field of performance art.

This is the first collection of writings by Sarah Boulton and brings together her happenings, encounters and happening-upons.

The first half of this collection is a series of texts that describe encounters and happening-upons, which are two directions of experiencing. Encounters are what happens to [her] and happening-upons are what [she] find happening. [She’s] made them into happenings by way of writings.

The second half of texts are happenings that [she’s] made since 2012 that [she has] now documented into words.

Throughout the collection, there are texts that Boulton has written in respinse to some of these writings, which are continuations that circle back and move forward the ideas and actions over time.

Audio documentation of a lecture given by Malik Nashad Sharpe, on the subject ‘Horror for the Live Context’ on 8th March 2025 at The Garrett Centre.

Culminating his Study Room residency, this talk highlighted some of the utility of making horror as a performance practice, and explored the genre’s potential as a framework for seeing, reading and working with contemporary live performance. During his residency he approached horror as a research tool to tease out an alternative tradition of choreographic practice that contains social resonance and fantastical outcomes, and constitutes a suggestive and speculative lens through which performance can be contextualised.

Artworks referenced and shared in this talk:

‘Shoot’, Chris Burden, 1971, ‘Carcasse’, Piotr Pavlensky, 2013, ‘Rhythm 0’, Marina Abramovic, 1974, ‘American Psycho’, directed by Mary Harron, 2000, ‘Nope’, Directed by Jordan Peele, 2022, ’10 Cloverfield Lane’, directed by Dan Trachtenberg, 2016,  ‘Saw’, directed by James Wan, 2004, ‘Le Manoir de Diable’, directed by George Meillies, 1890, ‘All of us are Dead’, directed by Lee Jae-kyoo; Kim Nam-su, 2022, ‘Untitled Nostalgia 3’, Tiraan Willemse, 2025, ‘Presage’, Elie Autins, 2022, ‘Goner’, Malik Nashad Sharpe, 2024

This is an audio file. For a version with closed captions, please visit our vimeo channel

This e-journal edition from performingborders gathers artists and practitioners exploring how their work crosses borders—territorial, cultural, political, and personal. Rooted in connection, resistance, and shared struggles, these contributions reimagine collaboration and solidarity across time and space. With a foreword by their long-time collaborator Diana Damian Martin, this collection is a tapestry of methodologies and practices grounded in survival and creative resistance.

shado Issue 2 : Global Womxnhood

Feature on poet and performer Tolu Agbelusi.

shado Issue 02: Global Womxnhood

Feature/Poetry by Fatimah Asghar with Art and introduction by Sabba Khan.

In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert-the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves-Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.

This zine brings together writings and words from contributors who came together in the summer of 2018 at Bethnal Green Nature Reserve (BGNR) to think about and connect with soil.

Featuring conversations, essays, drawings and photographs, Bodies of Knowledge(Ed. Laura Purseglove) reflects and builds on an interdisciplinary project involving artists, amateur and professional dancers, wrestlers, members of a trans community group and academic researchers interrogating how our bodies are both produced by and productive of knowledges.

In Other Words is a collection of urgent reflections, created by 49 artists over 4 months in 2020 exploring their hopes and fears for the future at a time of global crisis. Through prose, poetry, drawing, collage and photography it is a clarion call for change from a diverse group rich in wisdom, shared experience, and what it means to be marginalised in the UK.