Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

Our book of the month for June 2025 is Sophia Al-Maria’s Sad Sack. Order it with 30% off until the end of June.

Sad Sack is a book of collected writing by Sophia Al-Maria, taking feminist inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’; opposing ‘the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic.’ Encompassing more than a decade of work, Sad Sack tracks Al-Maria’s speculative journey as a writer, from the first seed of her ‘premature’ memoir, through the coining and subsequent critique of ‘Gulf Futurism’, towards experiments in gathering, containing, welling up and sucking dry.

Second, expanded edition with lilac pages and new additions – Tarax’sup Meditation, Taraxos Praxis, Dear Farah, The Law of the Father, Black Friday, Dear Angel, @Sxfyxbot, The Untold (Tale of Mx Muffin), and Dearests.’  

Sophia Al-Maria is a London-based artist, writer and film-maker. Al-Maria has had recent solo exhibitions at Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; La Biennale di Venezia, Venice; LUMA Arles; Tate Britain, London, and numerous others. She is the author of three books: Sad Sack (Book Works, London, 2019 & 2023), Virgin with a Memory (Cornerhouse Publications, Manchester, 2014), and The Girl Who Fell to Earth (Harper Perennial, New York, 2012).