New edition of Sad Sack
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Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Sad Sack is the second, expanded edition of a book of collected writing by Sophia Al-Maria. ‘When Book Works contacted you about printing a second edition you were both honoured and filled with trepidation… it felt like facing a refrigerator you left full of food while you were away… Unlike the metaphorical fridge, you can’t just wipe a page clean. In theory, sure. Erase. Redact. But that feels like a cover up, and this new edition can’t be the palimpsest that you would wish for in an ideal world. So you’ve turned the pages lilac, and expanded the sack. The additions to the (surely also soon-to-be-dated and wilting) contents are: 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.’
Sad Sack takes 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.
Sophia Al-Maria is a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker. Though her work spans many disciplines including drawing, collage, sculpture and film it is united by a preoccupation with the power of storytelling and myth, interrogates the enduring orientalist gaze and residual histories of resource extraction and colonial authority in the context of contemporary culture and society.
Al-Maria has had solo exhibitions at Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar; Tate Britain, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among other institutions. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the ICA, London; LUMA Arles, France; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the New Museum, New York; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy; and numerous other venues.
She has been writer in residence at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. She is the author of three books: Sad Sack (Book Works, 2019, 2024), Virgin with a Memory (Cornerhouse Publications, 2014), and The Girl Who Fell to Earth (Harper Perennial, 2012) and has written for TV and film including a television adaptation of Anais Nin’s Little Birds (Warp Films, 2020).
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Book of the Month: Proximity Machine by Rosalind Nashashibi
Our Book of the Month for January 2024 is Rosalind Nashashibi’s Proximity Machine. Get it with 30% off until 31 January.
Proximity Machine presents a series of static ‘films’ made from found and re-photographed images collated from a variety of sources. Edited into associative groupings, the newly formed series of short sequences construct fragments of narratives that allude to filmic language, writing, or chains of thought. Through the act of editing, each successive image affects the next, creating a montage in which unexpected projections, hidden shapes, and mythologies materialise.
Proximity Machine includes an essay by Will Bradley, and was published as part of Singular Sociology, a project curated for Book Works by Nav Haq.
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Index Art Book Fair
18–21 January
kurimanzutto
Cuidad de México
More info.
For its tenth anniversary edition, Book Works will again have our titles on sale at the wonderful Index Art Book Fair in Mexico City, alongside lots of other great publishers from around the world. We’ll be sharing a table with friends and collaborators Juan de la Cosa/John of the Thing. If you’re in town, stop by!
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Book Works has a new editor
At the end of 2023 we said goodbye to our outgoing editor, Lizzie Homersham, who leaves us to focus on their PhD and will be much missed. Keep up with Lizzie via their Teleportations Substack.
However we are simultaneously delighted to welcome Hannah Regel, who joins Book Works as our new editor!
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