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One brilliant new fiction debut and two beautiful artists’ books coming from Book Works this autumn. Please get in touch with me if you’d like to cover any of them in any capacity. Cheers, Tamar
The Kingdom – galleys available now
Yoel Noorali
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“Yoel Noorali – along with all the ghost-Yoels who float through these pages – has turned the despair and alienation of modern work into a source of pure pleasure. This is the funniest, knottiest, most exhilaratingly jaded debut of the year.”
– Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine and Children of Radium
In a surreal and hilarious mix of fiction and autobiography, The Kingdom follows a host of misfits and losers struggling to devote themselves to the religion of the 21st century: work. Set predominantly within the admin office of an NHS liver wing, the collection chronicles the strange behaviours of men cornered by a bureaucracy that lets indignity run rampant.
Yoel Noorali is a former NHS administrator and writer of fiction and non-fiction living in London. His short stories have appeared in Back Patio, Dispatches, The Fence, Neutral Spaces, and Somesuch, and his essays in Esquire, The Financial Times, The Observer and The Spectator.
Coming in November 2025. The Kingdom is the first title in the New Writing Series from Book Works – publishing outside the mainstream.
Please contact me for more info or to request a galley for review. You can also download a cover, press release and PDF from this folder. Yoel is available for interview or events and some short stories are available for extraction.
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The Truth and Untruth of Stones
Lucy Skaer  |
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I ought to tell you, the cow is my favourite picture. This probably comes as no surprise to you. It’s as if I’ve held out my hand and you’ve placed the cow inside it. I can feel its weight against my skin. There’s sensuality in every photograph, every work, of yours, but here it is so deliberate. I’d put this cow on the cover of my gay magazine, if I had one. All is announced in it. The fucked-up arable, the human-animal relationship that requires a queer gaze to cut it loose, free. – K Patrick 
‘I’m always making one thing’, says Skaer, whose assertion is upheld by the structure of this book: a space that contains her various sensibilities on pages partitioned, like rooms or chambers, by the walls of singleword chapter headings. An abbreviated index, these nine words might well serve to categorise all her art and many of its stones. See, for instance, FONTS and SENTENCES to study the grammar of sculpture that is as cultured and elemental as a rock tool. In several images, we see just the artist’s hand wielding one of her sculptures as if it could be used to do something. Obviously. Look under ROCKS to see boulders on beaches, pebbly shores, the stoney desert fossil of an ocean that receded long ago, and the sheer cliffs of the sea that show us where, and before, we began. – Ingrid Schaffner
 This book has been conceived as a moment in time. The sculptures that appear in its pages have been rephotographed to allow them to exist anew in book form, alongside recent photographs of surroundings, events and landscapes from the artist’s life. These images were then given to two writers to respond to directly. What emerges is ‘a space that contains her various sensibilities on pages partitioned, like rooms or chambers’, now receding in time. With essay contributions by Ingrid Schaffner and K Patrick.
Lucy Skaer lives on the Isle of Lewis. She is an artist who works with sculpture, film, print and drawing. Her work slows ideas down to abstractions and makes them concrete.
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distinguish the limit from the edge
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha & Jimmy Robert
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distinguish the limit from the edge is an intergenerational dialogue between Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Jimmy Robert. Their connection emerges through the intersection of text and image between selected work from Cha’s oeuvre and Robert’s practice that share the formal strategies of the fold.
Robert’s utilizes paper as a sculptural material, and his hand sometimes appears to shape the page. For Cha, the fold is present in her compositions enmeshing language through strategies of visual poetry, as in L’Image Concrete feuille L’Objet Abstrait (1976), and Untitled (après tu parti) (1976) which are both previously unpublished. The possibility of overlaying of one’s work with the other, emphasised by the book’s spiral-bound double spine, and reverse fold-outs, forges an intimacy, a shared sensibility, and an encounter with the corporeal. In conversation with editor Jacob Korczynski, Robert refers to Fred Moten’s In The Break, stating, ‘Suddenly time falters. Words don’t go there. And if words don’t go there, then what does?’
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born in 1951 in South Korea, and emigrated with her family to America in 1962. She studied art and comparative literature at UC Berkeley before moving to New York City. She worked for Tanam Press, producing Dictée, a book-form collage of poetry, found text, and images; and editing Apparatus, an anthology of writings on film theory. On November 5, 1982, Cha was murdered in New York City. There will be a retrospective of her work, the first in two decades, in Berkeley in 2026.
Jimmy Robert was born in Guadeloupe (FR) in 1975 and lives and works between Paris and Berlin. His work has been shown internationally including solo exhibitions at Moderna Museet, Malmö (2023); Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2022); Künstlerhaus Bremen (2022); The Hunterian, Glasgow (2021); and a mid-career survey at Nottingham Contemporary in 2020. Robert’s performances have also been presented at Tate Britain, London; MoMA, New York and Migros Museum, Zurich.
Jacob Korczynski is a curator and a PhD candidate at the Malmö Art Academy. He has curated projects for the Stedelijk Museum, Cooper Cole, Western Front, and the Badischer Kunstverein, and his writing has been published by Afterall, BOMB, Camera Austria, and Flash Art.
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