Auteur/autrice : gisellesbooks

Slow Reading Club (SRC) is a semi-fictional reading group initiated and run by Bryana Fritz and Henry Andersen.
Since 2016, in numerous contexts, they have rehearsed alternatives to the kinds of reading they were taught in school, actively suppressing semantic content through strobe lights, strange postures, sociality, and toxins.
Operating at the contact zones between reader and text, text and text, reader and reader, they attempt to build a practice from within the unstable space of reading itself.

Répondeur is an extensive account of SRC’s practice in collective reading sessions, exhibitions, and textual bootlegging. Imagined as a scroll, with a rhyme structure and typesetting by Will Holder, the book brings together facsimiles of SRC readers, a wide-ranging interview by Alicja Melzacka, new texts by Joyelle McSweeney and Bill Dietz, and visual work and translations by SRC. These discrete elements are interwoven into a complex, shimmering whole, delighting in the ruptures and elisions of one text’s move into the next.

Wayne Koestenbaum has published 23 books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, including Stubble Archipelago, Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award).

His next book, a novel, My Lover, the Rabbi, will be published by FSG (in the U.S.) and Granta (in the U.K.) in March 2026.

He has exhibited his visual art in solo shows at White Columns, 356 Mission, the University of Kentucky Art Museum, Millennium Film Workshop, and Gattopardo; in two-person shows at Essex Flowers and the Wege Center for the Arts; and in many group shows, including Air de Paris, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Gordon Robichaux, Klaus von Nichtssagend, Yossi Milo Gallery, FIERMAN, Jeff Bailey Gallery, Geoffrey Young Gallery, and the Fashion Institute of Technology. His first piano/vocal record, Lounge Act, was released by Ugly Duckling Presse Records; he has given musical performances of improvisatory Sprechstimme soliloquies at The Kitchen, REDCAT, Centre Pompidou, The Walker Art Center, The Artist’s Institute, the Renaissance Society, the Hammer Museum, The Poetry Project, and the Francis Kite Club.
His first feature-length film, The Collective, premiered at UnionDocs (New York) in 2021. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Whiting Award. Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has acquired his literary archive. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Retail Therapy is a raucous and darkly funny meditation on consumerism, survival, and self-worth in an era of economic decline. Through biting dialogue and immersive detail, Jess Cole crafts a vivid portrait of working life on the crumbling high street—where ambition collides with corporate indifference, and identity is both a performance and a commodity.

Set in the basement of a fading department store, the novel follows the HOTshop GIRLS as they navigate shifting sales tactics, impossible targets, and the slow erosion of their own aspirations. Between stockroom politics, relentless corporate oversight, and the absurd logic of retail, they carve out moments of wit, camaraderie, and fleeting resistance against a system designed to wear them down.

Jess Cole (she/her) is a writer based in South London. She has written for Vogue, The New York Times, The Guardian, and is a regular contributor to MARFA. Her creative practice spans dramaturgy, performance pieces, and prose. Cole finds wit—especially when it’s quick and sharp—deeply sexy, a sentiment that pulses through her writing.