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24 Okt Rory Gallagher – Live! – from the Hotel of the Dead – Tim MacGabhann – Rough Trade Edition #57
Tim MacGabhann’s Rory Gallagher - Live! From the Hotel of the Dead is a poetic, psychedelic bar - crawl of the soul a multi - faceted conjuring with the seminal pan - Atlantic Ireland - to - the - Americas cultural criss - crossing. Sections spoken by the titular musician, riffing on the heroes and figures of America’s blues tradition, also talk back to the ‘folk process’ of loanings and stealings that link Europe’s folk music to that of the Americas, while other voices seem to slip in and out of the poem, altering our loci in place and time and consciousness - just who’s heartbreak is it we’re dealing with here, we ask, the poet’s remarkable scope and ambition held in supreme control even as we descend, hungover, once again.
24 Okt Delíria – Jeff Young – Rough Trade Edition #56
Set against the backdrop of ‘the city’ as activation point for dreams, for visions, as a receptacle for memory, as a canvas for meaning, for art, poetry, sex, for the very stuff of life, and death, Delíria is a modern - day beat fable conjured by the master craftsman of cityscape poetics, Jeff Young. As day and night blend and blur across a city captured in its moment of brothels and cheap railway station hotels, cold beer and endless peregrinations, we are pulled further into both the place itself, deftly observed, profoundly felt, exquisitely described, and the speaker’s bruised and romantic soul.
24 Okt Chaotic Nightclub Photos: The Review – Gabrielle de la Puente (The White Pube) – Rough Trade Edition #55
Writing with all the trademark verve and deliciously irreverent brio that de la Puente has become known for as a founder of The White Pube, Chaotic Nightclub Photos: The Review charts one art critic’s voracious appetite for the eponymous Twitter feed and its glut of flashbulb surrealism. Taking the reader back through the history of artistic representations of nightclubs, de la Puente finds herself asking why this chaotic, unhinged energy has so often been found wanting in the cultural depictions of night-time debauchery. Hugely intelligent, readable, personal, playful, and yet full of deft scholarship and deep knowledge, this is a vital contribution to the lore of the growing cult of Chaotic Nightclub Photos.
31 Mrz Nature Spotting – Russell Weekes – Rough Trade Edition #53
In 2010 the artist Russell Weekes noticed a horse chestnut branch that had fallen onto the pavement by his feet. There was something about the structure of this branch that suggested a dog and sparked the daily exercise that Weekes calls ‘nature spotting’—a simultaneously meaningful and mundane activity that renders the quotidian material of the world—leaf fall, moss, lichen, bits of bark—weighted with new meaning. These items become signs, cyphers and tokens of suggestion, creating connections in the imagination of the alert observer and loading the everyday with its own unique language.
31 Mrz On Language – John Grant – Rough Trade Edition #51
As one of the most strikingly original lyricists going, it’s entirely unsurprising that John Grant has a life-long interest in language and languages—from the academic solace he found in his school days upon discovering his talent for German, through to his love of Russian and the Icelandic language of his current home, Grant has found succour, relief and stimulation in words and how they work. In this fascinating interview with the writer Will Burns, John Grant’s passion for language provides the foundations for hilarious and heartbreaking digressions on his own life, on politics, on history, on music and much more—John Grant On Language functions as a compelling and unique portrait of an artist in, and through, words.
31 Mrz We Are But Nothing/No somos nada – Fernando Sdrigotti – Rough Trade Edition #52
We Are But Nothing takes place during a funeral in Argentina, when the unnamed narrator meets some of his old school friends after a long time away. What is a sad albeit boring occasion serves here as an excuse to explore the drudgery of our hyperconnected present and the thin line that divides life and death. We Are But Nothing is at times a hyper-realist fly-on-the-wall survey of human behaviour and at times a fantastical satire about the meaninglessness of life. Originally written in English and translated into Spanish by its author. Please DO NOT use the words 'magical' and 'realism' around We Are But Nothing.
31 Mrz Loving Characters Into Gas Station Snacks – Sara Ivanyi, Katinka von Gorkum – Rough Trade Edition #52
In the early winter of 2019, Katinka van Gorkum and Sára Iványi met online after creating personal ads on a text-based dating app called Lex. Without knowing who the other person was or what they looked like, they started writing to each other on a daily basis. This exchange is presented here as a kind of un-edited textual performance in which the act of language functions under the most intense pressure—how can we perform our ‘selves’ only through the use of words? How do the negotiations of the early stages of friendship, romance, sexuality, hold up under these conditions? How does language itself?
17 Apr Pessimism Is For Lightweights – Salena Godden
One of the very first publications to come off the Rough Trade Books press, Pessimism is for Lightweights began life as thirteen pieces of courage and resistance from the pen of the one and only Salena Godden. These are poems written for the women’s march, poems that salute peaceful protest, poems on sexism and racism, class discrimination, poverty and homelessness, immigration and identity. This new edition expands the collection to full book length and shows Godden at her inimitable best—deft technique and powerful emotional heft, with additional new poems reflecting on our fast- changing world with her trademark humour and resilience. With a new foreword by John Higgs and an Old English translation by Emily Cotman this is a book full of light, courage and most of all hope.
18 Nov BEEF! The Guide
This book is part of the Rough Trade Edition.
BEEF! is a simple card game for two or more players where you are required to find the other half of a feuding couple. The aim is to collect as many pairs as possible. Based on our love of the cult Go Fish! game, the artist Wilfrid Wood here imagines the pairs as sets of antagonists in popular culture’s seemingly endless beefs, simultaneously creating a new deck and form for his subtle illustrations. A pairs game for the contemporary age—a satirical artwork for an epoch of never-ending arguments, spats and tantrums.