trans. Lara Vergnaud
A rare book that depicts the isolation and poetry of rural life.
Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer.
Shortlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses.
Marouane Bakhti is a writer and arts journalist. Born in Nantes, France to a Moroccan father and a French mother, he studied history and journalism at the Sorbonne. He writes criticism for Mouvement magazine and lives in Paris. How to Leave the World is his first novel.
Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator of French and has translated over a dozen novels, including works by Zahia Rahmani, Fatima Daas, Mohamed Leftah and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. Lara was born in Tunisia, grew up in the United States and currently lives in southern France.
Visceral scenes and fragments of shame, desire and displacement crystallise as sentences that are felt before they are understood. Bakhti writes diaspora as distension, a condition of freezing and unfreezing through successive intimacies and encounters: ‘Voice, silence, voice, silence.’ What it takes to imagine social and physical freedom is what it meant to keep reading this incredible book.
I was struck by its kaleidoscopic scope, despite its brevity – from the earthy and vital imagery of Bakhti’s childhood, through the transformational effects of grief and faith. A beautiful book!
This is an astonishingly good debut book. I was immediately drawn in and adored the beautifully crafted prose. With sensitivity and nuance, Marouane Bakhti explores the complexities of family and cultural identity as a member of the Moroccan diaspora – and one who happens to be coming to terms with his sexuality. There is so much heart in this story, you can’t help but feel like it was a privilege to have been taken on this journey. Marouane Bakhti is without doubt a promising new writer and I am excited to see what he does next.
trans. Grace Nissan
Bourgeois coldness refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and aesthetic forms of preserving the structure of the colonial status quo. It creates an affective shelter in the world, unencroached upon by the immediate consequences of its many catastrophes. It functions like air conditioning – a complex technology which reliably stabilises the climate until those inside consider it natural. Bourgeois spaces – institutional and affective – stay cool and pleasant. But outside it’s burning.
Canonical critical theory by Adorno and Horkheimer enters a dialogue with Black studies through Hartman and Moten.
Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher in Berlin, working on social and political philosophy, critical theory, affect studies, Black studies and feminist philosophy. She regularly publishes work in academic journals and criticism in magazines. She organises and hosts events in Berlin, such as the conversation series ‘Feelings at the end of the world’ at Volksbühne. Bourgeois Coldness is her first book, and was published in German in 2023 by Campus Verlag.
Grace Nissan is the author of The Utopians (Ugly Duckling Presse) and The City Is Lush With / Obstructed Views (DoubleCross Press), as well as the translator of War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions) and kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf (World Poetry Books). Their translations of Yevgenia Belorusets were presented in the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as in the accompanying publication In the Face Of War (Isolarii). They are the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellowship to translate the Austrian poet Ann Cotten’s Banned! An Epic Poem into English.
Foregrounding affect, this timely book provides an inestimable philosophical argument for the centrality of Blackness in critical examinations of capitalism’s violence.
Elegant and erudite in equal measure, this book will stand as a landmark diagnosis of the practices of denial in our time.
| 10 November | Amsterdam | Henrike Kohpeiß launch |
| 06 November | London | Book launch Bourgeois Coldness, Historical Materialism |
| 04 November | London | Bourgeois Coldness launch, Housmans Bookshop |
