minor li(s)t – minor literature(s)

Over the past few months, we’ve been asking writers whose work has been published in or featured by minor lits to suggest texts for an anti-cannon of minor literatures. In order to avoid anything too hierarchical or prescriptive, contributors were free to interpret the call as they wished. Suggestions of any kind/genre of text were accepted, as were any reason for the nomination — they could be personal favourites, texts that felt the most significant, inspiring or generative, perhaps the one most representative of the what minor literature means to the contributor — no rationale was out of bounds when it came to justifying an inclusion.

This openness, the refusal, as far as it were possible, to impose restraints and boundaries, seemed fitting to the spirit of the minor, as first outlined by Deleuze and Guattari in their 1975 monogram Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure. They defined minor literature thus:

« The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation. We might as well say that minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature. » (tr. Dana Polen)

In each of the entries below, this spirit of revolt from within the heart of “great” established literatures, whether through content, voice or form, can be felt. And that, of course, is what we hope to continue through minor lits, opening up spaces in which the revolutionary spirit can flourish, and from which ever newer and more diverse forms of literature can spring.

This is not a “Top (XXX)” list, or a ranking of the best or most essential texts. Rather, it is attempt to map the off-shoots of an idea, at this moment in time and among this group of contemporaries. Long may it continue to fork, splinter and multiply, twisting back upon itself and spiralling out, as the rhizomatic network of the minor spreads.

The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula (1973) — Kathy Acker

The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by The Black Tarantula (aka Kathy Acker) was initially a samizdat novel serialized in six pamphlets & mailed (monthly) to a list of 300 or so artists & later published by the underground press TVRT (The Vanishing Rotating Triangle) in 1975. The Black Tarantula is a nymphomaniac. She fucks a lot. She is also a furious scribbler into spiral-bound notebooks. She plagiarizes (openly) from the Marquis de Sade. She fucks & fucks & fucks. The Black Tarantula writes: “I wear men’s clothes, jeans cut an inch above the hair of my cunt I hold the jeans up with a studded brown leather belt when I sit on my waterbed where I write the material of the crotch of the pants presses against my cunt lips I’m always slightly hot I masturbate often when I write I write a section 15 minutes to an hour when I unbuckle my brown belt either unzip my jeans and/or squeeze my hand between the cloth of the jeans and my abdomen the lower palm of my hand masturbating calms me down maintain a level energy I can keep working …”

— R. G. Vašíček

The lion’s share (ca. 620-564 BCE) — Aesopica

There are idiomatic phrases in use, so minor as to pass our lips barely noted. Yet, inside many brief references, one can find a persisting gestural resistance. The language of the master was always, also, that of the slave —only used differently.

Take, for example, the “lion’s share.” ‘A cow and a she-goat and a long-suffering sheep decided to become the lion’s companions. They went into the forest together and there they caught an extremely large stag which they divided into four portions. Then the lion said, ‘I claim the first portion by right of my title, since I am called the king; the second portion you will give me as your partner; then, because I am strongest, the third portion is mine – and woe betide anyone who dares to touch the fourth!’ In this way the wicked lion carried off all the spoils for himself.’ (Gibbs, 2008)

A craving to be close to power produces absurdity. What delusionary conceit or desperate manoeuvres makes the herbivores deny their nature? The failure to gain anything from their labour, and this willingness to portion up a fellow herbivore, could yet foreshadow a greater tragedy, or might it trigger a countermove, a rebellion?

In fable’s disguise, the slave is telling this tale, and therefore it is prudent for there to be no direct appearance of rebellion. The lion is master, the master must have their share. There shall be no realisations other than in laughter; a moment assembled after the telling. And now the “Lion’s share” has currency whenever “Fat Cats” are discussed. The difference of portion indicated by this ancient fable is in play wherever a study of power’s relativity is proposed. The fable-function, beneath the idiom, scrutinises greed, power, fear, and also complicity. The Aesopic as a deterritorialization.

— Nick Norton

Tashkent Novel (2006) — Suhbat Aflatuni

The notion of a city defined by absence was central to the Russophone “Tashkent School” that Aflatuni helped create in the first decade of Uzbek independence, and dramatized in his first novel. Its heroine Lagi has a child with fellow student Yusuf: “At the moment Sultan was born, Lagi had lost everything, except her mother-in-law. Somewhere, in western Kazakhstan, her nearly-legal husband had vanished …” Tashkent is a site of cultural mixing, but also the burial pit of semi-forgotten history and lives. The archeological dig to which Yusuf absconds is one the novel’s thousand teasing expeditions in search of what was. The Sanskrit, Uzbek, and German studied by Lagi fracture the Russian text, giving access to ancient and distant places. Overlaying them, the novel’s descriptions of still-Soviet Tashkent are both languorous and scientific in their exactitude: “acacia blossoms under a layer of dust …”

— Sabrina Jaszi

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) — Gloria Anzaldúa

Borderlands / La Frontera is a book that as its title suggests is written both in English and Spanish. Anzaldúa threads her experiences as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist into theories, personal stories, ideas and poems that resulted in these essays that mix both languages. In the preface Anzaldúa explains that the physical borderland in this book is the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands she deals with are not particular to the southwest, but universal. This book challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity. In the essay “How to tame a wild tongue” Anzaldúa writes about being reprimanded by an Anglo teacher for speaking in Spanish in recess. “If you want to be American, speak ‘American.’ If you don’t like it go back to Mexico where you belong,” her teacher said. Anzaldúa makes the case for Chicano Spanish, a border tongue that developed naturally. “For a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castilian) Spanish nor standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language?”

In Borderlands Anzaldúa explains how she had to leave her family, to be the person she wanted to be and not the woman her family and the Chicano culture had expected of her. Anzaldúa critiques the patriarchy system of her own culture while still celebrating her Chicano identity.

Borderlands was first published in 1987, the theories, ideas and experiences of Anzaldúa remain relevant to this day and are still discussed and quoted in different writing and reading groups. That’s how I came across this book. 

— Silvia Rothlisberger

Célina (2024) — Catherine Axelrad (tr. Philip Terry)

A letter from a mother advises a master of the death of her daughter, once his maidservant. The libertine masters will always fuck the maids, but sometimes a maid has a voice, speaking against and speaking with the Monsieur upon whom her livelihood depends. Speech is restored to a young woman born in poverty and almost lost to history. Dead of tuberculosis (like her sister, and the signs of illness were always present), Célina is given life, lively, courageous, complex, witty, pragmatic, and joyful. There are moments of great tenderness and longing; despite her exploitation (for relations are often complicated, and Célina dreams of his footstep on the stairs, with longing, not terror)), there is a real and delicate relation between her and her master, Victor Hugo, with whom she discovers the possibility of poetic language. Célina and Célina, woman and book.

— Sharon Kivland

Le Dépeupleur (1970) — Samuel Beckett

Fragments, no commas, sentences ending repetitively, as they began on a word, so many expressions impersonal: Le Dépeupleur, by Samuel Beckett, is a very scary story. He had switched out of writing in English in order to “write without style”; the title of this French-language work translated by the author as The Lost Ones is a made-up word. Meaning depeopler. I encountered the text curiously enough in a seminar on ecopoetics, Marielle Macé’s at the EHESS, where it inaugurated a discussion of literature’s potential to repeople. Our political moment is late, but this old text, from which the author removed himself personally, is bleak enough, still, to get the job done. To wipe the smile off Dante’s face, as Beckett writes. In its desertion it is bleak and teeming all at once.

— Jacqueline Feldman

Watt (1953) — Samuel Beckett

I think there are a lot of Beckett texts that would qualify, but in my opinion this is the one that best fits the bill. It was his last novel in English before switching to French, and the language seems like it’s being totally exhausted and pushed to its limits. It’s hilarious and weird, filled with gaps & lacunae that give the whole work a very provisional feeling. There’s also the context in which it was written: on the run from the Nazis, with his future uncertain and dark.

— Seph Murtagh

C.B. versus Cinema (1995) — Carmelo Bene

In C.B. Versus Cinema, Carmelo Bene, the incendiary figure of the stage, screen, page, and pellicola of reality itself, reflects on the dismantling of language spoken of in the exemplary essays on expenditure by Foucault, Deleuze (a friend and collaborator of Bene’s), and others. Fulminating over never encountering abandonment in the various arts, Bene proclaims that, “what matters is that we liberate ourselves from language, that we concentrate only on its black holes.”

Through what Deleuze himself called Bene’s ascending and descending variations, Bene bored into such black holes of language, moving to the thresholds of classical linguistic limits, his syntax, his borborygmic shredding of words, of phrases, of sentences, testing the tensility of grammar via bristling litanies of volcanic intensity. As Beckett stated, “it is only through the word that one can shatter logos,” and as did Beckett, it is through the logos that Bene shatters the word, bores hole after hole into it “until what lurks behind it (be it something or nothing) begins to seep through.”

Bene’s work is also a “literature of the Unwort,” and he is of the Logoclasts League, writing a form of what Beckett called ruptured writing, so as to make the void protrude like a hernia. As Bene himself stated in his autographical portrait (the bios, the subject, has been extracted), he enacted the “quartering of language and of sense” and the “disarticulation of the discourse, succubus of the signifier.” Through his continuous variations, Bene opened the word to a kaleidoscopic series of possibilities, forging an incantatory minor language through his becoming a volcanic combustion engine of text.

— Rainer J. Hanshe 

Harbart (2011) — Naburan Bhattacharya (tr. Sunandini Banerjee)

I’ve lent out my copy of Harbart, and have left it a little late to get it back in time to do the diligence I’d have liked, but here we are. Maybe it’s where I’m writing from — my bedroom in Sheffield, England, a country where the book is yet to be published — that puts me in a position of ignorance enough to think that work might be minor. With 291 million first and second language speakers (thank you, Wikipedia) Bengali is after all the (thanks again) seventh most spoken language in the world. I am unsure of the book’s reception when first published in Calcutta, and not sure whether the claims I’ve seen as it to be an entirely different tradition to the one I was brought up with quite hold water. I do remember reading it several times in a few weeks (something that I rarely do), and writing this makes me want to do so again.

— David Roberts

‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ (1939) — Jorge Luis Borges (tr. James E. Irby)

The text features an unnamed critic, possibly Borges himself, reviewing the few surviving fragments of Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote. Menard’s Quixote is not another Quixote, but the Quixote. He set out “to produce a few pages which would coincide —word for word and line for line —with those of Miguel de Cervantes.” In death, Menard left behind an unfinished masterpiece. Cervantes’ and Menard’s Quixotes are identical but different. The text asks, is the same thing in a different time and place the same as itself or is it different? And is its meaning the same or different than that in the original situation? The questions open up a space where identical texts can mean different things since they, even if literally the same word for word, are never the same or identical to themselves. Our time with a text, changes nothing and everything.

— Eoghan Carrick

Unexplained Presence (2007) — Tisa Bryant

“(Re)writing and reframing across genre creates a way of “talking the seen,” and a form for catching racialized narration in the act of making itself (un)known.” 

from the preface to Unexplained Presence, Tisa Bryant

Tisa Bryant’s Unexplained Presence is an act of re-viewing, reimagining (akin to ostranenie) the images/texts of a collective imagination/canon. Manet’s Olympia’s servant, the black woman shot in the opening scene of Stephen Frears’ Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, the sketches of slaves from the film version of Mansfield Park, et al. are rediscovered like clues at a cultural crime scene. Shadowy figures (re)conjured/(re)cast in relief at the margins of an Anglo-American psyche.

“A remembrance of poverty past. Untamed specters of other bodies in faraway places, naturally predisposed to … fieldwork … sweating through the interstices of … tea time.” (on Mansfield Park)

— Steven Felicelli

Junkie (1953) — William Burroughs

While readers are most familiar with the more fantastical Naked Lunch, it was with Junkie that Burroughs first explored subterranean drug and queer culture, exposing aspects of society that were previously hidden, and beginning his early forays into his ground-breaking use of language and form. When you read it today it still feels entirely modern and still just as shocking.

— Nick Hilden

Jesus Trilogy (2013-2019) — J.M. Coetzee

Despite Coetzee’s high stature, his ‘Jesus Trilogy’ seems yet to have hit the critical mass of wider discussion. Maybe it’s the title, which suggests something orthodox and banal, and may turn off the average atheist reader. Spiritual in the vein of Siddartha or The Last Temptation of Christ: the ‘Jesus Trilogy’ takes the old myths as starting material but creates something entirely new. Refugees Simon and David find themselves in a new country, their memories wiped clean. Simon is not David’s father, but agrees to help the boy find his parents. As they begin their new life David exhibits increasingly idiosyncratic and forceful behavior, much to the chagrin of Simon and other adults. There are endless striking elements to this book, not the least of which is a persistent wavering (shared surely with Simon) between seeing David as a spoiled child and as a much greater force.

— Samuel Moss

Poésies (1870) — Isidore Ducasse, Le Comte de Lautréamont

The Comte de Lautréamont/Isidore Ducasse does not belong. Sometimes recognized as an originator of poetic modernity, theory concerning that modernity often leaves out his name and works. He is uncanonizable: there will always be objections to his puerility, his facile Satanism, his deliberately artificial style, his over-the-top provocations.

Just as Kafka chose to write in German, the Uruguayan Isidore Ducasse chose to write in French, and to deterritorialize it. His aberrant punctuation, tortuous style, and camp violence all contribute to this deterritorialization.

Ducasse/Lautréamont’s Poésies is an avant-garde manifesto written before such a thing was conceivable; hence his tardy reception, exactly contemporaneous with the emergence of the historical avant-gardes. No collective assemblage was possible when Ducasse wrote his Poésies, yet it gradually invented its own audience, committed to changing literature and the world.

Ducasse/Lautréamont is the minor as excess.

— Alexander Dickow

Ducks Newburyport (2019) — Lucy Ellmann

Ducks, Newburyport fits the criteria as a minor literature mainly because of its repetition and refrain, both characteristics that Deleuze and Guattari name as features. Ellmann’s 1000-page masterpiece is delivered via the refrain “the fact that” by a pie-making housewife in Ohio. The phrase appears 19,329 times! Deleuze and Guattari believe that art has the power to create sensations not available in life and to disrupt traditions and the deterritorialization of language, which this incessant, unruly, irreverent and defiant use of the phase does. Through this exhilarating technique, an utterly addictive and politically charged unique work of literature is presented. The novel rewires your brain for the duration of the length it takes to read it (a long time) and for some time after. It’s a ride! Deleuze and Guattari consider women’s literature in itself to be minor, due to it being more uncharted territory at the time of writing A Thousand Plateaus. All combined, this establishes Ellmann a solid spot on this list.

— Vik Shirley

GOOMAH (2019) — Jesi Gaston

GOOMAH is a screenplay that doesn’t need a movie, though it sure might want one. GOOMAH stages itself and breaks the set. GOOMAH is now viewable on CNN and YouTube Shorts. GOOMAH is still dancing. GOOMAH is everything you’ve misheard on the train, played straight. GOOMAH is Angela Merkel with a shotgun. “WHAT DOES… ‘DURATIONAL IRONIC POLEMIC’ MEAN?” GOOMAH is a ‘pataphysical and so heavy joke. GOOMAH is everything since, and much to come. GOOMAH laughs in your face and cries behind your back. GOOMAH gets itself and comes back for you later. GOOMAH’s hazards have unclear ramifications. “THERE ARE FOUR BOYS AND THEIR RACES ARE IMPORTANT TO THE STORY.”

GOOMAH is available here.

— L.A. Leere

Diary (1953-1969) — Witold Gombrowicz (tr. Lillian Vallee)

No one seemed to know what to do with Gombrowicz in his life (1904-1969). No one in the Anglosphere really seems to know what to do with him now. A queer son of the landed Polish gentry, he spent most of his adult years living in poverty in Buenos Aires, alternately nearly starving, working in a bank, writing outlandish novels and plays, fucking sailors, holding court in various cafes and, in his public Diary, he ridiculed nearly every significant literary figure of his time. A blend of autobiography, fiction, criticism, philosophy and polemic, the book bristles with the angular rhythms of a truly radical mind. Usually when a reader calls a book life-changing, the term is meant in the positive sense. Not me! Reading the Diary nearly ruined my life.

— Nathan Knapp

Does the Secret Mind Whisper? (1960) — Bob Kaufman

Bob Kaufman wrote a five-page-long unpunctuated sentence and City Lights published it in 1960 as a broadside. Copies sold for 50 cents apiece. Kaufman was heavily influenced by jazz and the free improvisational nature of the form. A lot of his work was transcribed and later compiled by his wife, poet and editor Eileen Kaufman, since he never bothered to write down many of his poems.

Kaufman was an artist-in-revolt and, as such, a known trickster. Does the Secret Mind Whisper? is semiotically rich and lucidly humorous, like most of Kaufman’s writing. He incorporates a vast network of historical and literary references, news bits and obscure allusions. Everything gets reabsorbed by the whispers of the secret mind. On the last page of the broadside, the following is stated:

“The ‘secret mind’ whispers and the ‘caught flesh’ shouts in this opening section of BOB KAUFMAN’S novel-in-progress. This part merely provides the atmosphere in which the ‘characters’ are to appear–and disappear.”

There is no novel. We are ‘caught flesh’ in Kaufman’s text, its fleeting characters.

— Yanina Spizzirri (editor)

KROTCH zine, OBJECT:PARADISE (2022-2024)

— Louis Armand

History of Shit (1978) — Dominique Laporte (tr. Nadia Benabid & Rodolphe el-Khoury)

A directive in 1539 to order and ration the French language was followed by a second to clean the streets of Paris. For Laporte, there is a shared logic. If language is beautiful, it must be because a master bathes it—a master who cleans shit holes, sweeps offal, and expurgates city and speech to confer upon them order and beauty… the cleansing of language is less a political act than an economic one. Language is liberated from excess, from a corrupting mass. This excess is one the person typesetting a book would be grateful to do without. In a digital era, the same constraints no longer apply and the shit comes back as Laporte himself predicted. With the typesetter no longer complaining, the shit holes and latrines have become an open system, a sewer to undercut the city.

— Ansgar Allen

“Un violador en tu camino” (2019) — LASTESIS collective (incl. Sibila Sotomayor, Daffne Valdés, Paula Cometa, Lea Cáceres, influenced by the work of Rita Segato, Virginie Despentes, and Silvia Federici)

Women are deterritorialized by patriarchal systems of property ownership. Likewise, publishing systems have been formed out of this same system of oppression and deprioritize literature held on the tongue. When Deleuze and Guattari call Kafka a minor literature, name a construct of a minor literature, I laugh. If only more men were interested in abolishing hierarchy rather than simply being fascinated by where other men fall in these rungs of power.

The LASTESIS collective organized masses of people into political immediacy through their song. In a span of two years, “Un violador en tu camino” was performed in more than 400 locations across over 50 bordered nations on Earth. “Un violador en tu camino” can be found online or read in English in the book Set Fear on Fire: The Feminist Call That Set the Americas Ablaze written by LASTESIS, translated by Camila Valle, and published by Verso.

— Laura Paul

Poesía (2016) — Violeta Parra

Her voice is tender but not sweet; her verses are full of pain and hope. She plays the guitar with hard strokes, embroidering rich yet austere worlds from scorn, nostalgia, passion. At their heart: a tremendous, overflowing love. Her threads transform hair into birds, open mouths into ribbons of breath. Shuttling from Andean winds, to southern rains and rucas, to the Chile of her invention in Switzerland, she is everywhere, nowhere. She travels, talks to people, learns songs, reworks them. A devil dances the cueca with her in circus tents, Parisian cafés, her restless mind. Life is theatre, self forever transfigured into another, solitude picking up loose threads of tradition, folkloric countryside rhymes and bohemian city rhythms to weave music for parties and funerals. “Violeta Parra is our Shakespeare,” said Raúl Zurita. A complete artist across multiple forms, Parra reorders past and present on the insouciant loom of her imagination.

— Jessica Sequeira

Miroir des âmes simples et anéanties (1295) — Marguerite Porete

Miroir des âmes simples et anéanties (The Mirror of Simple Souls) is an Old French (Picard) text written by the fourteenth-century Beguine Marguerite Porete. The text eschews the strict confines of medieval genre, combining elements of Boethian scholasticism with vernacular romance in order to argue that the soul is annihilated in pursuit of and recognition of the divine. Ultimately, its author was imprisoned and called to answer to cleric authorities in Paris, who found her argument heretical. Marguerite Porete refused to discuss the text and was tried, sentenced, and burnt at the stake. 

— Cristina Politano (editor)

We, the Sparrows (1968) — Yordan Radichkov

Not all books are created equal. Some descend from the civilizational heavens like a shiny monolith, barely scratched after centuries of adulation. Others hatch in the wild and start chasing everything that flies. Those light-weight, witty spirited, too swift even for their own literature books are the most difficult to translate. Thus, until now, the attempts to adapt in English Radichkov’s We, the Sparrows have only been vernacular.

Under the disguise of something “for children and for adults,” illustrated by the author himself, the book appears in 1968 as a carnivalesque rebellion against the then state-socialist ideological weaponization of natural environment, folklore, and language. The disguise is so good that We, the Sparrows becomes part of the official school curriculum. And still is to this day, as an elegiac reminder that some of the finest books are impossible to spell even for the people who can read them in original.

— Yoana Pavlova

Ficciones (1989) — Alfonso Reyes

When critics attempt to write fiction, they tend to worry about professional overload. Lest the reader should confuse them for themselves, they become painters with language, reasoners through images―in severe cases, major writers. This insisted-upon division between fiction and criticism makes a timid book-reporter of the venturous mythomaniac, and a punctilious bore of the mercurial appraiser.

Alfonso Reyes strays without qualms into the short story, the anecdote, the parable, the fable, the dream. He burdens a vignette with abstruse Greco-Roman allusions and follows a sudden philosophical point to the boundaries of narrative collapse; he invents an epic poem and approaches it through increasingly audacious interpretive methods. His collected fiction proves that a critical mind can treat possible worlds as intellectual playgrounds, infinitely malleable. It proves, perhaps, that fiction is always eager to place “the complex figure” in its own ruins.

— Israel A. Bonilla

Maria Wutz (1792) — Jean Paul Richter

We should avoid slotting works of literature too readily into preestablished critical schema. Still, it would be difficult to find a more “rhizomatic” work than Maria Wutz (1793) by Jean Paul Richter. Jean Paul’s texts propagate themselves vegetatively, sending out leading vines in every direction, without a central narrative or topic. Wutz was originally included as an addendum to another novel, The Invisible Lodge, about, ostensibly, a young man named Gustav who is raised experimentally in the “moral hothouse” of a cave inside a castle garden. Wutz concerns a minor character in the Lodge, a poor village schoolmaster, who writes his own versions of books based on the descriptions he reads in catalogs, including the Critique of Pure Reason by Kant. Are Wutz’s copies at all faithful to the originals? Jean Paul doesn’t even entertain the question, but it’s clear they represent an ideal for writing. 

— Matthew Spencer

The Baudelaire Fractal (2020) — Lisa Robertson
 
I was a girl. I entered literature like an assassin, leaking, fucking, wanting, drinking. In her first novel Lisa Robertson writes: I had to destroy art in order to speak my monstrous life. 

There is no way for a girl to speak without speaking her politics. Unbothered by irritating institutional knowledge and with no aspirations towards anything that might be termed a literary society, narrator Hazel Brown’s authorship/being is a challenge to intellectual history, to the canon, and to the possible. Fractals cannot be measured in traditional ways. A girl is always minor, but the soft action of her fingers in the text, will become philosophy, will become poetry, in a passive but total infiltration.

— Isabella Streffen

Sleep (2023) — Amelia Roselli

A text that thrillingly embodies Deleuze’s sense of minor literature as ‘the possibility of setting up a minor practice of a major language from within’ is Amelia Rosselli’s Sleep. Rosselli, known as an Italian poet, also wrote in French and English (the language of her mother and her American high-school education)—sometimes all three in a single text—with the ‘other’ languages fitfully jostling to break through the surface of the texts’ dominant language. The poems in Sleep were written in English between 1953 and 1966, but only surfaced in the English-speaking world in 2023. In them nouns are verbed, verbs are adjectived, language is weirded, glorious bursts of slang and sound-play erupt through planes of archaic diction. ‘Do come see my poetry/ be forceful and desperate’ they coax, ‘We are ready, yes! we are here, yes! The/ no of negation is being swept away, we/ do exist, half out of way of chance.’

— Ellen Dillon

The Lonely Londoners (1956) — Sam Selvon

The latest astounding minor literature I’ve encountered is Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956). This slim novel is one of few that I can think of told entirely in a vernacular style, which matches the speech of its West Indian characters. The apogee of its speech deterritorialization comes as a stream of consciousness towards the end of the novel, known as “Summer-is-Hearts,” which catalogues the beauty, pleasure, alienation, exploitation and racism of being Black during a London summer in the early 1950s. This situation is rather compounded by the fact that Selvon, as a Trinidadian, was an imperial subject, as are most of the characters in this novel whose “homecoming” functions paradoxically as a kind of exile. Told as a unified series of anecdotes, there is humor, profundity and sadness here—a minor literature which captures those most human conditions for what continues to make literature great.

— Daniel Adler

Des anges mineur (1999) — Antoine Volodine

Volodine’s entire literary project, under its self-imposed “post-exotic” classification, maps well onto the contours of the philosophy from which the concept of the minor emerged. In his own words: “Even in my first books, post-exoticism existed with its idiosyncrasies, its refusal to belong to the mainstream, its marginalized characters, its revolts, and its murky narrators.” (tr. Jeffrey Zuckerman)

His is a corpus without body, multiply composed, a rhizomatic network of tale, song, dream, narract, Shågga, and interjoist (amongst other invented genres), offered up by a post-apocalyptic collective of heteronymous spokespersons, including, alongside Volodine, Lutz Bassmann, Manuela Draeger, and Elli Kronauer. Why single out Des anges mineur/Minor Angels? The fortuity of its title aside, it was recommended to me by a woman I love, and there are few things that make a text more significant than that.

— Tobias Ryan (editor)

Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet (Mikrogramme)/Microscripts (ca. 1924-1933) — Robert Walser

As much as he was proud of anything, Robert Walser was proudly minor, and the works now known as the ones from the pencil zone are his most proudly minor work, so minor they hardly qualify as a work at all. No book, but a collection of over 500 business cards, beermats, paper napkins, bank statements, blank pages ripped from books, telegrams, menus, receipts, old letters or torn corners of newspapers. Walser kept them all with him throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s and covered them in minute, intricate pencil markings in his own personal script, letters but one or two millimetres tall, six stories on one postcard.

A friend thought they weren’t writing at all, but merely tiny scribbles, graphite runes, asemic glyphs that Walser, madness-adjacent if not yet committed, had to keep with him, a lexical talisman, his own external memory, deciphered only post mortem then fashioned into books – six volumes of the full German edition, a single handy one in English.

Why write at all? is a question that bothers many of us. It’s not one that this work answers, but one which it enacts. We write to tell secrets that we do not want to be told, to say things we want no one to hear, to let people know we exist in the world while at the same time wishing disappear from it. The Mikrogramme are Walser’s solution to the paradox: writing which hides itself, which effaces itself even as it is being written but can never be abandoned.

This is writing that is, like Walser himself, ‘holy and … silly’ (to use Rivka Galchen’s words). This is writing that is designed not to be read, but writing designed to disappear, writing, perhaps, with only the slightest intent of ever being fished out of the murk of history and being exposed to the merest glimmer of light.

— C.D. Rose

Untitled (The Fox) (2024) — @yearning1001

In my pursuit of meaning I find the fox. My minor is the politics of kitsch—what TikTok cores
mean and can mean for queer people, how they are inherently queer.
Fox: My white eyes see not you, but through you. Or, there’s light in place of my eyes, light
superimposed, and in it you see…?
The fox wants to be hunted, poses itself in waiting position, a tease. The words corroborate,
and since they’re the only light in a dark space we believe them. As a child I’d tease my
mother and performatively ready myself to run, never actually moving until she feigned
interest. When I looked back at her I’d see the mirror of her eyes, same colour as mine.
What the fox sees, if it sees, is a motherless faggot craving meaning. It sees a brother
across animal distinctions, another being craving feeling, another craving for feeling
superimposed by something else. The fox is a revolutionary condition, is conditioned to eat
what I feed it, won’t run until I do. I hunt it slow. I found my love and have him. The fox can
wait.
Fox: I’ve been single so long. Look into my eyes.
The fox is minor because it’s hunted by guns and by ideology. I hunt it with my faggot urge,
my faggot philosophy. The toffs hunt it with rifles. This, of course, is queer. Queer is a
revolutionary condition. Queer is therefore minor.
Fox: I’m gay-ish. Nothing crazy.
And what of those other foxes lurking behind? Are they my siblings?
Fox: They’re not mine.
The image itself is queer. It’s minor. Small on a phone screen and digital, endlessly digital. A blur in the dark woods. You swipe to something else, it’s a slideshow. How I see it, it’s queer because it has two bodies, one which must insist upon the other’s resonance in vague, soppy terms. Licks the other with meaning, and in that erases something. They feed off each other. In every image of this kind it stands. The white box/text eats the image. I found my love. I eat his white box/text with fervour.

— Jak Merriman

Interior Chinatown/Charles YuSlave Old Man/Patrick Chamoiseau Leash/Jane Delynn The Story of My Teeth/Valeria Luiselli The Big Mirror/Mahamed Mrabet Mr. Fox/Helen Oyeyemi Omeros/Derek Walcott Olio/Tyehimba Jess Citizen/Claudia Rankine Blacktop Sky/Christina Anderson Fabulation, or the Re-education of Undine/Lynn Nottage Lightning Rods/Dewitt The Hearing Trumpet/Leonora Carrington The Blind Owl/Sedagh Hedayat Disclamor/G.C. Waldrep Dr. No/Percival Everett Experimental Animals/Thalia Field Sphinx/Anne Garreta Threats/Amelia Gray Riddance/Shelley Jackson Ice/Anna Kavan Dark Spring/Unica Zurn My Year of Meats/Ruth Ozeki The Age of Wire & String/Ben Marcus The Hell Screens/Alvin Lu Autoportrait/Édouard Levé The Last Illusion/Porochista Khakpour The Teeth of the Comb/Osama Alomar At the Drive-in Volcano/Aimee Nezhukumatathil Self-Portrait in Green/Marie NDiaye Call Me Zebra/Azareen van der Vliet Oloomi Sleeping with the Dictionary/Harryette Mullen Christ on the Rue Jacob/Severo Sarduy Do You Hear Them?/Nathalie Sarraute We the Parasites/A.V. Marraccini The Stronghold/Dino Buzzati AngelStation/Jachym Topol John Henry Days/Colson Whitehead The People in the Trees/Hanya Yanigahara The Weekend/Helen Zahavi Blindness/José Saramago Nelly’s Version/Eva Figes Wide Sargasso Sea/Jean Rhys ULULU: Clown Schrapnel/Thalia Field Hopscotch/Julio Cortázar Pussy, King of the Pirates/Kathy Acker Dolly City/Orly Castel-Bloom The Vegetarian/Han Kang Beasts of No Nation/Uzodinma Iweala Unexplained Presence/Tisa Bryant The Sympathizer/Viet Thanh Nguyen Vengeance is Mine/Marie NDiaye

— Name of Author

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