Here, in a new work by the author of The Dark Object, a series of tense and violent short stories are intertwined to form a narrative whole – a collection, with a twisted narrative structure, that parodies the form of a novel.

When the protagonist, the dysfunctional Reality Flickers, meets the psychotic Heart Beast (aka the fucker), death, sex and sculpture collide in the stories that form The Fabricator’s Tale.

Palmer’s misanthropic characters are embedded within their own obsession with objects, exposure, voyeurism, and the sexualised abuse of power. They appear to exist in a highly dysfunctional world, that parodies, and replicates both the conditions of art, and its place in contemporary society.

Black Slit documents a process whereby Katrina Palmer learned to throw a knife, using vibrantly painted clay objects as her targets. The setting is a studio/office/classroom/bedsit at night – a multi-purpose space which must be prepared for the action. We see a sofa-bed being made in low light, a knife laid on a table before it flies through the air, and then the focus shifts to the targets themselves. The clay was still wet and unstable when struck by the blade, resulting in unpredictable radical disruptions to the colour and shape of these hand-crafted forms. Alongside filming and editing footage of the knife throwing, Palmer practised drawing lines, to make a series of works on paper which are also reproduced in this book.

An artist is invited to take up residency in a gallery filled with historical paintings. They are meticulously crafted, maintained, and revered. She begins to make an audit of the paintings, outlining the depictions of violence, subjugation and physical tension on public display. Eleven arrows in a torso, someone’s hair cut as they sleep, a man nailed to a cross. Horses, decapitations, memorable lobsters. Written in sparse, urgent fragments that invite closer reading, The Touch Report, turns the reader’s gaze into the dark, to question our notions of ‘civilisation’.

• ‘N u there p?
• L yes b.
• N Working on this Diego thing
• L how is it
• N It’s making me think about my Kreol. Did I tell you how I lost it?
• L I know you mourn it
• N It was the first language I knew
• L the first one you spoke?
• N y. the only one. Til I went to nursery school and no one understood me. They told my folks to speak English to me. So Kreol became language of adults/familial authority
• L Didn’t you know any kids who spoke it?
• N nope.
• N I never stopped understanding it
• N but the speaking seized up
• L Funny when you think how under colonialism, use of pidgins/creoles by colonised subjects = justification for colonials to infantilise them, while English = language of authority…
• L Have you read Moten’s ‘Blackness and Nothingness’?
• N No. Send!’

—Enn Gramaten

A cautionary tale of academic privilege and misadventure in Diego Garcia via a Kreole translation, and parallel live chat.

Dialecty, conceived by Maria Fusco with The Common Guild, considers the uses of vernacular forms of speech and writing, exploring how dialect words, grammar and syntax challenge and improve traditional orthodoxies of critical writing.

‘Ohwnleeeinn Bellphasst wudyah b’borninn ahplace cauld Frendleee Whay wiffahfuckin myuralaffa bandahfukin terrroristz whanwiffah rauckettlawnchar whanwiffah ayedunnowha anh whan blade wiffah masheeengunn.
Frendleee Whay iffyur furrrtha rahpublikin cawz lak.

Whattzap frum Flukeyluke anh Daza mahcuzinn. Uppattah Sentraall Staishinn abowtaah gyett affah trane frumm Larrnn tha shitehoal werther wuzah yoovee-eff parrteee tha nite baahphore furr summ kunt ouwttah maggabbreee. Flukeyluke ohvarherd summ kunt slabbarinn tha therr wuz gunnah beeah striparr attah thiss parrteee.

Here, for Dialecty, Robert Herbert McClean presents us with a phonetic tale of Flukeyluke and Belfast friends.

Dialecty, conceived by Maria Fusco with The Common Guild, considers the uses of vernacular forms of speech and writing, exploring how dialect words, grammar and syntax challenge and improve traditional orthodoxies of critical writing.

• ‘Shetland wis won by Harald Hårfagre, in da days whan
• da Vikings wir settin oot in aa da aerts wi dir axes,
• longboats and stinkin haps tied aboot dir backs. Dis cam eftir
• da time dat giants roamed an fokk wid wakken in
• dir beds tae hear bairns greetin wi a big wan clawed trow
• comin in da bedroom window, tearin at dir throats.’

Helen Nisbet makes a return to family history and memories of Shetland and the displaced reverberations in her contemporary life.

Dialecty, conceived by Maria Fusco with The Common Guild, considers the uses of vernacular forms of speech and writing, exploring how dialect words, grammar and syntax challenge and improve traditional orthodoxies of critical writing.