Undelivered Lectures

A deeply felt chronicle into the wilderness of the first forty days of new motherhood.In the final weeks of her pregnancy, Ayşegül Savaş becomes fascinated by the mythology around the first forty days after giving birth, and the invisible beings that are said to surround the mother. "In Turkish, we speak of extracting the forty days, like a sort of exorcism. My grandmothers assure me that it will all get better after forty days are out." A friend lends a book that suggests forty days of rest and fortifying broths and avoiding wind and cold. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, forty days are seen as a period of trial and transformation. They are often journeys into the wilderness and "its vast and unruly territories." When the baby arrives, Savaş charts her own path into the wilderness of new motherhood-a space of contradiction, of chaos and care, mothering and being mothered. "What is the trial of the postpartum crossing?" writes Savaş. "Where will mother and child emerge once they have left the wild?"

Usman Khan was convicted of terrorism-related offenses at age 20, and sent to high security prison. He was released eight years later, and allowed to travel to London for one day, to attend an event marking the fifth anniversary of a prison education program he participated in. On November 29, 2019, he sat with others at Fishmongers' Hall, some of whom he knew. Then he went to the restroom to retrieve the things he had hidden there: a fake bomb vest and two knives, which he taped to his wrists. That day, he killed two people: Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt. Preti Taneja taught fiction writing in prison for three years. Merritt oversaw her program; Khan was one of her students. "It is the immediate aftermath," Taneja writes. "'I am living at the centre of a wound still fresh.' The I is not only mine. It belongs to many." In this searching lament by the award-winning author of We That Are Young, Taneja interrogates the language of terror, trauma and grief; the fictions we believe and the voices we exclude. Contending with the pain of unspeakable loss set against public tragedy, she draws on history, memory, and powerful poetic predecessors to reckon with the systemic nature of atrocity. Blurring genre and form, Aftermath is a profound attempt to regain trust after violence and to recapture a politics of hope through a determined dream of abolition.

In twenty-first century America, there is so much that holds or demands our attention without requiring it. Imagine the lecture as a radical opening. Mary Cappello's Lecture is a song for the forgotten art of the lecture. Brimming with energy and erudition, it is an attempt to restore the lecture's capacity to wander, question, and excite. Cappello draws on examples from Virginia Woolf to Mary Ruefle, Ralph Waldo Emerson to James Baldwin, and blending rigorous cultural criticism with personal history to explore the lecture in its many forms-from the aphorism to the note-and give new life to knowledge's dramatic form.

"In the city where I was born there is a collective of women taking apart donated wedding dresses. Seam ripping and taking off lace, uprooting stitches and unstringing beads-one by one by hand in their spare time." A collective of women gathers to painstakingly turn wedding dresses into burial garments for infants. "Like many collectives whose existence and skills might seem unfathomable, most of us won't know about them until there is a need to know," writes Winrock. It is when confronted with the loss of her own unborn twin child that Winrock learns of their transformative work and begins to create a garment herself-made of language. Threading together stories of textiles and texts, from the first space suits and the seamstresses who made them, to Emily Dickinson's famous white dress, to the Steinian rhythms of Goodnight Moon, Winrock constructs and reconstructs an essay that might begin to accommodate devastating loss. A work of process and possibility, Alterations enacts the hidden labors of mourning.

A book-length essay on beauty and revolution as seen through the work of Jean-Luc Godard. As Joanna Walsh watches the films of Jean-Luc Godard, she considers beauty and desire in life and art. "There's a resistance, in Godard's women," writes Walsh, "that is at the heart of his work (and theirs)." She is captivated by the Paris of his films and the often porous border between the city presented on screen and the one she inhabited herself. With cool precision, and in language that shines with aphoristic wit, Walsh has crafted an exquisitely intimate portrait of the way attention to works of art becomes attention to changes in ourselves. Taut and gem-like, My Life as a Godard Movie is a probing meditation by one of our most observant writers.

Continuing her investigation into the archive, Iman Mersal sifts through representations of one of history's most elusive figures-the hidden mother. No one excluded my mother from our joint portrait. It is before me now and I can see for myself that I was with her, but she is a ghost. The picture is a burden: an assault on, and fabrication of, what I remember. It doesn't make my mother present; it sharpens my desire to resist, to transcend her ghostliness, to rescue what the picture hides. Iman Mersal has only one photograph of her mother, who died giving birth at age twenty-seven. But the woman portrayed in it strikes her as very unlike the one in her fleeting childhood memories, in mood, expression, dress. When Mersal has a child of her own decades later, she begins to wonder whether it's possible to depict a mother with any degree of fidelity. How to represent-in photography, dream, memory, or writing-an individual whose complex inner landscape has suddenly come under threat of looming archetypes? What is hidden in traditional representations of motherhood? What lies outside the narrative in which motherhood "means giving, the melding of two distinct selves, a love unlimited and unconditional"? Sifting through the archives of motherhood, including journal entries, photographs, and the writings that have informed her own poetic practice, Mersal privileges questions over answers, drifting over arriving, allowing a form of motherhood to exist in these pages unbounded.

From a writer who has "invented a new form" (Annie Ernaux), an exploration of mortality, alienation, boredom, surveillance, and how we regard ourselves among the animals.Animal Stories begins with Kate Zambreno's visit to the monkey house at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where one stark tree "seems to be the stage design for a simian production of Waiting for Godot." But who are the players and who is the audience, and can they recognize each other?What follows is a series of reports from the deep strangeness of the zoo, a space that is "more often than not deeply sad, an odd choice for regular pilgrimages of fun." Amid excursions with their young children, Zambreno turns to Garry Winogrand's photographs and John Berger's writings on animals, reshaping the spectator as the subject to decode our complex "zoo feelings"-what we project, and what we refuse to see. Then, in the "Kafka system" that dovetails with these zoo studies, Zambreno thinks through the notebooks and animal stories of a writer known for playing at the threshold between species, continuing their investigation into the false divide between human and animal.Drawing on forms including reports, essays, journals, and stories, Zambreno renders visible the enclosures we construct and the ones we occupy ourselves.

If evolutionary biologists, ethical philosophers, and social media gurus are to be believed, the face is the basis for what we call "humanity." The face is considered the source of identity, truth, beauty, authenticity, and empathy. It underlies our ideas about what constitutes a human, how we relate emotionally, what is pleasing to the eye, and how we ought to treat each other. But all of this rests on a specific image of the face. We might call it the ideal face. What about the strange face, the stranger's face, the face that thwarts recognition? What do we make of the face that rides the line of legibility? In a collection of speculative essays on a few such stranger faces-the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the digital face, the face of the dead-Namwali Serpell probes our contemporary mythology of the face. Stranger Faces imagines a new ethics based on the perverse pleasures we take in the very mutability of faces.

In her prize-winning debut, Mexican essayist Mariana Oliver trains her gaze on migration in its many forms, moving between real cities and other more inaccessible territories: language, memory, pain, desire, and the body. With an abiding curiosity and poetic ease, Oliver leads us through the underground city of Cappadocia, explores the vicissitudes of a Berlin marked by historical fracture, recalls a shocking childhood exodus, and recreates the intimacy of the spaces we inhabit. Blending criticism, reportage, and a travel writing all her own, Oliver presents a brilliant collection of essays that asks us what it means to leave the familiar behind and make the unfamiliar our own.

A speculative essay on language in the face of climate catastrophe: how we memorialize what has been lost and what soon will be, pushing public imagination into generative realms."I am in need of a word," writes Lauren Markham in an email to the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, an organization that coins neologisms. She describes her desire to memorialize something that is in the process of being lost-a landscape, a species, birdsong. How do we mourn the abstracted casualties of what's to come? In a dazzling synthesis of reporting, memoir, and essay, Markham reflects on the design and function of memorials, from the traditional to the speculative-the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, a converted prison in Ljubljana, a "ghost forest" of dead cedar trees in a Manhattan park-in an attempt to reckon with the grief of climate catastrophe. Can memorials look toward the future as they do to the past? How can we create "a psychic space for feeling" while spurring action and agitating for change? Immemorial is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.