Amant’s Café and Bookstore offers two modes of cultural consumption: a cozy lounge in which to relax over a book and a coffee, and an active space for live readings, workshops, and presentations.
We work with a group of local and international independent publishing houses and small presses with an emphasis on theory, artists’ books, literature, music, performance, and experimental poetry. Moreover, the bookstore consists of publications suggested by our guest artists, artists-in-residence, and collaborators, fostering a philosophical and academic ethos of sympathetic links between people, stories, and ideas.
The Amant bookstore echoes the meanings traced within its etymology, describing both the act of loving and the lover, or “they love” when translated from the original Latin. There is no better statement for a space dedicated to the sharing of knowledge and experience. For us, a library or bookstore perfectly reflects the collective idea of love: a love that refrains from “romantic exclusivity” and leads to the emancipation of people socially and emotionally.
The Café will open to the public this Fall.
Image: Shark Senesac
Current Book Recommendations
“Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism” by Grada Kilomba
Plantation Memories is a compilation of episodes of everyday racism written in the form of short psychoanalytical stories. From the question “Where do you come from?” to Hair Politics to the N-word, the book is a strong, eloquent, and elaborate piece that deconstructs the normality of everyday racism and exposes the violence of being placed as the Other.
This book is part of our exhibition “Heroines, Birds and Monsters” by Grada Kilomba
Publisher: Between The Lines Books
“The Matrix” by N. H. Pritchard
Long out of print, Norman H. Pritchard’s masterwork presents a decade of poetic experimentation from 1960 to 1970. Inflected with—and perhaps an influence on—Black Arts, the precise architecture of Pritchard’s book (the poems and their design) stage an unexpected meeting of Concrete Poetry with Olson’s “open field” poetics and Cage’s chance operations.
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse co-published with Primary Information
“Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds” by Jayna Brown
In Black Utopias Jayna Brown takes up the concept of utopia as a way of exploring alternative states of being, doing, and imagining in Black culture. Brown demonstrates that engaging in utopian practices Black subjects imagine and manifest new genres of existence and forms of collectivity.
Publishers: Duke University Press
“Blank Forms 06: Organic Music Societies” edited by Lawrence Kumpf with Naima Karlsson and Magnus Nygren
Avant-garde jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and textile artist Moki Cherry (née Karlsson) met in Sweden in the late sixties. They began to live and perform together, dubbing their mix of communal art, social and environmentalist activism, children’s education, and pan-ethnic expression “Organic Music.” Organic Music Societies, Blank Forms’ sixth anthology, is a special issue released in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name devoted to the couple’s multimedia collaborations.
Publisher: Blank Forms
“Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979” edited by Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre
Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 is expansive anthology focused on concrete poetry written by women in the groundbreaking movement’s early history. It features 50 writers and artists from Europe, Japan, Latin America, and the United States selected by editors Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre.
Publisher: Primary Information
“Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction” by Joshua Whitehead
This exciting and groundbreaking fiction anthology showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous) writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism’s histories.