Releases November 11, 2025

This book is a rebellion against machine-made art.

At a moment when artificial intelligence is challenging writers in every facet of artistic production, The Relegation Reader celebrates writing in its rawest, most evocative form. Each piece is an emerging star in a constellation of new poetry and prose that illuminates our shared world.

In this collection, edited by Paris-based author Will Mountain Cox (Roundabout and With Paris in Mind: Talking with Artists of This Generation), twenty-six contemporary writers in the US, UK, and Europe offer a fresh view of identity, technology, memory, and place.

These voices—which include a poet shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; a recipient of the 2021 Berlin Senate grant for non-German literature; three writers mentored by the publisher Giancarlo DiTrapano, who lived and worked in New York, Rome, and Naples; and many other remarkable talents—pull you through portals into cultural landscapes you’ve likely romanticized only via screen.

From Berlin to Baltimore, from a mountaintop to the subway, the Reader holds up a 360-degree mirror to our hyper-networked society, connecting unexpected emotional harmonies to reveal that the heart of who we are lies not in the answers, but in the asking.

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In The Trees, Claudia Peña Claros piercingly renders a world in perpetual tumult, marked both by convulsive disputes over property and power and by nature's resistance in the face of human injustice. Shifting the focus of the short story away from the urban realm, she locates her vivid anti-narratives in the countryside and in small rural towns. Each story is its own uncanny ecosystem of reality-altering presences; each finds startling ways to catalogue ongoing tension and transformation. Staring deep into the past without taking her eyes from a future that may never arrive, Claudia Peña Claros raises her subtle, arresting voice with intimacy and power.

A group of friends and lovers in Paris weather the polycrisis of contemporary life together and explore cycles of connecting, belonging, departing, and inevitable change in Will Mountain Cox's debut novel.

Excerpt:

In the spring, the Seine promptly flooded its promenades with water. Yellow was the water, and murky too. It matched the spring sky of election season and some of us spoke in documentary voices. One evening we crossed the river on our way to an election party. From the bridge we looked down in. There were no answers in the river. It was just pretty in its drawn-out, yellow-tough question. At the party, Brassens was playing. His music was starting to mean something new. The party had no television, but it had a view onto a tall new-build building with rows and rows of windows. We listened to the election on the radio, pausing Brassens to listen, some of us watching the living rooms of the building we could see into. There were dozens of living rooms, each with their own television making colors. When the results burst in we watched the living rooms begin churning. Hands were thrown toward the sky, toward God we guessed. And remote controls were thrown screenward, useless. The apartments with nice decorations looked angry. So too the apartments with no decor at all.

Selected as a Dennis Cooper favorite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2023.

Dead Hemingway. Dead Baker. Dead Joyce and Dead Fitzgerald. Dead Stein. Dead Picasso. Dead Barnes and Dead Truffaut. Piaf Dead and Breton Dead. Gainsbourg Dead and Monet Dead. Bernhardt Dead and Satie Dead. Baldwin Dead and Foucault Dead too.

The Parisian artists of our dreams have been dead a long time. It is now our chance to live in the moment. The romantic fantasy of mythic Paris is always close at hand, but what is it really like to be a resident artist today? Does hyper-connectivity help or hinder creativity? Are cities still necessary? Are artists? Will Mountain Cox, who has made a career out of identifying and championing young, fresh talent, and who himself arrived in Paris as a newcomer in search of inspiration, pursues the elusive answers in this searching collection of conversations with the most intriguing emergent minds of our urgent time. Interviews with twenty-two vibrant new voices, accompanied by extensive photographs, give a candid and insightful look at making it (or moving on) in Paris today, sparking essential social dialogue about new art, how we make it, for whom we make it, and above all, why now.

Featuring: Romy Alizée - Luis Miguel Andrade - Oscar d’Artois - Bagarre - Yotam Ben-David - Bianca Bondi - Gaëlle Choisne - Amélie Derlon Cordina - Julien Creuzet - John Denison - Wendy Huynh - Merryn Jean - Nina Leger - Léa Mysius - Adam Naas - Lucy K Shaw - Billie Tomassin - Alcidia Vulbeau

Translations by Christopher Seder

STOCKISTS:

Paris:

-Shakespeare & Company
-Galignani
-Yvon Lambert
-Palais de Tokyo

Portland: Powell’s

-Boston: Brookline Booksmith