Fitzcarraldo Editions bags 'vital' Preciado gender politics book

Fitzcarraldo Editions has snapped up a “vital” book on gender politics by Paul B Preciado, including an account of the author’s own transition.

Publisher Jacques Testard acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to An Apartment on Uranus from María Lynch at Barcelona-based agency Casanovas & Lynch. It will be published on 15th January 2020 in Charlotte Mandell's translation from French, simultaneously with Semiotext(e) in the US and featuring a foreword from novelist and filmmaker Virginie Despentes.

The synopsis explains: “A bold, radical argument for a new gender politics, An Apartment on Uranus is a chronicle of a crossing, recounting the author's transition from Beatriz to Paul B against a backdrop of global, political, cultural and sexual transitions. Taking in socio-political issues including the rise of neo-fascism in Europe, the migrant crisis, the Zapatista struggle in Mexico, the fight for Catalonian independence, sex work, Trump’s America, the harassment of trans children, and the technological appropriation of the uterus, An Apartment on Uranus takes a personal experience as a starting point to question the foundations of a society which excludes heterodoxy and proclaims it deviancy or illness.”

Preciado’s first book, Counter-Sexual Manifesto (Columbia University Press) was acclaimed by French critics. He is also the author of Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics (The Feminist Press) and Pornotopia (Zone Books), for which he was awarded the Sade Prize in France.

Testard said: “Paul B Preciado's An Apartment on Uranus clears new ground. It is a vital, timely and necessary book. It opens new horizons for the Fitzcarraldo Editions list and I am honoured and humbled that Paul B chose to publish this book with us.”