Early copies of Egress on display
in The Word Bookshop, New Cross, London, 2020.
Part of me was excited for this moment, but the last few days have changed things…
My first book, Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher, turns 5 years old today. But then as now, the whole thing feels complicated and bittersweet.
It was always a completed and bittersweet book, of course, about building solidarity around failures, with grief, with others, whilst resisting the gravitational pull of ressentiment… I’m feeling that same energy today.
Today, I’m catching the train home to Newcastle, after two weeks of “rest” in London. On this day 5 years ago, I was wandering around central London doing interviews, and waiting for the evening book launch event at the ICA with Kodwo Eshun.
Already things were tense, but not because of anything to do with the book itself. We were one week out from Boris Johnson finally implementing lockdown conditions that would keep us all mostly inside for an unknown length of time, feeling anxious about whether going ahead with the event was even a good idea anymore. But we did go ahead with it, and it was a very special evening.
Now it is 2025, and rather than lockdown looming over this first foray into print, the book is basically out-of-print, in need of further corrections to address its litany of typos (oops), and I’d really like to give it an afterword that addresses the peculiar context the book emerged into and out of, which is far clearer to me now than it was before this day 5 years ago. But that all seems unlikely, with the rights being held by a publisher that is a shadow of what it was once.
Repeater Books — and its subsidiary, Zer0 Books, bought back from scabs in 2021 — is currently controlled by Watkins Media, who have decimated the imprint’s core team of staff over a decision made 18 months ago to sign a Publishers for Palestine letter of solidarity. (Please read Sereptie’s report on all this if you haven’t already.) Repeater, then, has gone the same way as the first iteration of Zer0 Books, when control was also lost over disagreements with ownership, but today the stakes are so much higher.
The fifth anniversary of a book’s publication should be a moment of celebration, but things are worse than they’ve ever been. Just as Zer0 Books was at that time run by reactionaries profiting off the legacy and reputation of the late Mark Fisher, so too now are the rights to Mark’s work held by an ownership investing in Israeli AI start-ups and who have smothered all dissent at the imprint against Israel’s ongoing genocide and apartheid of the Palestinian people. There is nothing to celebrate.
The fifth anniversary of a book’s publication should also be an excuse to remind people of its existence, in the hope that those who haven’t bought it will do so, in order to support independent publishing and independent writers like myself, who — contrary to any online clout — are often at the sharp, precarious end of the culture industries. (In fact, financially speaking, I’m a lot worse off now than I was five years ago, lol.)
But I will not be asking you to buy my books today. Instead, I want to implore you to do the opposite. Boycott Watkins Media. For over a year, they have battled against internal pressure and instead flexed their financial and administrative power to rid the imprint of workers trying to express solidarity with the dispossessed. Those who have applied this pressure have my full respect and adulation, but internal pressure is no longer enough. With the cat out the bag, external pressure is now what is needed.
If you care about the freedom of left-wing publishing, about Palestine, about dissenting ideas that hope to inspire those to take action against power, it has long been the time to act on it. “We are alive and we don’t agree” is Repeater’s tagline; its time to reiterate that mantra to those who currently own it.
Boycott Watkins.
So true bestie