Bøker utgitt av 404 Ink

From drag queens and discos, to black holes and monsters, these stories and poems wrestle with love and loneliness and the fight to be seen. By turns serious and fantastical, hilarious and confrontational, We Were Always Here addresses the fears, mysteries, wonders and variety of experience that binds our community together.

What does the command "look, don't touch" suggest about the (lack of) freedom to feel in society? hill and Sobande reflect on society's nurturing and obstructing of emotional expression, physical touch, and connectedness between different species and spaces as Look, Don't Touch journeys through the music of feeling, "self-help" social media, the power of public signage, and more to call for a move away from the language of "okayness", and a move towards collectively uplifting forms of anger, agitation, love, solidarity, release, and ultimately, feeling.

A handpicked crew of dykes board the Caledonian Sleeper bound for Glasgow. A couple wrestle with gender roles when their flat inventory includes a brand new baby. A young man's world expands with possibility in Barcelona, while lust mingles with faith and celebrity in verse. Curious and provocative, sometimes domestic, sometimes otherworldly, this collection of stories, poems and memoir provides a snapshot of Scotland's queer community and LGBTI+ writing scene, and captures the variety of experiences that bind our community together.

Why are feet so hot? When Jesus washed his bros' feet, what kind of love was he showing? Why did feet show up in poetry written during a medieval outbreak of gonorrhoea? How did early sexologists convince us that loving feet is deviant? And what did Victorian lesbians make of all this?These are the questions thrusting Adam Zmith into a history of toe-botherers who will guide the reader through the sex archives, the online forums and a millennium of art, with his trademark queer lens. Solemates will bring to light the history of this peculiarly popular kink. From Tarantino films to Bible stories, from Renaissance paintings to OnlyFans, Solemates is the rich and messy tale of our obsession with everything below the ankle, and what it reveals about how we view our bodies and our sex lives.

Scotland's LGBT+ musicians have long mined beauty from the darkest of seams - and today's artists are taking that treasure and using it to make magic. Trans writer, broadcaster and musician Carrie Marshall travels from bothys to the Barras to discover and share the sounds, the stories and the sheer joy of queer Scots pop.

Struggling to deal with the trauma of her Catholic upbringing, Noelle, travels to the Isle of Bute. She meets a man who claims to be a vampire, and a relationship blooms between them based solely on confession. Noelle becomes hounded by memories of her past.

Gathering brings together essays by women of colour across the UK in writing about their relationships with nature, including neurodiversity, mental health, academia, colonialism, whiteness, music, hiking and more.

In Victor and Barry's Kelvinside Compendium, Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson reminisce about their hectic years as Victor and Barry through both beloved and never-before-seen photos, songs and musings in a scrapbook style compendium, including a foreword from former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.

Naomi Westerman was an anthropology student studying death rituals when her whole family died, turning death from the academic to the deeply personal. She struggled with grief and talking about, particularly as a young woman, realising while death is everywhere in our culture, grief is harder to find in specialist ways.

Electric Dreams picks apart the forces that posit sex robots as either the solution to our problems or a real threat to human safety, and looks at what's being pushed aside for us to obsess about something that will never happen.

Identification tech gathers data on our behaviours, our likes and dislikes, through profiling and biometics. Corporations use these methods to make our identities legible to machines. But self-determination to change our identity is a core part of being human. How does being forced into artificial categories affect how we understand who we are?

When we hear news stories about displaced people, people running away from war, living in exile, they're always accompanied by big numbers, presented as waves of immigrants. The Last Day Before Exile re-focuses the narrative to the human side, sharing some of the hardest moments of their lives, where they had to make the decision to stay or go.

Chronicling a history of punks at war, Blitzkrieg Bops studies bands who have soundtracked a movement - including Pussy Riot, Stiff Little Fingers, National Wake, Wutanfall, The Kominas & more - creating music to overthrow corrupt governments, stomp out oppressive regimes, fight the establishment and, in turn, fight for their lives.

For a period in time that gave us Sappho, and the love affair of Achilles and Patroclus, the Ancient Greek relationship with queer folk is a lot more complicated than at first glance. Yet ancient Greek myths are being told anew by LGBTQ+ writers and readers to explore modern day queer joy and queer struggles.

Deeping It shines a critical light on UK drill and its fraught relationship with the British legal system. Intervening on current discourse steeped in anti-Blackness and moral panic, this Inkling 'deeps' how the criminalisation of UK drill cannot be disentangled from histories, technologies, and realities of colonialism, consumerism and more.

We're Falling Through Space investigates how Doctor Who uses its larger-than-life, fantastical lens to discuss the mundane conflicts of normal life; from the shifting friendships of our twenties, to enduring domestic life, learning the value of self worth, and more.

They Came to Slay investigates just how D&D became such a powerful mechanic for queer people to examine, explore, and come to terms with who they are, and how they want to lead their lives in real and imagined worlds alike.

Now Go interrogates not only how Studio Ghibli navigates grief so well, but how that informs our own understanding of grief's manifold faces.

Men who experience sexual abuse are often dismissed, only brought up as the butt of a joke, an exception to the rule or, perhaps worst, to be used as a rhetorical tool against female victims. Sons and Others offers a new way of seeing these men in our lives, and asks how the violence they experience affects us all.

Risk is embedded in almost every corner of the popular culture we consume; its hidden exposure is a new version of disaster capitalism. No Dice explores the messy world of gambling, addiction and risk that we encounter daily, from childhood through adulthood, to ask - is it worth the risk? And more so, do we even know what risks we're taking?

At Least This I Know guides the reader through Andrés N. Ordorica's own story, of ancestry, nationhood, activism and queerness, through childhood photographs, across international highways, to tales of love and loss, and beyond.

A novel about youth, the ghosts of friendship, and growing up as a mixed-race person in a small but fiercely proud nation, the story spans India and Skye, seeing the characters exorcise past ghosts in order to face the present.

Beginning with an ex sex-worker drifting through a rural town in South America, and ending with a young woman's sinister wedding night, Nash writes across the complications of working class women, rendering their desires with visceral prose and dissecting the root that threads her work: craving and the conflicts within.

Inspired by his own experience navigating depression following a tragic personal loss, Checkpoint reflects on the comforting and healing effect that entering into new digital worlds and narratives can have on mental health both personally and on a wider scale.

Flip the Script showcases some of the best rappers currently making music in the UK. It has taken a significant amount of time for women to get recognition in the genre, even though there have been phenomenal women in hip hop since its beginnings in the Bronx in the 1970s - but why did we take so long in the UK? Flip the Script gets to know the women who have paved the way, the successes and experiences of those that shape the thriving scene we have today. Arusa goes in depth with a number of female rappers who are making waves right now to find out about their relationships with hip hop, why they were attracted to the scene, what their thoughts are on the future of the genre and whether or not they feel a sense of belonging. Using her own research, and with reference to pioneers and critical theory, she explores hip hop's history of misogyny and how women have traditionally been looked over by their peers, and celebrates the brilliant icons who have made this one of the most exciting genres to be part of. A must read for fans of music, feminism, and culture.

Love That Journey For Me dives deep into the cultural sensation of Canadian comedy-drama Schitt's Creek. Considering the fusion of existing sitcom traditions, references and tropes, this Inkling analyses the nuance of the show and its surrounding cultural and societal impact as a queer revolution.