Seven Rooms brings together highlights from Hotel, a magazine for new approaches to fiction, non-fiction & poetry which, since its inception in 2016, provided a space for experimental reflection on literature's status as art & cultural mediator. Co-published by Tenement Press and Prototype, this anthology captures, refracts, and reflects a vital moment in independent publishing in the UK, and is built on the shared values of openness, collaboration, and total creative freedom.

When was love first described as a sickness? When did the body in love begin to be likened to one battling an infection? In this meditative and inventive essay, Daisy Lafarge explores metaphors of love and disease as she seeks to understand our intimacy with microbial life. Even in an age of fermented food and flourishing microbiomes, when it comes to thinking about infection, our imaginations remain dominated by an old script of good versus evil: the pure self threatened by pathogenic others. But as Lafarge points out, microbial cells in our bodies equal or even outnumber those that are 'human', while ancient viruses are inscribed in our DNA. So-called human life simply would not exist if the world were divided into binaries of self and other, good and bad, sickness and health. Lovebug is an essay about the poetics of infection, and about how we can learn to live with multispecies ambivalence. Turning to microbiology, literature, mysticism, and psychoanalysis, Lafarge explores the uncomfortable intimacy between the human body and the many bacteria, viruses, and parasites to which it is host. How might we forge non-phobic relationships to our 'little others'? How might we rewild our imaginations?

SHORTLISTED FOR THE TS ELIOT PRIZE FOR POETRY 2020 WINNER OF THE SCOTTISH BOOK AWARDS' POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR A POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION SHORTLISTED FOR THE JOHN POLLARD FOUNDATION INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE "Whip-smart, sonically gorgeous" - Rae Armantrout, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Versed When Louis Pasteur observed the process of fermentation, he noted that, while most organisms perished from lack of oxygen, some were able to thrive as 'life without air'. In this capricious, dreamlike collection, characters and scenes traverse states of airlessness, from suffocating relationships and institutions, to toxic environments and ecstatic asphyxiations. Both compassionate and ecologically nuanced, this innovative collection bridges poetry and prose to interrogate the conditions necessary for survival.

The critically acclaimed debut novel from the T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet -- Frances is a graduate student spending a summer volunteering in rural France, in the hope that tending vegetables and harvesting honey will distract her from a scandal that drove her out of Paris, her research unfinished and her sense of self unmoored. At the eco-farm Noa Noa, she comes under the influence of its charismatic and domineering owner, Paul. As his hold over her tightens and her plans come unstuck, she finds herself entangled in a strange, uneven relationship. On a fraught road trip across the South of France, both are forced to reckon with uncomfortable truths. A compelling and perturbing story of power, passivity and the cage of being 'good', Paul introduces a novelist of extraordinary perspicacity and lyricism.