Phoretics - Israel Bonilla

Note: This is a preorder. The pamphlet will be delivered by June 14th. Budget international shipping will be available soon through our distributor, Asterism Books.

June 2025 // 38 pages // 5.5 x 8.5 inches // ISBN 979-8-9875626-6-6

Influence is always a relationship between living beings. Yet it is mainly an asymmetrical one, where achievement allows the flourishing of action. We are all indebted. We all seek either to conceal the debt or repay it with allusion. Spiritual debts, however, cannot be paid in full. Influence is a phoretic relationship: an organism travels by being carried on the body of its host. Perhaps when Voltaire, as he neared death, argued with Pascal’s Pensées line by line, he had stumbled upon the only commendable approach.

In Phoretics, the works of Goethe, Emerson, and Hazlitt jump-start a series of aphorisms on life, memory, creation, and morality.

Israel A. Bonilla lives in Guadalajara, Jalisco. He is author of the micro-chapbook Landscapes (Ghost City Press, 2021) and the short story collection Sleep Decades (Malarkey Books, 2024). His work has appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Exacting Clam, Firmament, Able Muse, minor literature[s], new_sinews, and elsewhere.