In a remote seaside village, Niki Jumpei, an amateur entomologist, is held captive at the bottom of a vast sand pit where he is pressed into shovelling off the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten the village. View More...
Kathy Acker's Don Quixote is an indomitable woman on a formidable quest: to become a knight and defeat the evil enchanters of modern America by pursuing "the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love." In this visionary world, Don Quixote journeys through American history to the final days of the Nixon administration, passing on the way through a New York reminiscent of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and a brutally defamiliarized contemporary London. Here transvestites who might play at being Nazis and beautiful she-males enact the rituals of courtly love. Presiding over... View More...
Kathy Acker's characteristically outrageous, lyrical, and hyperinventive novel concerns three characters -- Rimbaud, Airplane, and Capitol -- who share an impulse toward self-immolation through doomed, obsessive romance. Rimbaud, the delinquent symbolist prodigy, is deserted by his lover Verlaine time and time again. Airplane takes a job dancing at Fun City, the seventh der of the sex industry, in order to support her good-for-nothing boyfriend. And Capitol feels alive only when she's having sex with her brother, Quentin. In Memorium to Identity is at once a revelatory addition to, and an irre... View More...
Kathy Acker's characteristically outrageous, lyrical, and hyperinventive novel concerns three characters -- Rimbaud, Airplane, and Capitol -- who share an impulse toward self-immolation through doomed, obsessive romance. Rimbaud, the delinquent symbolist prodigy, is deserted by his lover Verlaine time and time again. Airplane takes a job dancing at Fun City, the seventh der of the sex industry, in order to support her good-for-nothing boyfriend. And Capitol feels alive only when she's having sex with her brother, Quentin. In Memorium to Identity is at once a revelatory addition to, and an irre... View More...
Kathy Goes to Haiti, the first of three novels in Literal Madness, "Speaks to us out of a delightful mock-na'vet that reminds one at times of the Dick and Jane readers rewritten as manuals for politics and sex . . . . At once hilarious and terrifying, it] has all the logic of a Caribbean tour and a nightmare combined" (Los Angeles Times). My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini - wherein, among other things, the late Italian filmmaker solves his own murder, with the help of, among others, Romeo, Juliet, and the Bront sisters - is a "scathing commentary on false values in art" (The Hartford ... View More...
Loosely related to Robert Louis Stevenson's classic Treasure Island, Pussy, King of the Pirates is a grrrl pirate story that journeys from the most famous whorehouse in Alexandria though an unidentified, crumbling city that may or may not be sometime in the future, to Brighton Town, England, and, finally, to a ship headed toward Pirate Island, where the stories converge and the vision ends.Neil Gaiman, a close friend of Acker's, has written a new introduction to this anniversary edition. In typical Acker fashion, he's including a text exchange with one of Acker's fictional heroines, Janey Smit... View More...
A legendary love letter to Los Angeles by the city's most charming daughter, complete with portraits of rock stars at Chateau Marmont, surfers in Santa Monica, prostitutes on sunset, and Eve's own beloved cat, Rosie. Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: by the time she'd hit thirty, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha's Five 1965 Girlfriends, Babitz's first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve's Hollywood is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California's haute bo... View More...
No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated "its own kind of moral laws," spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and '70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note premise. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind-swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraugh... View More...
Set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, this groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love is a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction (The Atlantic). In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni's curtainless room, whi... View More...
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (Times Literary Supplement). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna--a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous.The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction--there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Ro... View More...
A graceful, contemplative volume, Camera Lucida was first published in 1979. Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on the subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography.
A graceful, contemplative volume, Camera Lucida was first published in 1979. Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on the subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography.
Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans--though no one calls them that anymore. His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the "Transition." Now, eating human meat--"special meat"--is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing. Then one day he's given a gift: a live specimen of the fines... View More...
How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Author and editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls "pleasure activism," a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, she challenges us to rethink the ground rules of activism. Her mindset-altering essays are interwoven with conversations and insights from other feminist... View More...
Jorge Luis Borges declared The Invention of Morel a masterpiece of plotting, comparable to The Turn of the Screw and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Set on a mysterious island, Bioy's novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious. Inspired by Bioy Casares's fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, The Invention of Morel has gone on to live a secret life of its own. Greatly admired by Julio Cort zar, Gabriel Garc a M rquez, and Octavio Paz, the novella helped to usher in L... View More...
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST - One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans in this deeply personal and groundbreaking portrait of a nation."Karla's book sheds light on people's personal experiences and allows their stories to be told and their voices to be heard."--Selena Gomez LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST - LONGLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD - NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VULTURE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Book Review - Time - NPR ... View More...
