Playboy

I am still transitioning, but I am unsure into what.

Who are all these Evas? They puncture and disrupt the domestic space and equilibrium of the narrator, who alternately relies upon them or administers their care. Foam is the latest boundary-blurring, genre-resistant, strange and speculative new fiction from Kate Zambreno, the inimitable and relentless literary stylist and conceptualist. Inspired by the absurdities of Eva Hesse and other soft sculpture, these are speculative art essays and textures, a document of precarity and slippery time—mischievous, moody, estranged—a masterwork of tone and atmosphere. 

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Reynaldo Rivera took personal photos of the Los Angeles that he lived in and knew: a world of cheap rent, house parties, subversive fashion, underground bands, and a handful of Latino gay and transvestite bars: Mugi’s, The Silverlake Lounge, and La Plaza. Most of these bars are long closed and many of the performers have died. But in Rivera’s photographs, these men and women live on in a silvery landscape of makeshift old-style cinematic glamour, a fabulous flight from unacceptable reality. 

As a teenager, Rivera took refuge in used bookstores and thrift stores, where he discovered old  photo books of Mexican film stars and the work of Lisette Model, Brassai, and Bresson. Inspired, he bought a camera and began  photographing people at his hotel. In 1981 he moved to Echo Park and began taking photos for the LA Weekly. 

This book is an ensemble of almost 200 images selected by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler spanning more than two decades in Los Angeles and Mexico. The  book also includes Luis Bauz’s story, “Tatiana,” about one of the  subjects of these photographs; a critical essay on Rivera’s work by Chris Kraus; and a novella-length conversation between Rivera and his  friend and contemporary Vaginal Davis about their lives, work, fantasies, and collective histories.

Edited by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler
With Luis Bauz, Vaginal Davis and Chris Kraus

The legendary 1975 "Schizo-Culture" conference, conceived by the early Semiotext(e) collective, began as an attempt to introduce the then-unknown radical philosophies of post-'68 France to the American avant-garde. The event featured a series of seminal papers, from Deleuze's first presentation of the concept of the "rhizome" to Foucault's introduction of his History of Sexuality project. The conference was equally important on a political level, and brought together a diverse group of activists, thinkers, patients, and ex-cons in order to address the challenge of penal and psychiatric institutions. The combination proved to be explosive, but amid the fighting and confusion "Schizo-Culture" revealed deep ruptures in left politics, French thought, and American culture.

The "Schizo-Culture" issue of the Semiotext(e) journal came three years later. Designed by a group of artists and filmmakers including Kathryn Bigelow and Denise Green, it documented the chaotic creativity of an emerging downtown New York scene, and offered interviews with artists, theorists, writers, and No Wave and pre-punk musicians together with new texts from Deleuze, Foucault, R. D. Laing, and other conference participants.

This slip-cased edition includes The Book: 1978, a facsimile reproduction of the original Schizo-Culture publication; and The Event: 1975, a previously unpublished and comprehensive record of the conference that set it all off. It assembles many previously unpublished texts, including a detailed selection of interviews reconstructing the events, and features Félix Guattari, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Michel Foucault, Sylvère Lotringer, Guy Hocquenghem, Gilles Deleuze, John Rajchman, Robert Wilson, Joel Kovel, Jack Smith, Jean-François Lyotard, Ti-Grace Atkinson, François Peraldi, and John Cage.

Audio journals that document Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time. 

"In these moments I hate language. I hate what words are like, I hate the idea of putting these preformed gestures on the tip of my tongue, or through my lips, or through the inside of my mouth, forming sounds to approximate something that's like a cyclone, or something that's like a flood, or something that's like a weather system that's out of control, that's dangerous, or alarming.... It just seems like sounds that have been uttered back and forth maybe now over centuries. And it always boils down to the same meaning within those sounds, unless you're more intense uttering them, or you precede them or accompany them with certain forms of violence."
—from The Weight of the Earth

Artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was an important figure in the downtown New York art scene. His art was preoccupied with sex, death, violence, and the limitations of language. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Wojnarowicz began keeping audio journals, returning to a practice he'd begun in his youth.The Weight of the Earth presents transcripts of these tapes, documenting Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.

In these taped diaries, Wojnarowicz talks about his frustrations with the art world, recounts his dreams, and describes his rage, fear, and confusion about his HIV diagnosis. Primarily spanning the years 1987 and 1989, recorded as Wojnarowicz took solitary road trips around the United States or ruminated in his New York loft, the audio journals are an intimate and affecting record of an artist facing death. By turns despairing, funny, exalted, and angry, this volume covers a period largely missing from Wojnarowicz's written journals, providing us with an essential new record of a singular American voice.

Abandoned by their Dutch partner after giving up their home and their job to follow him to the Netherlands, humanities scholar Seasonal finds themself single in a strange place for the first time in a decade. 

Dipping into the rabbit hole of digital eroticism, Seasonal soon meets László, a male sub who volleys back their cerebral sexts and is seeking a  dominant guide. His dating-app profile—a photo of Foucault and the  ingenuous greeting “Hello, World?”—thinly veils his desire to be annihilated. It's a desire that Seasonal senses they can fulfill. But to do this means crossing the frightening gap between their desires and capacities.  

Seasonal and László embark on an experiment in remaking intimacy outside the Republic of Gender. But as it continues, the two realize they are staging separate confrontations with domination: Seasonal finds they must confront their own relation to the violence and anger that marked their upbringing in working-class, small-town Australia, while László stages his own confrontation with his  decision to leave Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. As they attempt to improvise a  theater of domination that opens up possibilities of reciprocity, the energies of their sexuality stalk this collaboration, threatening to give them exactly what they bargained or begged for. 

A feminist paean to perversity in the tradition of Pauline Réage’s Story of O and Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus, Anna Poletti's hello, world? dares to fully inhabit female power, and to fully face the violence, beauty, and uncharted territories of human sexuality.

A novel of lesbian identity and motherhood, and the societal pressures that place them in opposition. 

The daughter of an illustrious French family whose members include a former Prime Minister, a model, and a journalist, Constance Debré abandoned her marriage and legal career in 2015 to write full-time and begin a relationship with a woman. Her transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian was chronicled in her 2018 novel Play boy, praised by Virginie Despentes for its writing that is at once "flippant and consumed by anxiety."  

In Love Me Tender, Debré goes on to further describe the consequences of that life-changing decision. Her husband, Laurent, seeks to permanently separate her from their eight-year old child. Vilified in divorce court by her ex, she loses custody of her son and is allowed to see him only once every two weeks for a supervised hour. Deprived of her child, Debré gives up her two-bedroom apartment and bounces between borrowed apartments, hotel rooms, and a studio the size of a cell. She involves herself in brief affairs with numerous women who vary in age, body type, language, and lifestyle. But the closer she gets to them, the more distant she feels. Apart from cigarettes and sex, her life is completely ascetic: a regime of intense reading and writing, interrupted only by sleep and athletic swimming. She shuns any place where she might observe children, avoiding playgrounds and parks "as if they were cluster bombs ready to explode, riddling her body with pieces of shrapnel."  

Writing graphically about sex, rupture, longing, and despair in the first person, Debré's work is often compared with the punk-era writings of Guillaume Dustan and Herve Guibert, whose work she has championed. As she says of Guibert: "I love him because he says I and he's a pornographer. That seems to be essential when you write. Otherwise you don't say anything." But in Love Me Tender, Debré speaks courageously of love in its many forms, reframing what it means to be a mother beyond conventional expectations.

Leash extends the logic of S&M to its inexorable and startling conclusion, darkly and hilariously revealing the masochistic impulse as the urge to disappear from the chores, obligations, and emotional vacuity of daily life.

No more jobs, no more taxes, no more checkbook, no more bills, no more credit cards, no more credit, no more money, no more mortgages, no more rent, no more savings, no more junk mail, no more junk, no more mail, no more phones, no more faxes, no more busy signals, no more computers, no more cars, no more drivers' licenses, no more traffic lights, no more airports, no more flying, no more tickets, no more packing, no more luggage, no more supermarkets, no more health clubs... While her current spends the summer researching public housing in Stockholm, a moderately wealthy, object-oppressed, and terminally hip New York female of a certain age seeks adventure in the sedate dyke bars of lower Manhattan. Finding none, she answers a personal ad. She is ordered to put on a blindfold before the first meeting with the woman she knows only as Sir. Not knowing what someone looks like turns out to be freeing, as do the escalating constraints that alienate her not just from her former life, but from her very conception of who she is. Part Georges Bataille, part Fran Leibowitz, this is the Story of O told with a self-referentially perverse sense of humor.

Slide into spring with our mega-stimulating 38th issue. 

Hop in the jacuzzi with Italiano chart-topper Mahmood. Read the hustling tell-all with Ashland Mines aka deejay Bobby Beethovan. Zip to queer futures with internet-doll sensation @StarAmerasu. Go behind-the-scenes of some of the biggest French content creators with photographer @RaphaelChatelain. There’s hairy art from China, trans love affairs, cottaging evidence for court, d*ck arrangements, ladyboy activism, and so much more. 

Plus, a back section of smutty poetry submitted to us by our talented readers, and a visit to our favorite local cruise bar on BUTT’s 25th anniversary. At 152 pages, it’s sure to satisfy size queens all around the world. 

Darryl Cook is a cuckold, and that’s exactly how he likes it. He has an inheritance that spares him from work, a manageable and seemingly consequence-free drug habit, and a lovely wife called Mindy who’s generally game for anything—and for as much of it as she can get. But after an accidental overdose and some serious oversharing, Darryl’s world begins to crack up. Tormented by what seems to be the secret truth in sex, and less assured of that secret’s form, Darryl steps into what used to be called real life . . . Darryl is a disarmingly funny and unabashedly intelligent look at a community of people parsing masculinity, marriage, sex (and love) on their own terms.

Underneath the sharp satire and hilarious sexual irreverence this is a deadly serious book: a brilliant novel of a seeker, like The Pilgrim’s Progress refracted by queer internet culture. —Torrey Peters

Ess is what I might call a burgeoning cult literary figure, armed with an unmistakable lyric deadpan and a taste for provocative subject matter. — Stephen Ira, Poetry Project

What Darryl is looking for is a crisis of sufficient severity that it will cause him to feel real to himself. — Dominic Fox, Review 31

The Stone Door is a surrealist allegory intertwining myth, mysticism, and romance. Written by Leonora Carrington after World War II, the novel follows a woman's symbolic journey through esoteric teachings, ancient lands, and dreamlike visions in pursuit of spiritual awakening and the unification of male and female forces. Both a metaphysical adventure and a tribute to Carrington's personal love story, it offers a visionary exploration of transformation and liberation.

In this characteristically sexy, daring, and hyperliterate novel, Kathy Acker interweaves the stories of three characters who share the same tragic flaw: a predilection for doomed, obsessive love. 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 tier 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 Memoriam to Identity is at once a revelatory addition to, and an irreverent critique of, the literature of decadence and self-destruction.