Selected Amazon Reviews

Name, the third novel in Constance Debré’s acclaimed trilogy, is at once a manifesto, an ecstatic poem, and a political pamphlet. By rejecting the notion of given identity, her narrator approaches the heart of the radical emptiness that the earlier books were pursuing.

Newly single, and having recently come out as a lesbian, the narrator of Debré’s first two novels embarked on a monastic regime of exercise, sex, and writing. Using the facts of her own life as impersonal “material” for literature, Playboy and Love Me Tender epitomized what Debré (after Thomas Bernhard) has called “antiautobiography.” They introduced French and American readers to her fiercely spare prose, distilled from influences as disparate as Saint Augustine, Albert Camus, and Guillaume Dustan. “Minimalist and at times even desolate,” wrote the New York Review of Books, these works defied “the expectations of personal growth that animate much feminist literature.”

Name is Debré’s most intense novel yet. Set partly in the narrator’s  childhood, it rejects Proustian notions of “regaining” the past.  Instead, its narrator seeks a state of profound disownment: “We have to  get rid of the idea of origins, once and for all, I’m not holding on to the corpses. … Being free has nothing to do with that clutter, with having suffered or not, being free is the void.” To achieve true freedom, she dares to enter this “void”—that is, dares to accept the pain, loss, and violence of life. Brilliant and searing, Name affirms and extends Debré’s radical project.

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.

Faced with photos of a once-tumultuous New York art world, the narrator's mind in this scathing, darkly funny novel begins to erupt. Memories jostle for center stage, just as those that they are about always did. These brilliant but broken survivors of the '80s and '90s have now reached the brink of middle age and are facing the challenge of continuing to feel authentic. Luminous with imagery, cackling with bitter humor, and with a new foreword by the author, this roman a cle spares no one.

First published in 2003, Gary Indiana's turn-of-the-millennium novel traces the lives of a loosely connected group of New York artists and the dissolution of their scene.  

During the summer of 2001, the narrator of Do Everything in the Dark, a gallery curator, receives intermittent dispatches from his far-flung friends, many of whom resemble well-known figures in the art and intellectual worlds, who are spread out across the globe, from Istanbul to Provincetown to Santa Fe. Seeking various reprieves from a changed New York, the long-festering, glossed-over incompatibilities of these aging bohemians blossom into exotic and unbearable relief. Beneath the contemporary excesses Indiana chronicles, we can see the outlines of the earlier New York bohemia captured by Dawn Powell.  

Arguably Indiana's most intimate, internal, and compassionate work to date, Do Everything in the Dark is a chilling chronicle of madness and failure, success and disappointment, and the many ways love dies in a world people find increasingly unlivable.

A classic queer text of trauma, written by one of the most talented novelists of her generation.

Published by Doubleday in 1994, Heather Lewis's chilling debut novel took place on the northeastern equestrian show-riding circuit, to which Lewis herself belonged in her teens. Expelled from boarding school, its fifteen-year-old narrator moves numbly through a world of motel rooms, heroin, dyke love, and doped horses. Kirkus Reviews found it “brutal, sensual, honest, seductive … a powerful debut,” while the New York Times found the book “grating and troublesome … it's difficult to imagine a more passive specimen.”

Almost immediately, Lewis began writing Notice, a novel that moves even further into dark territory. The teenaged narrator Nina begins turning tricks in the parking lot of the train station near the Westchester County home of her absent parents. She soon falls into a sadomasochistic relationship with a couple. Arrested, she's saved by a counselor and admitted to a psychiatric facility. But these soft forms of control turn out to be even worse. Writing in the register of an emotional fugue state, Notice's helpless but all-knowing narrator is as smooth and sharp as a knife.

Rejected by every publisher who read it during Lewis's life, Notice was eventually published by Serpent's Tail in 2004, two years after her death. The book, long out of print, emerged as a classic queer text of trauma, written by one of the most talented novelists of her generation.

McKenzie Wark invents a new genre for another gender: not a memoir but an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.

Another genre for another gender.

What if you were trans and didn't know it? What if there were some hole in your life and you didn't even know it was there? What if you went through life not knowing why you only felt at home in your body at peak moments of drugs and sex? What if you expended your days avoiding an absence, a hole in being? Reverse Cowgirl is not exactly a memoir. The author doesn't, in the end, have any answers as to who she really is or was, although maybe she figures out what she could become.

Traveling from Sydney in the 1980s to New York today, Reverse Cowgirl is a comedy of errors, chronicling the author's failed attempts at being gay and at being straight across the shifting political and media landscapes of the late twentieth century. Finding that the established narratives of being transgender don't seem to apply to her, Wark borrows from the genres of autofiction, fictocriticism, and new narrative to create a writing practice that can discover the form of a life outside existing accounts of trans experience: an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.

Conceptual writing is emerging as a vital 21st century literary movement and I’ll Drown My Book represents the contributions of women in this defining moment. Edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, I’ll Drown My Book takes its name from a poem by Bernadette Mayer, appropriating Shakespeare. The book includes work by 64 women from 10 countries, with contributors’ responses to the question—What is conceptual writing?—appearing alongside their work. I’ll Drown My Book offers feminist perspectives within this literary phenomenon.

CONTRIBUTORS:

Kathy Acker, Oana Avasilichioaei & Erin Moure, Dodie Bellamy, Lee Ann Brown, Angela Carr, Monica de la Torre, Danielle Dutton, Renee Gladman, Jen Hofer, Bernadette Mayer, Sharon Mesmer, Laura Mullen, Harryette Mullen, Deborah Richards, Juliana Spahr, Cecilia Vicuña, Wendy Walker, Jen Bervin, Inger Christiansen, Marcella Durand, Katie Degentesh, Nada Gordon, Jennifer Karmin, Mette Moestrup, Yedda Morrison, Anne Portugal, Joan Retallack, Cia Rinne, Giovanni Singleton, Anne Tardos, Hannah Weiner, Christine Wertheim, Norma Cole, Debra Di Blasi, Stacy Doris & Lisa Robertson, Sarah Dowling, Bhanu Kapil, Rachel Levitsky, Laura Moriarty, Redell Olsen, Chus Pato, Julie Patton, Kristin Prevallet, a.rawlings, Ryoko Seikiguchi, Susan M. Schultz, Rosmarie Waldrop, Renee Angle, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tina Darragh, Judith Goldman, Susan Howe, Maryrose Larkin, Tracie Morris, Sawako Nakayasu, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jena Osman, kathryn l. pringle, Frances Richard, Kim Rosenfeld, and Rachel Zolf.

Impossible Princess is the third collection of gay short fiction by PEN Award–winning San Francisco–based author Kevin Killian. A member of the “new narrative” circle including Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, Killian is a master short story writer, crafting campy and edgy tales that explore the humor and darkness of desire. A former director of Small Press Traffic and a co-editor of Mirage/Periodical, Killian co-wrote Jack Spicer’s biography, Poet Be Like God, and co-edited three Spicer books, including My Vocabulary Did This To Me: Collected Poems. His latest book, Action Kylie, is a collection of poems devoted to Kylie Minogue.

A selection of interviews and rare photos from the legendary St. Mark's Poetry Project for its 50th anniversary season.

The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church was founded in 1966 for the overlapping circles of poets in the Lower East Side of New York. These interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter form a kind of conversation over time between some of the late 20th century's most influential poets and artists, who have come together in this legendary venue over the past 50 years.

Includes interviews with Charles North, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, David Rattray, Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Koch, Harryette Mullen, Barbara Henning, David Henderson, Lisa Jarnot, Alice Notley, Ed Sanders, Samuel Delany, Harry Matthews, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Renee Gladman, Lorenzo Thomas, Fred Moten, Stan Brakhage, Alex Katz, Lewis Warsh, Ron Padgett, Maggie Nelson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eileen Myles, and more.

"I find it one of the liveliest points of communication in the American poetry world. There is an incredible excitement to come to the church and read one's poems to the many other poets who congregate there, drawn to the church by its own energy and thrust."—Donald Hall

From the introduction, by Anselm Berrigan: "For the poets closely involved with the Poetry Project since, and subsequent to, its inception, the interviews were an opportunity to speak directly to a community one could perceive as known, imaginary, expanding, unwieldy, intermittent, formative, desperately necessary, and sometimes peculiarly unsatisfying all at once. Community being the kind of term that often implies everything and nothing simultaneously, with the bottom falling out of the word depending on who happens to be wielding it. Poets can be particularly adept at using and exposing such terms."