Teenage Grave 2

Rebecca Rowland is one of the sharpest writers that I know. This little book combines elements of life in the publishing industry, #MeToo, and a literal boogeyman. It’s long been my desire to do more “social horror.” And Shagging the Boss is the stick I use to measure other submissions in that vein. (Back Cover Text) “Lesson number one: don’t get attached to anyone. Being a cannibal is the only way to truly succeed in this business.” He placed one hand on the door handle, then thought a moment and smiled to himself. “The problem is, once you take a bite, it will never be enough.” After a fortuitous encounter at a local book convention, a liberal arts graduate accepts a position at a flashy publishing company under the tutelage of its charismatic owner only to learn that the press is led, and fed, by a literal boogeyman.

“Rowland tells an exceptionally tight and fast-paced tale about a unique legendary creature stalking the modern publishing industry” — Michael Arnzen, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Licker and 100 Jolts

“Rowland’s tale is a transgressive mindf*ck that will leave you irreparably unnerved” — L. Stephenson, author of The Goners

“Rowland has a narrative mastery that makes you feel as if a good friend is pulling you in close to tell you some special secret…You’ll be left shook” —Tim Murr, Stranger With Friction

Goddamn Failure gathers the early grotesque and absurd works of cult writer Ira Rat for the first time. Many of them are previously unpublished.

This book is not intended for children or people with good taste.

Featuring poems and short stories by Coco Gordon Moore, Nate Lippens, Jimmy Cooper, Danielle Chelosky, Matthew Kinlin, and Thomas Moore, as well as an interview of Jack Skelley by Lydia Sviatoslavsky and photographs by David Catalano. Edited

A collection of interrelated short stories by Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael. First published in private limited edition, it was intended as a cheap holiday read to titillate and entertain summer visitors to the Mediterranean island of Stromboli, and as a piece of site-specific work; the location of the action and the place in which it is read being the same.

The visual art subsequently generated by Unlawful Assembly includes work by Josephine Pryde, with whom the artists collaborated to produce this second edition’s cover image.

In the mid-1960s, legendary artist and writer Joe Brainard (I Remember) teamed with poets such as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, Kenneth Koch, Ted Berrigan, and many more for these pioneering collaborative comic strips—unavailable for decades and collected here for the first time.

“PEOPLE OF THE WORLD… RELAX!”

In the creative hotbed of 1960s New York, Joe Brainard was a whirlwind. He was a maker of paintings, assemblages, collages, book covers, poetry-reading flyers, and more. But some of his most exciting work was done with his friends. In 1964, the twenty-two-year-old Brainard turned his talents to rewiring the lowly comic book form into something new and surprising. He invited his friends Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Peter Schjeldahl, Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, and others—all of them New York School poets—to collaborate with him on comics that they would write and he would draw.

The results were unlike any comics seen before. Previously available only on the rare-book market (at very high prices) but available here under one cover for the first time, the two issues of C Comics still feel as fresh as when the first page rolled off the mimeograph machine more than sixty years ago. Brainard’s energetic line and joyful humor charge across every page, illustrating O’Hara’s recasting of a cowboy as a mash-note-writing lover, Padgett’s experiments with traditional cartoon sound effects (ROAR! GRRR! SKREE!), cameos by Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, and heaps of Dadaesque delights.

This edition includes a foreword from Padgett and an essay by comics historian Bill Kartalopolous, who details the creation (and creators) of C Comics. A masterpiece of collaboration and spontaneity, C Comics is a testament to the vastness of Brainard’s creativity and his ability to push any artistic form in a new and powerful direction.

Foreword by Ron Padgett
Contributions by Bill Kartalopoulos

New Orleans, 1853. A young Zapotec exile from Mexico named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city.

Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the stark trade in human beings.

With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.

The collected life-work of an interdisciplinary writer, performer, and central figure in the Black Gay cultural arts and AIDS movements.

In this timely collection of poetry, plays, fiction, and performance texts, Assotto Saint draws upon music and incantation, his Haitian heritage, and a politics of liberation to weaves together a tapestry of literature that celebrates life in the face of death. Influential to contemporary writers such as Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, and Melvin Dixon, Sacred Spells is Saint’s crucial legacy–five hundred incandescent pages of painful, lyric writing that exemplifies the visceral, spiritual dimensions of an artistic practice that’s integral to Black and LGBTQ activist movements worldwide, both historic and present.

In her darkly funny 1985 take on Dante’s Divine Comedy, acclaimed French writer and activist Monique Wittig restages the journey through the circles of hell, limbo, paradise from a lesbian feminist perspective. 

Never-before published in the US, Across the Acheron follows the adventures of “Wittig” and her anti-Virgilian guide through laundromats, billiard parlors, dyke bars, and picnic grounds of a 1980s San Francisco populated by hunters and their prey, lost souls, and fantastical beasts, including a robotic eagle and angelic bikers. Wittig reimagines Dante’s epic poem through a feminist and queer lens, subverting his cosmological order and upending gender identities and literary traditions. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig’s final novel back into print for the first time since the early-1990s, revised according to the author's notes, and with a new introduction by Sophie Lewis.

“Across the Acheron is a work of lesbian struggle and triumph across two kinds of hell. The hell of the classic western literary canon—and the hell of San Francisco. Monique Wittig brings all of her writerly powers and political experience to bear here, as witness to the horrors of heterosexual patriarchy and also to the possibility of another world for another life. Her work is a rare combination of deeply felt materialism and radical linguistic freedom. If we're to have another world, we'll need to create another language. She knew that, and she lived it.” — McKenzie Wark

“Even in fiction Monique Wittig’s writing is critical, prescient, brilliant, satirical, searing, and way ahead of its time. I’m so glad this work is back in circulation to revisit and revel in.” — Pamela Sneed

“In this unendurable yet compelling journey through the circles of patriarchal hell, Wittig encounters hordes of tortured women who do not struggle against their oppressors. Their brainwashing is as difficult to witness as their bloodied flesh. Only through communal activism does the seeker’s soul becomes tough enough to enter Paradise, where bare-breasted angels dismount motorcycles and offer baskets of 'cherries, strawberries, raspberries, apricots, peaches, plums, tomatoes, avocados, green melons, cantaloupes, watermelons, lemons, pawpaws, pineapples and coconuts.’ The bounties of Across the Acheron are lush and many.” — Dodie Bellamy

“A Guernica of the human (feminist) condition, a blacker, bleaker, more vengeful Alice’s tea party, this is a novel as graphic as a painting, whose brilliance its translators have creditably preserved.” — Publishers Weekly

Introduction by Sophie Lewis
Translated by David Le Vay with Margaret Crosland