The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker

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.

In a novel capturing an era that seems at once familiar and grotesque, a New York writer lands in Los Angeles in 1994.

Originally published in 1997, Resentment was the first in Gary Indiana's now-classic trilogy (followed in 1999 by Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story and in 2003 by Depraved Indifference) chronicling the more-or-less permanent state of “depraved indifference” that characterized American life at the millennium's end.

In Resentment, Seth, a New York–based writer arrives in Los Angeles (where he has history and friends) in mid-August, 1994, to observe what will become the marathon parricide trial of the wealthy, athletic, and troubled Martinez brothers, broadcast live every day on Court TV. Still reeling from the end of his obsessive courtship of a young SoHo artist/waiter, Seth moves between a room at the Chateau Marmont and a Mount Washington shack owned by his old cab-driving, ex-Marxist friend, Jack, while he writes a profile of Teddy Wade—one of the era's hottest young actors, who has “dared” to star as a gay character in a new Hollywood film. Studded throughout with scathing satirical portraits of media figures, other writers, and the Martinez trial teams, Resentment captures an era that seems, two decades later, at once grotesque, familiar, and a precursor to our own.

Introduction by Patrick McGrath
Afterword by Chris Kraus

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.

A novel about escape and connection, class, sex, and queer intimacy in the American Midwest. 

The oldest story: an insider pretends to be an outsider and receives praise for his empathy and imagination and intelligence. Maybe some asshole even says bravery. An outsider pretends to be an insider, is exposed as a fraud, a liar, and burned to the ground. 

In Ripcord, Nate Lippens continues his meditations on escape and connection, class, sex, and intimacy. Stuck in Milwaukee, the narrator cobbles together a living by bartending and catering weddings, enmeshed in a semiaffair with a younger, married man. Cruising apps while tallying his youthful romantic failures, he fantasizes about disappearance but finds both solace and frustration in his friendships with Charlie, an aging punk who was prominent in the 1990s Chicago queercore scene, and Greer, a painter who never broke through but continues making work.

Composed of stories, fragmentary essays, and even press releases Stagg has been commissioned to write, Artless captures the media landscape lived and generated in New York during the past half decade. Since the 2016 publication of her debut novel Surveys, Stagg has positioned herself as an in-demand expert on, and critic of, the psychic experience of self-mythology within the cruelly optimistic metaverse of infinite branding. Part voyeur and part participant, Stagg continues her exploration of the branded identity and its elusive, bottomless desire for authenticity.

Natasha Stagg is the author of a novel, Surveys, and a collection, Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019. Her essays have appeared in the books Excellences and Perfections, Link in Bio: Art After Social Media, You Had To Be There: Rape Jokes, Intersubjectivity Vol. II: Scripting the Human, and 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art: The Present in Drag, among others.

A revolutionary book tracing the collapse of the paradigms that have organized the world for centuries. 

In Dysphoria Mundi, Paul B. Preciado, best known for his 2013 cult classic Testo Junkie, has written a mutant text assembled from essays, philosophy, poetry, and autofiction that captures a moment of profound change and possibility. Rooted in the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and taking account of the societal convulsions that have ensued, Preciado tries to make sense of our times from within the swirl of a revolutionary present moment.

The central thesis of this monumental work is that dysphoria, to be understood properly, should not be seen as a mental illness but rather as the condition that defines our times. Dysphoria is an abyss that separates a patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist order hurtling toward its end from a new way of being that, until now, has been seen as unproductive and abnormal but is in fact the way out of our current predicament.

With echoes of visionaries such as William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, Preciado’s theoretical writing is propelled by lyric power while providing us with a critical toolbox full of new concepts that can guide our thinking and our transition, cognitive emancipation, denormalization, disidentification, “electronic heroin,” digital coups, necro-kitsch. Dysphoria Mundi is Preciado’s most accessible and significant work to date, in which he makes sense of a world in ruins around us and maps a joyous, radical way forward.

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

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.