Memoir

Contributions by John Waters, Mink Stole, Gary Indiana, et al.

Cookie Mueller was a firecracker, a cult figure, a wit, a wild child, a writer, a go go dancer, a mother, an unlikely queer icon, an alchemist, a lightning rod in dark times. A child of suburban 50‘s Maryland and post-beatnik 60’s freakdom, she made her name first as an actress in the films of John Waters, and then as an art critic and columnist, a writer of hilarious and sublime stories and short fiction and a maven of the Downtown art world. Edgewise tells the story of Cookie‘s life through an oral history composed from over 80 interviews with the people who knew her. After tracing back some of the steps of the author’s 7-year trip in search of Cookie, the voices take us from the late 60’s artist communes of Baltimore to 70’s Provincetown where romantics and queers crawled the dunes and discos, to the sleepless creative high of post-industrial Bohemian New York, through 80‘s West Berlin and Positano, and into the depths and contradictions of Cookie’s life and loves.

Since her death from AIDS in 1989, Cookie’s work and life have made her an underground icon. Her original texts, first published by Hanuman Books and Semiotext(e), have been reprinted by Serpent’s Tail, and she is remembered for her appearances in the No Wave films and theater of Amos Poe, Michel Auder, Gary Indiana and others.

Along with the text, Edgewise consists of original artwork, unpublished photographs and archival material, and photo contributions by Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, David Armstrong, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar and others.

Edgewise is a meditation on memory and story-telling.

A memoir by Kawasaki-based writer and musician Kazuki Tomokawa, Try Saying You're Alive! offers a semi-fictionalized account of the vibrant Tokyo underground that he has been at the center of since the 1970s.

Recounting sixty years in the life of this "screaming philosopher." Try Saying You're Alive! traces Tomokawa's beginnings in the Akita Prefecture as a "runaway toddler," his adolescent basketball career, and his wanderings as a day laborer, gambler, painter, actor, drinker, and avant-garde folk guitarist. Anecdotes of figures such as novelist Kenji Nakagami, poet Shuji Terayama, actor Tôru Yuri, directors Takashi Miike and Nagisa Ōshima, and musicians Ryudo Uzaki and Kan Mikami animate this impassioned memoir by a legendary musician. This is the first English translation of Tomokawa's writing.

Kazuki Tomokawa (born Tenji Nozoki in 1950 in the Akita Prefecture area of northern Japan) is a prolific Japanese musician, singer-songwriter, artist and poet, one of the pioneers of acid-folk, active on the Japanese music scene since the beginning of the 1970s, companion of musicians such as Kan Mikami, Keiji Haino or Motoharu Yoshizawa. He has recorded more than thirty albums.

Enlevés à Bougie is a visual archive compiling documents from the kidnapping of a French state employee during the War of Independence, in 1960, Bougie, Algeria.

Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of autotheory offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. It binds an account of Nelson's relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexuality, gender, and family. An insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

First published in France in 2013, My Mother Laughs is the final book written by the legendary and beloved Belgian artist and director Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) before her death. A moving and unforgettable memoir, the book delves deeply into one of the central themes and focuses of Akerman's often autobiographical films: her mother, who was the direct subject of her final film No Home Movie (2015).

With a particular focus on the difficulties Akerman faced in conjunction with the end of her mother's life, the book combines a matter-of-fact writing style with family photographs and stills from her own films in order to better convey the totality of her experience. Akerman writes: With pride because I finally believed in my ability to say something that I'd had trouble saying. I told myself, I am strong for once, I speak. I tell the truth.  

Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) was a Belgian film director, screenwriter, artist and professor. She is best known for her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which was dubbed a masterpiece by the New York Times. During her 42 years of active filmmaking, Akerman's influence on queer, feminist and avant-garde cinema remains unmatched, her films highlighting a near-physical passage of time. Akerman's films have been shown at the Venice Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, among many others.

Translated by Corina Copp.

Published June 2019. 

"The Pain Journal" is the last finished work by Los Angeles writer and artist Bob Flanagan and is the extraordinary chronicle of the final year of his life before his death from cystic fibrosis at the age of 43. Flanagan created performances with Sheree Rose that shocked and inspired audiences as he combined text, video, and live performance to create a highly personal exploration of childhood, sex, illness, and mortality.