Jill Johnston in Motion

In Fly-Fishing, Christopher Schaberg ponders his lifetime pursuit of the widely mythologized art of fly-fishing. From the Michigan lakeshore where he learned to fish to casting flies in a New Orleans bayou, Schaberg sketches landscapes and fish habitats and shows how fly-fishing allows him to think about coexisting with other species. It offers Schaberg a much-needed source of humility, social isolation, connection with nature, and a reminder of environmental degradation. Rather than centering fishing on trophies, conquest, and travel, he advocates for a “small-fishing” that values catching the diminutive fish near one’s home. Introspective and personal, Fly-Fishing demonstrates how Schaberg’s obsession indelibly shapes how he understands and lives in the wider world.

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability.

At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.

While the stock image of the anarchist as a masked bomber or brick thrower prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure should be a printer at a printing press. In Letterpress Revolution, Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of printers, whose materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Ferguson shows how printers—whether working at presses in homes, offices, or community centers—arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers, and blank space within the architecture of the page. Printers' extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and the radical ideas they published created dynamic and entangled networks that brought the decentralized anarchist movements together. Printers and presses did more than report on the movement; they were constitutive of it, and their vitality in anarchist communities helps explain anarchism’s remarkable persistence in the face of continuous harassment, arrest, assault, deportation, and exile. By inquiring into the political, material, and aesthetic practices of anarchist print culture, Ferguson points to possible methods for cultivating contemporary political resistance.

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives.

Jack Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance.

Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. Halberstam pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

Thirty texts by cultural critic, auto/biographer, and lesbian icon Jill Johnston.

Jill Johnston was renowned as a writer on dance, especially on the developments around Judson Dance and the 1960s downtown New York City scene, and later as the author of the radical-feminist classic Lesbian Nation (1973). This book collects thirty texts by Jill Johnston that were initially published in her weekly column for The Village Voice between 1960 and 1974. The column provided a format in which Johnston could dissolve distinctions between the personal, the critical, and the political. Her writing took turns and loops, reflecting its times and contexts, and set a stage for the emergence of Johnston as a public figure and self-proclaimed radical lesbian that defied any prescribed position.

Johnston's original texts are accompanied by three new contributions by Ingrid Nyeboe, Bruce Hainley, and Jennifer Krasinski, as well as an appendix with archival material related to a panel Johnston organized in 1969, titled “The Disintegration of a Critic: An Analysis of Jill Johnston.”

Edited by Fiona McGovern, Megan Francis Sullivan, Axel Wieder.
Texts by Jill Johnston; contributions by Bruce Hainley, Jennifer Krasinski, Ingrid Nyeboe.

Contributions by: Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, Georgia Sagri, John Kelsey, Matthew Pang, Cathy Wilkes, Sarah Rapson, Nick Irvin, Gene Beery, Anne Dressen, Anne Pontégnie, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Sara Deraedt, Anne Rorimer, Kari Rittenbach, Olga Balema, Maria Nordman, Louise Lawler, Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Adrian Morris, Matt Browning, John Miller, Envers Hadzijaj, Enzo Shalom, Bedros Yeretzian, Morag Keil, Helmut Draxler, Gianna Surangkanjanajai, Steve Cannon, Rae Armentrout, Zoe Hitzig, Pierre Guyotat, Lola Sinreich, Fanny Howe, Hélène Fauquet, Marie Angeletti, Richard Hawkins, Andy Robert, Alexander García Düttmann, Daniel Horn, El Hadji Sy, Henrik Olesen, Aurélien Potier, Richard John Jones, Stéphane Barbier Bouvet, Nora Schultz, Peter Fend, Megan Francis Sullivan, Jill Johnston, Sturtevant, Tonio Kröner, Bernard Bazile, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Jérome Pantalacci, Gérard Traquandi, Gladys Clover, Maria Wutz, Jimmie Durham, Richard Sides, Camilla Wills, Michael Callies, Steven Warwick, Matthew Langan-Peck, Dan Graham, Nina Könnemann, Hans Christian Dany, Valérie Knoll, Win McCarthy, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Anna Rubin, Heji Shin, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Inka Meißner, Simone Forti, Morgan O’Hara, Angharad Williams, Ye Xe, Lily Van Der Stokker, Yuki Kimura, Peter Wächtler, Eva Steinmetz, Michael Van den Abeele, Marc Kokopeli, Bradley Kronz, Robert Grosvenor, Samuel Jeffery, Charlotte Houette, Adam Martin, Wade Guyton, Chloe Truong-Jones.

Edited by Marie Angeletti with Gianmaria Andreetta and Camilla Wills.

Printed in December 2022.
416 pages, Edition of 840.
© 2022 Claude Balls Int. / the author(s).

Jill Johnston began the 1960s as an influential dance columnist for the Village Voice and by the start of the next decade she was known as a keen observer of postmodern art and lesbian feminist life who challenged how dance, art, and women can and should be seen. The Essential Jill Johnston Reader collects dozens of pieces of her writing from across her career. These writings—many of which appeared in the Village Voice and the New York Times—survey the breadth of her work, braiding together her thinking, writing, and activism.

From personal essays, travel writing, and artist profiles to dance and visual art reviews as well as her infamous series of columns for the Voice in which she came out as a lesbian, these pieces demonstrate the evolution of her philosophies and writing style. Illustrating how Johnston drew on lessons from dance to reconsider what it means to be a woman, this collection brings a fascinating and brilliant voice of American arts criticism, radical feminism, and gay liberation back to contemporary audiences.

A re-examination of Yvonne Rainer's Parts of Some Sextets, a radical performance and pivotal piece in the American choreographer's career, which led her to theorize her conception of dance in the 1960s, before being revived in 2019.

Parts of Some Sextets, Yvonne Rainer's 1965 performance for ten people and twelve mattresses, represents a turning point in the American choreographer's oeuvre. "My mattress monster," as Rainer calls it, was built in her formative years with the experimental downtown New York group Judson Dance Theater. In this work, she asserted her exploration of "ordinary" actions as well as her disregard for narrative constructions to create an intricate choreography that unfolded with a new scene every thirty seconds.

More than half a century after its premiere, Rainer, in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Emily Coates, directed the 2019 revival of the piece for the Performa 19 Biennial in New York, grappling with the changing contexts of a new presentation of her radical performance. Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 delves into every aspect of this dance, from its original manifestation to its reconstitution.

This book, designed by visual artist Nick Mauss, includes previously unpublished archival images and documents from the 1965 stagings at the Judson Memorial Church in New York and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Texts by Emily Coates, RoseLee Goldberg, Jill Johnston, Kathy Noble, Yvonne Rainer, David Thomson, Lynne Tillman, and Soyoung Yoon, as well as a new interview with Rainer, pose questions about the trajectories of artworks, performers, and audiences, all while tracing the life—and afterlife—of a dance.

Edited by Emily Coates. 
Texts and contributions by Emily Coates, RoseLee Goldberg, Jill Johnston, Kathy Noble, Yvonne Rainer, David Thomson, Lynne Tillman and Soyoung Yoon; conversation between Yvonne Rainer, Emily Coates and Nick Mauss.