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Cover of Say Bye to Reason and Hi to Everything

Capricious

Say Bye to Reason and Hi to Everything

Dodie Bellamy, Lynne Tillman, Amy De'Ath, Cecilia Corrigan, Jackie Wang

€35.00

Say Bye to Reason and Hi to Everything is a collection of chapbooks by Dodie Bellamy, Cecilia Corrigan (with illustrations by Jocelyn Spaar), Amy De’Ath, Lynne Tillman, and Jackie Wang. Each chapbook is uniquely designed with an accompanying cover by artist Nayland Blake and features new or previously uncollected works by each writer. The collection is edited by Andrew Durbin.

This box set features the following titles:

Dodie Bellamy, More Important than the Object. Cecilia Corrigan, Cream. Amy De’Ath, ON MY LOVE FOR gender abolition. Lynne Tillman, In These Intemperate Times: 9 Frieze Columns. Jackie Wang, Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb

Dodie Bellamy is an American novelist, nonfiction author, journalist and editor who writes genre-bending works that focus on sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation, challenging the distinctions between fiction, essay, and poetry. Her methods include radical feminist revisions of canonical works. Bellamy is one of the originators in the New Narrative literary movement of the early and mid 1980s, which attempts to use the tools of experimental fiction and critical theory and apply them to narrative storytelling. Bellamy also directed the San Francisco writing lab, Small Press Traffic.  She teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University and California College of the Arts.

Cecilia Corrigan is a writer and performer. She recently starred in the short film Crush, which she co-wrote with director Katherine Bernard, now streaming at Dazed Magazine. She was recently selected as one of Issue Project Room’s Artists in Residence for 2016-17. Her first full-length book, Titanic, won the Plonsker Prize and the chapbook True Beige, (Trafficker Press). She is completing her PhD in Comparative Literature at NYU, writing about social media, makeup, and comedy. Her fiction and essays have been published many places including n+1, Joyland, and Nerve.

Amy De’Ath’s poetry chapbooks include Lower Parallel (Barque 2014), Caribou (Bad Press 2011), and Erec & Enide (Salt 2010). With Fred Wah, she is the editor of a poetics anthology, Toward. Some. Air. (Banff Centre Press 2015). Her criticism has appeared in Women: A Cultural Review, Anguish Language (Archive Books 2015), and Cambridge Literary Review, and is forthcoming in After Objectvism: Reconfiguring 21st-Century Poetry and Poetics (U of Iowa P 2017). She is a PhD Candidate at Simon Fraser University and lives in Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territories.

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer and critic. Her most recent collection of essaysWhat Would Lynne Tillman Do? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism (2014). Her most recent novel is American Genius, A Comedy (2006), on The Millions’ list of Best Novels So Far in the Millennium. Tillman writes frequently for artists books and catalogues, and has a bimonthly column in Frieze art magazine. In fall 2016, Semiotext(e) will publish hernew collection of fiction, The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories. She is currently finishing a novel, Men and Apparitions, due to be pubbed in 2017.

Jackie Wang is a writer, poet, musician, and author of Against Innocence (Semiotext(e)), as well as the zines On Being Hard Femme, Memoirs of a Queer Hapa, The Adventures of Loneberry, and The Phallic Titty Manifesto. In her critical essays she writes about queer sexuality, race, gender, the politics of writing, mixed-race identity, prisons and police, the politics of safety and innocence, and revolutionary struggles. Her blog, Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns, reads like a journal that explores writing as process, the personal as political.

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Cover of Se Te Subió El Santo (Are You In A Trance?)

Capricious

Se Te Subió El Santo (Are You In A Trance?)

Tiona Nekkia McClodden

Se Te Subió El Santo is a collection of self – portraits taken by the artist directly after she awoke every morning while away on a week-long residency in Iowa City, IA at the Center for Afrofuturist Studies in Spring 2016. This daily practice confronts notions of the artist’s interests in rendering a full self implicit of gender, race, sexuality, and spirituality while challenging and collapsing the intersections of each identity as well.

The title of the work is taken from Ana Mendieta, the Iowa Years: A critical study, 1969 through 1977 where Julia Ann Herzberg writes in the dissertation:

Ana and Raquelin Mendieta’s vocabulary contained many Afro-Cuban idiomatic expressions. For example, they would often respond to a friend who was acting in an unruly or hyperactive manner by asking” “Se te subió el santo? (“Are you in a trance?”) In the Afro-Cuban context, the expression “subirse el santo” is used in religious ceremony when the orisha/saint takes possession of the believer.

The monograph also includes an essay by author Akwaeke Emezi.

First edition, 94 page, black and white, leather bound hardcover with white foil embossment 

TIONA NEKKIA MCCLODDEN is an interdisciplinary research-based conceptual artist, filmmaker and curator whose work explores, and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and social commentary. McClodden’s interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Themes explored in McClodden’s films and works have been re-memory and more recently narrative biomythography.

Cover of Untitled

Capricious

Untitled

Sasha Phyars-Burgess

Photography €40.00

Sasha Phyars-Burgess’ first monograph, Untitled. Spanning three bodies of work, this 200-plus page monograph includes poems by Ser Alida and Aurora Masum-Javed, a conversation between Sasha Phyars-Burgess, Juliana Huxtable and Carolyn Lazard, and essay by Bill Gaskins. Designed by Studio Lin.

As recipient of the second annual Capricious Photo Award, Sasha is a vital, emerging voice in contemporary photography, engaging the charged line between documentary and fine art. Her work ranges from affecting studies on diaspora, family and place to revolving social phenomenons in which energy, beauty and power meet.

The second annual jury panel was helmed by Capricious Founder and Publisher Sophie Mörner and Associate Publisher Anika Sabin alongside Lauren Cornell, Katherine Hubbard, JOFF, Matt Keegan, Guadalupe Rosales, Ka-Man Tse, and Lyndsy Welgos.

Cover of == #2 (edition)

Capricious

== #2 (edition)

Matt Keegan

First launched in 2012, and published by mfc michèle didier (micheledidier.com), == is a small-run arts publication, edited by Matt Keegan. ==#2, 2015, is designed by Su Barber and published in an edition of 500 by Capricious Publishing. Barber and Keegan worked together on North Drive Press (northdrivepress.com) between 2005-2010, and this publication shares a variety of traits with NDP.

==#2 is a non-thematic arts publication contained in a box with a 96-page bound volume featuring artist-to-artist interviews, texts, and transcriptions. Six loose multiples are also included.

Contributors include: Sam Anderson, Uri Aran, Fia Backström, Darren Bader, Judith Barry, Stefania Bortolami, Daniel Bozhkov, Milano Chow, Anna Craycroft, Lucky DeBellevue, Cristina Delgado, Haytham El-Wardany, Jake Ewert, Vincent Fecteau, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Harrell Fletcher, Rachel Foullon, Aurélien Froment, Kenny Greenberg, Calla Henkel, Leslie Hewitt, Jaya Howey, Adelita Husni-Bey, Iman Issa, Ruba Katrib, Jill Magid, Jo Nigoghossian, Aaron Peck, Max Pitegoff, David Placek, Olivia Plender, Lisa Robertson, Andrew Russeth, Amy Sillman, Diane Simpson, Greg Parma Smith, Jessica Stockholder, Martine Syms, and Anicka Yi.

Cover of The TV Sutras

Ugly Duckling Presse

The TV Sutras

Dodie Bellamy

Fiction €24.00

Inspired by visionaries like Moses, William Blake, and Joseph Smith, Bellamy spent five months in 2009 receiving transmissions from her television set and writing brief commentaries on each. The sutras and commentaries in the present volume are the beginning of an intensive investigation into the nature of religious experience. What are cults? Are they limited to wacko marginal communities, or do we enter one every time we go to work or step into a polling place? What is charisma and why are we addicted to it? Bellamy speaks candidly and intimately to her own experience as a woman, a writer, and former cult member. This commingling of memoir, fiction, collage and essay makes room for horny gurus, visitors from outer space, the tenderness of group life, and maybe the beginnings of a hard-won individualism.

Cover of Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood

Semiotext(e)

Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood

Jackie Wang

Fiction €18.00

The early writings of renowned poet and critical theorist Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog. 

Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang's trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping out of an MFA program, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and writing her trenchant book Carceral Capitalism. Alien Daughters charts the dream-seeking misadventures of an "odd girl" from Florida who emerged from punk houses and early Tumblr to become the powerful writer she is today. Anarchic and beautifully personal, Alien Daughters is a strange intellectual autobiography that demonstrates Wang's singular self-education: an early life lived where every day and every written word began like the Tarot's Fool, with a leap of faith.

Cover of Five Stars: Selected Amazon Reviews, Vol 4

Tripwire Journal

Five Stars: Selected Amazon Reviews, Vol 4

Kevin Killian

Non-fiction €12.00

Five Stars: Selected Amazon Reviews, Volume 4 by Kevin Killian, selected by Ted Rees & David Buuck, with introductory words from Kevin edited by Dodie Bellamy. Curated from the over 2500 reviews that William Hall has lovingly archived, this latest edition showcases Kevin’s incomparable mix of wit and sincerity, pleasure and playfulness, his deep love of popular culture, and his unique critical voice.

Cover of Selected Amazon Reviews

Semiotext(e)

Selected Amazon Reviews

Kevin Killian

Non-fiction €34.00

A book-length selection from Kevin Killian's legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com.

An enchanting roll of duct tape. Love Actually on Blu-ray Disc. The Toaster Oven Cookbook, The Biography of Stevie Nicks, and an anthology of poets who died of AIDS. In this only book-length selection from his legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com, sagacious shopper Kevin Killian holds forth on these household essentials and many, many, many others.

The beloved author of more than a dozen volumes of innovative poetry, fiction, drama, and scholarship, Killian was for decades a charismatic participant in San Francisco's New Narrative writing circle. From 2003–2019, he was also one of Amazon's most prolific reviewers, rising to rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site. Alternately hilarious and heartfelt, Killian's commentaries consider an incredible variety of items, each review a literary escapade hidden in plain sight amongst the retailer's endless pages of user-generated content. Selected Amazon Reviews at last gathers an appropriately wide swath of this material between two covers, revealing the project to be a unified whole and always more than a lark.

Some for “verified purchases,” others for products enjoyed in theory, Killian's reviews draw on the influential strategies of New Narrative, his unrivaled fandom for both elevated and popular culture, and the fine art of fabulation. Many of them are ingeniously funny—flash-fictional riffs on the commodity as talismanic object, written by a cast of personas worthy of Pessoa. And many others are serious, even scholarly—earnest tributes to contemporaries, and to small-press books that may not have received attention elsewhere, offered with exemplary attention. All of Killian's reviews subvert the Amazon platform, queering it to his own play with language, identity, genre, critique.

Killian's prose is a consistent pleasure throughout Selected Amazon Reviews, brimming with wit, lyricism, and true affection. As the Hall of Famer himself reflected on this form-of-his-own-invention shortly before his untimely passing in 2019: “They're reviews of a sort, but they also seem like novels. They're poems. They're essays about life. I get a lot of my kinks out there, on Amazon.”

Introduction by Wayne Koestenbaum

Afterword by Dodie Bellamy

Cover of Remembering a Dance – Part of Some Sextets 1965/2019

Lenz Press

Remembering a Dance – Part of Some Sextets 1965/2019

Yvonne Rainer

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.