Native Agents

Sylvie wanted to believe that misery could simply be replaced with happiness. Time was a straight line, stretching out before you. If you could create a golden kind of time and lay it right beside the

Transcriptions of the scripts of Penny Arcade's (Susana Ventura's) performance art and experimental theater works, accompanied by essays and an interview with the artist.

A novel set in 1991, post-MTV, pre-AOL: Sylvie, longing for a life more like the TVshow thirtysomething, sets off with her husband, Columbia University professor Jerome, to Romania toadopt a child.

The third of Gary Indiana's famed crime trilogy tells a story inspired by the virtuoso con artistry of mother-and-son criminals Sante and Kenneth Kimes. She collected future marks like lottery ticke

In a novel set against a transforming Berlin, an artist confronts a diagnosis of breast cancer. Going to openings and parties, setting up a studio and breaking up with her longtime boyfriend, Noora

Essays and stories on fashion, art, and culture in the New York of the 2010s. We were supposed to meet Rose McGowan at Cafe d'Alsace after the party, but she cancelled at the last minute. I saw on T

The only collection of Rattray's prose: essays that offer a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition.In order to become one of the invisible, it is necessary to throw on

Short fragments and essays that explore how a seemingly irrelevant aesthetic detail may cause the eruption of sublimity within the mundane.That the nude painted by Manet (in a painting so conceptually

On the ongoing project of writing about grief; Zambreno's addendum to Book of Mutter.I came up with the idea of writing these notes, or talks, out of a primary desire to not read from Book of Mutter,

Selections from the work of radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin, famous for her antipornography stance and role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s.Radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin was a ca

A cult classic in France, the first translation of a novel that captures a subjective stroll through an underground, glamorous Paris finally there are the rolling stones who call for all these at the

Audio journals that document Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.In these moments I hate language. I hate

A novel that is a meditation on friendship, love, obsession, power, and abuse, by turns hyperrealist and phantasmagoric, recalling the work of Sade and Bataille. And he leaves. I'm not happy, I'm pret

A novel in essays that locates a "romance" within the mesh of electronic communication.So I didn't call you: instead I posted a new avatar of myself without my habitual dark glasses. I have learned: a

A novel that captures the glancing intersections of a loose group of artists and lawyers, restaurateurs, philosophers, wine-makers, and boxers.Composed between destinations, in cafes, museums, airplan

First published in France in 2016, Being Here Is So Much traces the short, obscure, and prolific life of the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876--1907). In a brief career, cut s

Tony Duvert's novel Atlantic Island (originally published in French in 1979) takes place in the soul-crushing suburbs of a remote island off the coast of France. It is told through the shifting perspe

First published in 1999, Gary Indiana's Three Month Fever is the second volume of his famed crime trilogy that is being republished by Semiotexte (following Resentment in

Was there some sort of accident? The Doll was now certain that the Japanese didn't consider him a human. He was concerned with Deary alone. Her flukes lifted to maintain her treading water, left her p

"I understand that you regard the film Schindler's List as a total lie, as Zionistpropaganda." Zundel clears his throat, preparing the posture of his body to pontificate, to delivera speech he has obv

In I Love Dick, published in 1997, Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and Video Green, boldly tore away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression. I

Los Angeles writer and artist Bob Flanagan created performances with Sheree Rose that shocked and inspired audiences. He combined text, video, and live performance to create a highly personal but uni

You can say I write stories with sex and violence and therefore my writing isn'tworth considering because it uses content much less lots of content. Well, I tell you this: 'Pricklyrace, who know nothi

An autobiographical novel by turns naive and cunning, funny and moving, this most recent work by Moroccan expatriate Abdellah Taia is a major addition to the new French literature emerging from the No

A privileged look into the life and artistic practice of the experimental filmmaker, music anthologist, and enigmatic polymath Harry Smith.Best known during his lifetime as an experimental filmmaker and Folkways Records music anthologist, Harry Smith (1923–1991) was a spiritual outsider and one of the most original, influential artists of the mid-century American avant-garde. An avid, inspired collector of old blues and hillbilly recordings during his youth, he became a fan of such bebop jazz as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and began making avant-garde film animations featuring patterns painted directly onto the negatives as visual accompaniments to jazz performances. Smith crossed paths with nearly everyone central to the cultural avant-garde; he lived for art and gnosis with little thought for practical consequences. In 1991, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in New York. Five years after Smith’s death, the poet Paola Igliori began conducting inti

A new edition of the only story collection compiled by legendary writer, actress, ex-biker, and columnist Cookie Mueller, featuring additional writings.First published in 1991, Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black was the only story collection that the legendary writer, actress, ex-biker, and columnist Cookie Mueller compiled in her lifetime. Featuring a new introduction by Olivia Laing and an afterword by the book’s first editor, Chris Kraus, this new edition collects all of Mueller’s fiction, together with her Details magazine columns (1982–1989) and other writings. The additional stories were discovered by Amy Scholder, who edited the anthology Ask Dr. Mueller for High Risk/Serpent’s Tail books in 1996. As Scholder writes in her introduction, the new stories were “written around the same time she wrote the stories in Walking Through Clear Water, but for some reason Cookie decided not to include them. They are darker than most of her other stories; they are the quoti

The conclusion of a radically philosophical and personal series of Fanny Howe novels animated by questions of race, spirituality, childhood, transience, resistance, and poverty.First published by Semiotexte in 2001, Indivisible concludes a radically philosophical and personal series of Fanny Howe novels animated by questions of race, spirituality, childhood, transience, wonder, resistance, and poverty. Depicting the tempestuous multiracial world of artists and activists who lived in working-class Boston during the 1960s, Indivisible begins when its narrator, Henny, locks her husband in a closet so that she might better discuss things with God. On the verge of a religious conversion, Henny attempts to make peace with the dead by telling their stories.

A memoir of gay life in 1970s Long Island by one of the leading proponents of the New Narrative movement.Fascination brings together an early memoir, Bedrooms Have Windows (1989) and a previously unpu

How the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt: a writer's account of her experience working in an Amazon fulfillment center.No longer able to live on the p

Tangier is a possessed city, haunted by spirits of different faiths. When we have literature in our blood, in our souls, it's impossible not to be visited by them. To sta

In the middle of the night between the 25th and 26th of November, Vincent fell from the third floor playing parachute with a bathrobe. He drank a liter of tequila, smoked

Writing is how I attempt to repair myself, stitching back former selves, sentences. When I am brave enough I am never brave enough I unravel the tapestry of my life, my c

Originally published in 1997, Resentment was the first in Gary Indiana's now-classic trilogy (followed in 1999 byThree Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story and in 2003 by Depraved Indifference) chron

I believe that destiny is the hesitation between whorehouse writing and poetry, Eviland Good. In my body almost deadened to stupidity by its growing length, I am carrying that destiny.-- from In the D

It was the lies he told that reminded me of that past of mine that I hadn'tencountered in a while. He was telling me the kinds of lies where the teller implies that thingsthat have only happened to hi

My friends are merely effigies I keep to remind me of the animal inside my mind. --from The SuicidersDuring the first decade of the secondmillennium, a group of seven friends -- Zach, Lukas, Adam, Mat