Book of Mutter

A classic queer text of trauma, written by one of the most talented novelists of her generation.

Published by Doubleday in 1994, Heather Lewis's chilling debut novel took place on the northeastern equestrian show-riding circuit, to which Lewis herself belonged in her teens. Expelled from boarding school, its fifteen-year-old narrator moves numbly through a world of motel rooms, heroin, dyke love, and doped horses. Kirkus Reviews found it “brutal, sensual, honest, seductive … a powerful debut,” while the New York Times found the book “grating and troublesome … it's difficult to imagine a more passive specimen.”

Almost immediately, Lewis began writing Notice, a novel that moves even further into dark territory. The teenaged narrator Nina begins turning tricks in the parking lot of the train station near the Westchester County home of her absent parents. She soon falls into a sadomasochistic relationship with a couple. Arrested, she's saved by a counselor and admitted to a psychiatric facility. But these soft forms of control turn out to be even worse. Writing in the register of an emotional fugue state, Notice's helpless but all-knowing narrator is as smooth and sharp as a knife.

Rejected by every publisher who read it during Lewis's life, Notice was eventually published by Serpent's Tail in 2004, two years after her death. The book, long out of print, emerged as a classic queer text of trauma, written by one of the most talented novelists of her generation.

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

Poet, writer, and translator Cecilia Pavón emerged in the late 1990s as one of the most prolific and central figures of the young Argentine literary scene—the so-called “Generation of the 90s”: artists and writers whose aesthetics and politics were an earnest response to the disastrous impact of American-exported neoliberal policies and the resulting economic crisis of 2001. Their publications were fragile—xeroxed, painted on cardboard—but their cultural impact, indelible.

A cofounder of Buenos Aires’s independent art space and publishing press Belleza y Felicidad—where a whole generation of soon-to-be-famous Argentine artists showed their work for the first time—Pavón pioneered the use of “unpoetic” and intimate content—her verses often lifted from text messages or chat rooms, her tone often impish, yet brutally sincere.

In 2015, Pavón’s first volume of collected poems, ‘A Hotel with My Name’, was published in English. Contemporary writers in the United States, Australasia, and Europe discovered a deep affinity with her work. Pavón’s protagonists, Ariana Reines noted, “are absolute women, guileless dreamers, saints in sneakers, on sidewalks, in jail, in Zara, on buses, in nightclubs, in bed.”

Translated by Pavón’s own poetic protégé Jacob Steinberg, ‘Little Joy’ collects the best of Pavón’s short stories written between 1999-2020, originally published in three volumes in Spanish.

Shulamith Firestone was twenty-five years old when she published The Dialectic of Sex, her classic and groundbreaking manifesto of radical feminism, in 1970. Disillusioned and burned out by the fragmented infighting within the New York City radical feminist groups she’d helped to found, when her book hit the bestseller lists, Firestone decided against pursuing a career as a “professional feminist.” Instead, she returned to making visual art, the profession that she’d trained for. She wouldn’t publish anything again until Airless Spaces, in 1998.

Long before her first hospitalization for paranoid schizophrenia in 1987, Firestone had fallen off the grid and into precarity and poverty. For the next decade, she would move in and out of public psychiatric wards and institutions. Conceived as a series of vignettes about institutions and identity, Airless Spaces is a subtle and deeply literary work. Embedded as a participant-observer, Firestone moves beyond the spectacular and frightening surfaces of institutional life to record individual lives and acts of cruelty and kindness. The existence that she depicts is a microcosm of the world beyond.

After they raised her dose to 42 mg. of Trilafon, Lucy very nearly fainted. She felt a rush of bad sensation comparable to her mental telepathy when her grandmother died. ... But there was a good aspect to fainting too. As she was about to lose consciousness, she felt an overwhelming relief. The black velvety edges of the swoon. If only she could faint all the way, black out, and never wake up again ...

Introduction by Chris Kraus
Afterword by Susan Faludi

Faced with photos of a once-tumultuous New York art world, the narrator's mind in this scathing, darkly funny novel begins to erupt. Memories jostle for center stage, just as those that they are about always did. These brilliant but broken survivors of the '80s and '90s have now reached the brink of middle age and are facing the challenge of continuing to feel authentic. Luminous with imagery, cackling with bitter humor, and with a new foreword by the author, this roman a cle spares no one.

First published in 2003, Gary Indiana's turn-of-the-millennium novel traces the lives of a loosely connected group of New York artists and the dissolution of their scene.  

During the summer of 2001, the narrator of Do Everything in the Dark, a gallery curator, receives intermittent dispatches from his far-flung friends, many of whom resemble well-known figures in the art and intellectual worlds, who are spread out across the globe, from Istanbul to Provincetown to Santa Fe. Seeking various reprieves from a changed New York, the long-festering, glossed-over incompatibilities of these aging bohemians blossom into exotic and unbearable relief. Beneath the contemporary excesses Indiana chronicles, we can see the outlines of the earlier New York bohemia captured by Dawn Powell.  

Arguably Indiana's most intimate, internal, and compassionate work to date, Do Everything in the Dark is a chilling chronicle of madness and failure, success and disappointment, and the many ways love dies in a world people find increasingly unlivable.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Unbidden Tongues #5: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Between the Teeth at Manifold Books, Amsterdam, November 28, 2021 – January 22, 2022.

​Drawing on artist, poet and filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s extensive and largely unexhibited archive of ‘work on paper’, Unbidden Tongues #5: Between the Teeth is a publication-turned-exhibition and the fifth title in the series. From never-realised film scripts to concrete poetry and artists statements written intimately in the first person, the collection of material selected for this occasion presents the varying ways with which Cha drew on her personal and familial experience as an immigrant to conceptually grapple with language and its mediation and suppression, particularly, in this case, in its written form.

An English translation of Peter Handke’s 1986 novel Repetition, previously out of print for a quarter of a century.

“In Repetition, Handke allows the peculiar light which illuminates the space under a leafy canopy or a tent canvas to glisten between words, placed here with astounding caution and precision; in doing so, he succeeds in making the text into a sort of refuge amid the arid lands which, even in the culture industry, grow larger day by day.” —W. G. Sebald

“In his earliest work … Handke found a way of conveying a state of mind … where words seem to come between you and the world, where nothing coheres or appears natural, and from the vantage-point of which the ease with which other people talk and go about their business seems deeply suspicious. But just as Kafka felt there were moments when, miraculously, a written sentence – even one written by himself – seemed full light, seemed to fill its own space and establish its own rhythm, and when even the whole story seemed mysteriously to stand as solidly in the world as a tree or a rock, so it has been with Handke. He has, in his later work, appeared to make a conscious effort to escape from the debilitating awareness of his own lack of authority or authenticity, and tried to write as though somehow the story were already written, had, in a sense, always been there… Repetition is the triumphant climax of his career so far…

What saves the book from the sort of sentimentality we find in John Berger’s recent work is first of all Handke’s uncanny ability to convey what it is this urge for pattern has to overcome, and secondly, his extraordinary attention to detail, historical, geographical, botanical, and linguistic. (No review can possibly convey the richness of Filip’s meditation on his brother’s two books, or Handke’s magical way with images.)

His narrative … is one of the most dignified and moving evocations I have ever read of what it means to be alive, to walk upon this earth.” —Gabriel Josipovici

She Follows No Progression reflects on the plurality of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982)’s work and legacy, collecting essays, personal narratives, poems, conversations, letters, and the extratextual in a reader that attests to Cha’s genre-bending vision and political imagination. The writers, artists, scholars, organizers, and educators collected here, each unique in their voice and method, multiply approaches to language, colonial history, migration, and time in dialogue with Cha’s unequivocally interdisciplinary practice. Their contributions traverse subjects from Asian American studies to literary history, translation, film theory, and experimental poetics, while attending to the gaps between these fields and the intractable entanglements of race, class, and gender that underlie them. She Follows No Progression echoes Cha’s appeal for a liberatory horizon emergent from all that we are affixed to in the present.

She Follows No Progression is published on the occasion of the 2022 program, The Quick and the Dead: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Edition. The Quick and the Dead is a yearlong, multiphase project that highlights the life, work, and legacy of a deceased writer by bridging their work to that of contemporary practitioners. In its third year, the program focused on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Contributors:

Sam Cha, Marian Chudnovsky, Jesse Chun, Una Chung, Anton Haugen, Irene Hsu, Valentina Jager, Juwon Jun, Youbin Kang, Eunsong Kim, Youna Kwak, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Jennifer Gayoung Lee, Sujin Lee, Florence Li, Serubiri Moses, Jed Munson, Yves Tong Nguyen, Wirunwan Victoria Pitaktong, Brandon Shimoda, Caterina Stamou, Megan Sungyoon, Teline Trần, and Soyoung Yoon.