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Cover of Ce Qui Vit La Nuit

Le Gospel

Ce Qui Vit La Nuit

Grace Krilanovich

€20.00

“Je voyais ce qui était écrit sur les murs. Ce n’était plus les années 1990. Ce n’était même plus le Pacifique Nord-Ouest. Quelque chose était arrivé qui avait tout balayé et j’avais été abandonnée enfermée dans un sarcophage puant, rêvant de l’endroit où j’étais née, me sentant très triste parce que cet endroit aussi avait été ramassé et fourré dans la gueule du monde.”

Elle a 17 ans, sort à peine de l’adolescence et pourtant elle est déjà en rupture totale avec le monde qui l’entoure et la violente. Fuyant sa famille d’accueil, elle part à la recherche de Kim, une sœur adoptive adorée qui a pris la route un peu avant elle. En chemin, elle tombe sur une bande d’enfants perdus, junkies violents devenus vampires qui dérivent de concerts en hold-ups, de parkings de supermarchés en gares routières. Sur les routes crasseuses de l’Oregon, cette riot grrrl d’un genre un peu particulier commence à entendre une voix, celle d’une pionnière morte de froid des siècles auparavant, qui se mêlent à celles de toutes les laissées-pour-compte de la société américaine. 

Texte culte de la contre-culture aux USA, publié en 2010 et immédiatement salué comme un choc, le premier roman de Grace Krilanovich n’est pas un récit traditionnel. Héritière de William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Stephen King et David Lynch, elle explose les carcans de la narration et offre une œuvre à la lisière de la littérature gothique et du roman d’horreur, invitant à une plongée rare dans le milieu punk hardcore américain des années 1990.

Published in 2023 ┊ Paperback ┊ Language: French

recommendations

Cover of Blood and Guts in High School

Grove Press

Blood and Guts in High School

Kathy Acker

Fiction €17.00

A masterpiece of surrealist fiction, steeped in controversy upon its first publication in 1984, Blood and Guts in High School is the book that established Kathy Acker as the preeminent voice of post-punk feminism. With 2017 marking the 70th anniversary of her birth, as well as the 10th year since her death this transgressive work of philosophical, political, and sexual insight—with a new introduction by Chris Kraus—continues to become more relevant than ever before.

In the Mexican city of Merida, ten-year-old Janey lives with Johnny—her "boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father"—until he leaves her for another woman. Bereft, Janey travels to New York City, plunging into an underworld of gangs and prostitution. After escaping imprisonment, she flees to Tangiers where she meets Jean Genet, and they begin a torrid affair that will lead Janey to her demise. Fantastical, sensual, and fearlessly radical, this hallucinatory collage is both a comic and tragic portrait of erotic awakening.

Cover of Acker

Nightboat Books

Acker

Douglas A. Martin

A lyric essay written through Kathy Acker's evocative prose, public statements, and private archives.

A cover of Kathy Acker’s career and a study of the development of narrative in her books deftly tracing Acker’s interactions with a diverse palette of avant-gardisms, world letters, cultures, and theory. Martin follows Acker through New York’s downtown St. Mark’s Poetry Project scene, Black Mountain College, and the Beats, as Acker embarks on her own deconstructions of subjects autobiographical and historical, art procedurals, proto-conceptual writing, legacies, and spirits.

Cover of The Undying (paperback)

Picador

The Undying (paperback)

Anne Boyer

Poetry €20.00

Blending memoir with critique, an award-winning poet and essayist's devastating exploration of sickness and health, cancer and the cancer industry, in the modern world

A week after her 41st birthday, Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living payslip to payslip, the condition was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness.

In The Undying - at once her harrowing memoir of survival, and a 21st-century Illness as Metaphor - Boyer draws on sources from ancient Roman dream diarists to cancer vloggers to explore the experience of illness. She investigates the quackeries, casualties and ecological costs of cancer under capitalism, and dives into the long line of women writing about their own illnesses and deaths, among them Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker and Susan Sontag.

Genre-bending, devastating and profoundly humane, The Undying is an unmissably insightful meditation on cancer, the cancer industry and the sicknesses and glories of contemporary life.

Winner of The Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction 2020; Windham Campbell Prize for Nonfiction 2020

Cover of In Memoriam to Identity

Grove Press

In Memoriam to Identity

Kathy Acker

Fiction €16.00

In this characteristically sexy, daring, and hyperliterate novel, Kathy Acker interweaves the stories of three characters who share the same tragic flaw: a predilection for doomed, obsessive love. Rimbaud, the delinquent symbolist prodigy, is deserted by his lover Verlaine time and time again. Airplane takes a job dancing at Fun City, the seventh tier of the sex industry, in order to support her good-for-nothing boyfriend. And Capitol feels alive only when she's having sex with her brother, Quentin. In Memoriam to Identity is at once a revelatory addition to, and an irreverent critique of, the literature of decadence and self-destruction.

Cover of Impossible Princess

City Lights Books

Impossible Princess

Kevin Killian

Fiction €16.00

Impossible Princess is the third collection of gay short fiction by PEN Award–winning San Francisco–based author Kevin Killian. A member of the “new narrative” circle including Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, Killian is a master short story writer, crafting campy and edgy tales that explore the humor and darkness of desire. A former director of Small Press Traffic and a co-editor of Mirage/Periodical, Killian co-wrote Jack Spicer’s biography, Poet Be Like God, and co-edited three Spicer books, including My Vocabulary Did This To Me: Collected Poems. His latest book, Action Kylie, is a collection of poems devoted to Kylie Minogue.

Cover of Reverse Cowgirl

Semiotext(e)

Reverse Cowgirl

McKenzie Wark

Fiction €16.00

McKenzie Wark invents a new genre for another gender: not a memoir but an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.

Another genre for another gender.

What if you were trans and didn't know it? What if there were some hole in your life and you didn't even know it was there? What if you went through life not knowing why you only felt at home in your body at peak moments of drugs and sex? What if you expended your days avoiding an absence, a hole in being? Reverse Cowgirl is not exactly a memoir. The author doesn't, in the end, have any answers as to who she really is or was, although maybe she figures out what she could become.

Traveling from Sydney in the 1980s to New York today, Reverse Cowgirl is a comedy of errors, chronicling the author's failed attempts at being gay and at being straight across the shifting political and media landscapes of the late twentieth century. Finding that the established narratives of being transgender don't seem to apply to her, Wark borrows from the genres of autofiction, fictocriticism, and new narrative to create a writing practice that can discover the form of a life outside existing accounts of trans experience: an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.

Cover of Orlando

Mariner Books

Orlando

Virginia Woolf

Fiction €19.00

"Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another."

Virginia Woolf described "Orlando" as "an escapade, half-laughing, half-serious; with great splashes of exaggeration, " but many think Woolf's escapade is one of the most wickedly imaginative and sharply observed considerations of androgyny that this century will see.

Orlando is, in fact, a character liberated from the restraints of time and sex. Born in the Elizabethan Age to wealth and position, he is a young male aristocrat at the beginning of the story - and a modern woman four centuries later. The hero-heroine sees monarchs come and go, hobnobs with great literary figures, and slips in and out of each new fashion. Woolf presents a brilliant pageant of history, society, and literature as well as subtle appreciation of the interplay between endings and beginnings, past and present, male and female.

Virginia Woolf(1882-1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando.

Cover of You Only Bend Once with a Spoonful of Mercury

Far West Press

You Only Bend Once with a Spoonful of Mercury

Jennifer Robin

Fiction €13.00

Do you feel it? I'm holding your hand. Come with me. Look! There's a mirror, many mirrors! They are watching us, but we don't have to care. This night belongs to us. This infinity. Come! ... World! Just watch us...as we prowl the arcades of fallen memory...

Cover of Zipper Mouth

Cipher Press

Zipper Mouth

Laurie Weeks

LGBTQI+ €16.00

Dreamy, bratty and brash, Zipper Mouth is a potent gut-punch of a novel by an icon of 90's queer lit. 

In this extraordinary novel, Laurie Weeks captures the exuberance and mortification of a lesbian junkie as she navigates the chaos and horror of everyday life. Through longing monologues to Vivian Leigh, ranting letters to Sylvia Plath and to-do lists that never get done, Zipper Mouth gives us an unforgettable protagonist caught in a spiral of addiction, unrequited love, and mental health crises, and the effortlessly hilarious and strange inner workings of her mind. 

A messy and raw depiction of striving to live in a world that doesn’t cater to your brain chemistry, Zipper Mouth is an outstanding work of queer fiction. Come for the exalted nightclub epiphanies, stay for the devastating morning-after hangovers.

Cover of Holy Smoke

Divided Publishing

Holy Smoke

Fanny Howe

Fiction €15.00

Why they said, “Your real name is Anon,” I’ll never know ... But now that I have a name, I know I must write ... I’m scared, but feel it is time to be really bad. 

Republished for the first time since its 1979 release, in a new revised edition, Holy Smoke is an account of the frenzy and paranoia of United States politics refracted through one individual’s psyche. With her theme of a child disappeared – and all that that phrase carries with it – Howe captures the chaos of reality in her salient mix of poetry and prose. Readers will find it hard to believe that this book, which gives fresh sense to the demand for universal human rights, was written in the last century. 

At once evocative and subtly incisive, Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. She has written some of the remarkable books of her time. —Adam Phillips 

A wonder of acid wit and Americana, Holy Smoke turns grief into a game and chaos into canticles. Bricolage at its best: incisive, inventive and intimate. It’s the exact work I needed in my life. —Navid Sinaki