Goddamn Failure gathers the early grotesque and absurd works of cult writer Ira Rat for the first time. Many of them are previously unpublished.
This book is not intended for children or people with good taste.
Rebecca Rowland is one of the sharpest writers that I know. This little book combines elements of life in the publishing industry, #MeToo, and a literal boogeyman. It’s long been my desire to do more “social horror.” And Shagging the Boss is the stick I use to measure other submissions in that vein. (Back Cover Text) “Lesson number one: don’t get attached to anyone. Being a cannibal is the only way to truly succeed in this business.” He placed one hand on the door handle, then thought a moment and smiled to himself. “The problem is, once you take a bite, it will never be enough.” After a fortuitous encounter at a local book convention, a liberal arts graduate accepts a position at a flashy publishing company under the tutelage of its charismatic owner only to learn that the press is led, and fed, by a literal boogeyman.
“Rowland tells an exceptionally tight and fast-paced tale about a unique legendary creature stalking the modern publishing industry” — Michael Arnzen, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Licker and 100 Jolts
“Rowland’s tale is a transgressive mindf*ck that will leave you irreparably unnerved” — L. Stephenson, author of The Goners
“Rowland has a narrative mastery that makes you feel as if a good friend is pulling you in close to tell you some special secret…You’ll be left shook” —Tim Murr, Stranger With Friction
Featuring poems and short stories by Coco Gordon Moore, Nate Lippens, Jimmy Cooper, Danielle Chelosky, Matthew Kinlin, and Thomas Moore, as well as an interview of Jack Skelley by Lydia Sviatoslavsky and photographs by David Catalano. Edited
In this small theoretical novella-cum-dictionary entry, Lauren Berlant engages love and desire in separate entries. In the first entry, Desire mainly describes the feeling one person has for something else: it is organized by psychoanalytic accounts of attachment, and tells briefly the history of their importance in critical theory and practice. The second entry, on Love, begins with an excursion into fantasy, moving away from the parent-child structure so central to psychoanalysis and looking instead at the centrality of context, environment, and history. The entry on Love describes some workings of romance across personal life and commodity culture, the place where subjects start to think about fantasy on behalf of their actual lives.
Whether viewed psychoanalytically, institutionally, or ideologically, love is deemed always an outcome of fantasy. Without fantasy, there would be no love. Desire/Love takes us on a tour of all of the things that sentence might mean.
Night Philosophy is collected around the figure of the child, the figure of the child not just as a little person under the tutelage of adults, but also the submerged one, who knows, who is without power, who doesn’t matter. The book proposes a minor politics that disperses all concentrations of power. Fanny Howe chronicles the weak and persistent, those who never assimilate at the cost of having another group to dominate. She explores the dynamics of the child as victim in a desensitized era, when transgression is the zeitgeist and the victim–perpetrator model controls citizens.
With an afterword by Chris Kraus.
New York poet Paul Vaughn has a trick for enjoying poetry readings: He simply imagines the reader died a long time ago. Paul is twenty-seven, married, and an admired poet himself. R. T. Wode’s mission is to give offense. He’s also a poet, freshly landed in the city, and, at age sixteen, unknown.
Paul worships T. They embark on a tempestuous affair, dropping acid and crashing parties and perambulating the grit and grime of New York City circa 1972. Paul is in love with T., but T. is in love with experience. Their relationship disintegrates.
A novel of compelling originality and transcendent beauty by legendary musician and poet Richard Hell, Godlike transposes the notorious romance of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud to the East Village in its squalid, glorious ’70s heyday. The book comprises a version of Paul’s 1997 hospital notebooks: diaries amidst poems and essays, along with, most pertinently, the poet’s third-person memoir-novelette of his youthful time with the now-famous T. Godlike is infused as well with evocations—and sometimes actual poems—of many New York poets of the era, from Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett to Edwin Denby and James Schuyler. It achieves a lyricism both profane and profound as it conjures the frenetic vitality as well as the existential malaise of an era. It’s a searching meditation on art, life, love, and the impossibility of everything.
Cult novelist Dennis Cooper launches the third title of Little House on the Bowery, the Akashic series he is editing and promoting.
Grab Bag is comprised of two interrelated novels, Dark Rides and Wish Book, from one of Canada’s most important young writers. Both books are set in the same small rural city, in different eras (1950s, 1930s), each characterized by McCormack’s spare and elliptical prose.
Part prose poem, part reflection on the relations between writing and place, Lagoon tells the story of the slow undoing of an idyll. In it the narrator walks for hours during long summer nights, gazing through the windows that line the streets. In between, she reflects on how she might write about the shifting space of the lagoon, where she spent summer holidays with her family years ago. In adolescence, the narrator watches quietly as her mother, father and sister go about building their holiday home. But she can sense something is awry, she just does not fully understand what.
Lagoon is the first novella by McCulloch.
Lagoon by Samantha McCulloch is the first title in Kunstverein Amsterdam's new imprint called First Drafts, which, inspired by artist and publisher Anne Turyn, celebrates experimental and commercially unviable work by publishing completed manuscripts that haven’t yet found a home in their first draft form. Importantly, each title is also the first attempt by the author to write in that particular form, or, to write at all.