by Derek McCormack

Judy Blame’s Obituary: Writings on Fashion and Death
Derek McCormack
Pilot Press - 16.00€ -  out of stock

Derek McCormack is the author of fashion-inflected novels that cast luminaries such as Elsa Schiaparelli and Balenciaga as characters. This collection brings together for the first time McCormack's fashion journalism. He writes about and interviews fashion figures that fascinate him, tracing the ways they inspire and inhabit his novels. The result is a sort of memoir in essays: as he writes, "My tribute to [Judy] Blame is about him and about me—there are lots of my own tales woven in with the topics I touch on. The writing here is a sort of autobiography, a life seen through a scrim, or a life as a scrim—my moire mémoire."

Judy Blame's Obituary contains twenty years' worth of reminiscences, reviews of fashion shows and books, interviews with writers about fashion, and interviews with fashion designers about writing. He talks to Nicolas Ghesquière about perfume, and to Edmund White about which perfume he wore as a young fag in New York City. He inspects the clothes that Kathy Acker left behind when she died, and he summons the spirit of Margiela in a literary seance. He traces the history of sequins, then recounts the cursed story of Vera West, the costume designer who dressed the Bride of Frankenstein. These pieces were all previously published, some in Artforum, some in The Believer, and some in underground publications like Werewolf Express—what binds them together is a sense that though fashion victimizes us, this victimization is sometimes a sort of salvation.

Derek McCormack is a Canadian writer. His most recent novels are The Well-Dressed Wound and Castle Faggot, both published by Semiotext(e). Of Castle Faggot, Dennis Cooper said: "It is really just one of the best books ever, and maybe the greatest novel ever written.

Praise for Judy Blame's Obituary:

'Derek McCormack, Canada's most famous author as yet unsullied by Nobel Prize or television adaptation, hides in plain sight as a fashion journalist. Parallel to his writing incantatory, scatalogical fiction, he has reviewed collections and interviewed the great and good of la mode. His divagations are often darkly hilarious and always exquisitely tailored. The sublime and the ridiculous coexist in his prose, as they do in life. Fashion victims, ignore his insights at your peril.' — William E. Jones

Published by Pilot Press, 20 × 15 cm, Softcover, 2021

The Well-Dressed Wound
Derek McCormack
Semiotext(e) - 14.50€ -  out of stock

A gleeful grotesquerie and savage satire, featuring Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln and the Devil, along with Civil War dead, deconstructed couture, and gay ghosts.

The Well-Dressed Wound is Derek McCormack's play script "séance" a fashion show by the dead for the living. In the depths of the Civil War, in a theater in P. T. Barnum's American Museum on Broadway, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln participate in a staged spiritualistic rite. But the medium conducting them has invited along another being: the Devil, disguised as twentieth-century French fashionista Martin Margiela (aka "King Faggot"). What follows is the most fiendish runway show ever mounted, complete with war dead, deconstructed couture, and gay ghosts infected with all manner of infectious agents, including oozy AIDS.

While his previous fictions have explored the darker corners of country music, high fashion, and camp, The Well-Dressed Wound is McCormack's most radical work yet, occultishly evoking the evil-twin muses of transgressive literature, Kathy Acker and Pierre Guyotat. The creation thus conjured is a gleeful grotesquerie, a savage satire not so much of fashion as of death, a work that, as Bruce Hainley observes in Artforum, puts "the 'pus' back in opus." Here death and life spin on a viral double helix of contamination and couture, blistering and bandages, history and hysteria, semen and seams. "Being dead is so very now," Hainley opines. "This tiny tome (a time bomb, a tomb) is to die for and radically alive."

Castle Faggot
Derek McCormack
Semiotext(e) - 16.00€ -  out of stock

In Derek McCormack's home province, farm boys with growing pains enjoy a little-known meal called bed-supper, a hearty bowl of sweet breakfast cereal enjoyed as a midnight snack. Here McCormack has composed a peculiarly salacious bed-supper, where the long secret sweet-tooth of the Marquis de Sade glints as it sinks into the dirtiest of dishes. This useful book will more than stay your appetite until breakfast -- Castle Faggot is also a manual of redecoration, a musical, a puppet show, a theory of cosmetics, a work of poetics, and a glorious celebration of the French decadence. -- Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal

Derek McCormack is a writer who lives in Toronto. His previous books include The Show that Smells and The Well-Dressed Wound (Semiotext(e)).

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