Bøker i Semiotext(e) / Native Agents-serien

A unique and provocative anthology of lesbian writing, guaranteed to soothe the soulful and savage the soulless. Includes Adele Bertei, Holly Hughes, Sapphire, Laurie Weeks, and many more.Borrowing its name from the notorious '60s Ed Sanders magazine, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, the editors have figured a way to rehone its countercultural and frictional stance with style and aplomb. A unique and provocative anthology of lesbian writing, guaranteed to soothe the soulful and savage the soulless. Includes Adele Bertei, Holly Hughes, Sapphire, Laurie Weeks, and many more.

A forgotten gem of French literature, Duvert's version of The Lord of the Flies: an indictment against the violence embedded in a middle-class community.

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 what words are like, I hate the idea of putting these preformed gestures on the tip of my tongue, or through my lips, or through the inside of my mouth, forming sounds to approximate something that's like a cyclone, or something that's like a flood, or something that's like a weather system that's out of control, that's dangerous, or alarming.... It just seems like sounds that have been uttered back and forth maybe now over centuries. And it always boils down to the same meaning within those sounds, unless you're more intense uttering them, or you precede them or accompany them with certain forms of violence.—from The Weight of the EarthArtist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was an important figure in the downtown New York art scene. His art was preoccupied with sex, death, violence, and the limitations of language. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Wojnarowicz began keeping audio journals, returning to a practice he'd begun in his youth.The Weight of the Earth presents transcripts of these tapes, documenting Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.In these taped diaries, Wojnarowicz talks about his frustrations with the art world, recounts his dreams, and describes his rage, fear, and confusion about his HIV diagnosis. Primarily spanning the years 1987 and 1989, recorded as Wojnarowicz took solitary road trips around the United States or ruminated in his New York loft, the audio journals are an intimate and affecting record of an artist facing death. By turns despairing, funny, exalted, and angry, this volume covers a period largely missing from Wojnarowicz's written journals, providing us with an essential new record of a singular American voice.

A novel that captures the glancing intersections of a loose group of artists and lawyers, restaurateurs, philosophers, wine-makers, and boxers.Having dinner at the Triennale, Massimiliano is cooking Pho. He bought the ingredients a few days ago on his way back from Vietnam. The building was built in 1933, Malou went there as a child with Jacqueline, the fascist architecture and the name Triennale remained. A building named "every three years.” Massimiliano was born on December 6th, the same day as Malou...—from VzszhhzzComposed between destinations, in airplanes, trains, museums, and bars over three years, Jeanne Graff's Vzszhhzz captures the slight intersections of a loose group of artists and lawyers, restauranteurs, philosophers, wine-makers and boxers whose lives are conducted almost entirely in a second language. A loose chronicle masquerading as a novel, Vszhhzz—like Michèle Bernstein's All The King's Horses, the Bernadette Corporation's Reena Spaulings, and Natasha Stagg's Surveys—couches Graff's sharp observations in a laconic and ambient style. By not saying too much, Vzszhhzz says everything about the relation to time, cities, weather and smog that has become the lingua franca of a creative and transient life."There's an art of writing amidst the energies and languages of others, and Graff's ear for existential specificity finds momentum in even the most glancing encounters. Always on the move, Graff's phototropic texts incline toward human heat, hallucinating characters upon contact."—John Kelsey

A cult classic in France, the first translation of a novel that captures a subjective stroll through an underground, glamorous Parisfinally there are the rolling stones who call for all these at the same time among them and around them: the policeman, the cross-dresser, the dancer, Frankenstein, the dandy, the robot—from Dusty PinkWritten with the hope of achieving a "dreary distant banality,” Jean-Jacques Schuhl's first novel is a subjective stroll through an underground, glamorous Paris, a city that slips into the background but never disappears, hovering on the verge of its own suppression. An elegiac and luminous cut-up, Dusty Pink brings together race wire results, editions of France-Soir, the lyrics to well-known British songs, scripts from famous old films, pharmaceutical leaflets, fashion ads, and strips and scraps of culture in which the avant-garde and academicism blur in an overview of the cultural scene. This world of atmospheres, portraits, and dazzling associations of ideas creates a plane of shimmering surfaces.Published in French in 1972, Jean-Jacques Schuhl's Dusty Pink became a cult classic. This is its first translation.

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.

The complete art world story/essays of the fictional Madame Realism, collected for the first time.The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories gathers together Lynne Tillman's groundbreaking fiction/essays on culture and places, monuments, artworks, iconic TV shows, and received ideas, written in the third person to record the subtle, ironic, and wry observations of the playful but stern "Madame Realism.”Through her use of a fictional character, Tillman devised a new genre of writing that melded fiction and theory, sensation, and critical thought, disseminating her third-person art writer's observations in such magazines as Art in America and in a variety of art exhibition catalogs and artist books. Two decades after the original publication of these texts, her approach to investigation through embodied thought has been wholly absorbed by a new generation of artists and writers. Provocative and wholly pleasurable, Tillman's stories/essays dissect the mundane with alarming precision. As Lydia Davis wrote of her work, "Our assumptions shift. The every day becomes strange, paradox is embraced, and the unexpected is always around the corner.”This new collection also includes the complete stories of Tillman's other persona, the quixotic author Paige Turner (whose investigation of the language of love overshoots any actual experience of it), and additional stories and essays that address figures such as the "Translation Artist” and Cindy Sherman.

A bored twenty-three-year-old woman suddenly leaves her dull suburban job for L.A., becomes Internet-famous, and falls in love—Zelda to a semi-famous Scott.One day, I was not famous, the next day, I was almost famous and the temptation to go wide with that and reject my past was too great. When I was legit famous, it was hard to tell when the change had occurred... If I had been born famous, the moment I would have started engaging in social media, I would have seen this fame, not the rise of it. But first I saw the low numbers, and later, the high ones.—from SurveysWryly mirroring the classic, female coming-of-age narrative, Natasha Stagg's debut traces a few months in the life of Colleen, a twenty-three-year-old woman with almost no attachments or aspirations for her life. Working at an unsatisfying mall job in Tucson, Colleen sleepwalks through depressing office politics and tiresome one-night stands in a desultory way, becoming fully alive only at night when she's online. Colleen attains ambiguous Internet stardom when she's discovered by Jim, a semi-famous icon of masculinity and reclusiveness.When Colleen quits her job and moves to meet Jim in Los Angeles, she immediately falls in love and begins a new life of whirlwind parties and sponsored events. The pair's relationship, launched online, makes them the Scott and Zelda of their generation, and they tour the country, cashing in on the buzz surrounding their romance. But as their fame expands, Colleen's jealousy grows obsessive.

Sharp, acerbic, and humorous writings that approach psychoanalysis and celebrity on a first-name basis, with subjects that range from Oprah Winfrey to William Eggleston.

An incantatory catalog of cultural artifacts either lost to time or never realized.• A boarder for two years following a national funeral, Mirabeau is removed from the Pantheon and transferred to the cemetery of Clamart when his pornographic novels are discovered • A photograph taken by Hessling on Christmas night, 1943, of a young woman nailed alive to the village gate of Novimgorod; Hessling asks his friend Wolfgang Borchert to develop the film, look at the photograph, and destroy it • The Beautiful Gardener, a picture by Max Ernst, burned by the Nazis—from The Missing PiecesThe Missing Pieces is an incantatory text, a catalog of what has been lost over time and what in some cases never existed. Through a lengthy chain of brief, laconic citations, Henri Lefebvre evokes the history of what is no more and what never was: the artworks, films, screenplays, negatives, poems, symphonies, buildings, letters, concepts, and lives that cannot be seen, heard, read, inhabited, or known about. It is a literary vanitas of sorts, but one that confers an almost mythical quality on the enigmatic creations it recounts—rather than reminding us of the death that inhabits everything humans create. Lefebvre's list includes Marcel Duchamp's (accdidentally destroyed) film of Man Ray shaving off the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's pubic hair; the page written by Balzac on his deathbed (lost); Spinoza's Treatise on the Rainbow (thrown into a fire); the final seven meters of Kerouac's original typescript for On the Road (eaten by a dog); the chalk drawings of Francis Picabia (erased before an audience); and the one moment in André Malraux's life in which he exclaimed "I believe, for a minute, I was thinking nothing.” The Missing Pieces offers a treasure trove of cultural and artistic detail and will entertain even those readers not enamored of the void.

A lyrical account of a childhood spent in a castle disguised as a psychiatric clinic, written by the daughter of Félix Guattari.A moment later, Lacan is chattering with me, and giving me some crayons to draw with.—from I, Little AsylumFounded in 1951 and renowned in the world of psychiatry, the experimental psychiatric clinic of La Borde sought to break with the traditional internment of the mentally ill and to have them participate in the material organization of collective life. The clinic owed much of its approach to psychoanalyst and philosopher Félix Guattari, who was its codirector with Jean Oury until 1992. In this lyrical chronicle of a childhood at La Borde, Félix Guattari's daughter Emanuelle Guattari offers a series of impressionistic vignettes drawn from her own experiences. As a child whose parents worked in the clinic, Emanuelle Guattari ("Manou”) experienced La Borde—which is housed in a castle in the middle of a spacious park—as a place not of confinement but of imagination and play. She evokes a landscape that is surreal but also mundane, describing the fat monkey named Boubou her father kept at the clinic, interactions between the "La Borde kids” and the "Residents” (aka, the "Insane,” feared by the locals), the ever fascinating rainbow-hued "shit pit” on the grounds, and prank-calls to the clinic switchboard. And, of course, there is Félix Guattari himself, at the dinner table, battling a rat, and in his daughter's dreams. Emmanuelle Guattari's tale of childlike wonder offers a poetic counterpoint to the writings of her father and his intellectual circle.

A tale of ambivalent friendship and obsession with a fashionable drifter named Nicola in the fashionable city named Milan.

The first career retrospective of activist photographer Brian Weil, whose work and practice explored insular cultures.

The lyrical story of a Mexican family torn apart by the fragility and madness of one of its members.

A young woman's fabulist search for her long-lost twin brother overturns all notions of motherhood, magic realism, and miscegenation.

A collection of stories told through the movies that revisits the lower Manhattan art world and the Atlantic haven of Provincetown in the 1980s.Masha Tupitsyn's Beauty Talk & Monsters is a debut collection of stories told through the movies. Equally influenced by Brian De Palma and Kathy Acker, Tupitsyn revisits the ruins of a childhood and youth nurtured on the fringe of the glittering lower Manhattan art world and the Atlantic haven of Provincetown in the 1980s. Moving fluidly through space, time, and a range of cinematic frameworks, Tupitsyn cuts through the cynical glamour and illusion of Hollywood to a soft, secret heart.Her narrator, a female loner and traveler, is caught in the maelstrom of films and images, where life is experienced through the eye of a camera lens and seen through the light on the screen. In a precise and elegant style, Beauty Talk & Monsters embraces and confronts a lineage of familiar myths and on- and off-screen cinematic excess in order to challenge the silver screen's century of power over our dreams and ideals. Intimate and intellectual, Tupitsyn's stories play with the cinema's most popular icons and images.

Artist David Wojnarowicz on his work, his aspirations, his personal history, his political views; Wojnarowicz in dialogue with Sylvère Lotringer, along with personal accounts from friends and fellow artists collected after Wojnarowicz's death.In February 1991, the artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) and the philosopher Sylvère Lotringer met in a borrowed East Village apartment to conduct a long-awaited dialogue on Wojnarowicz's work. Wojnarowicz was then at the peak of his notoriety as the fiercest antagonist of morals crusader Senator Jesse Helms—a notoriety that Wojnarowicz alternately embraced and rejected. Already suffering the last stages of AIDS, David saw his dialogue with Lotringer as a chance to set the record straight on his aspirations, his personal history, and his political views. The two arranged to have this three-hour dialogue video-recorded by a mutual friend, the artist Marion Scemama. Lotringer held on to the tape for a long time. After Wojnarowicz's death the following year, he found the transcript enormously moving, yet somehow incomplete. David was trying, often with heartbreaking eloquence, to define not just his career but its position in time. The subject was huge, and transcended the actual dialogue. Lotringer then spent the next several years gathering additional commentary on Wojnarowicz's life and work from those who knew him best—the friends with whom he collaborated. Lotringer solicited personal testimony from Wojnarowicz's friends and other artists, including Mike Bildo, Steve Brown, Julia Scher, Richard Kern, Carlo McCormick, Ben Neill, Kiki Smith, Nan Goldin, Marguerite van Cook, and others. What emerges from these masterfully-conducted interviews is a surprising insight into something art history knows, but systematically hides: the collaborative nature of the work of any "great artist." All these respondents had, at one time, made performances, movies, sculptures, photographs, and other collaborative works with Wojnarowicz. In this sense, Wojnarowicz appears not only as a great originator, but as a great synthesizer.

Seven friends in a continuous loop of eternal exile and youth embark on a road trip to the end of the world.My friends are merely effigies I keep to remind me of the animal inside my mind.—from The SuicidersDuring the first decade of the second millennium, a group of seven friends—Zach, Lukas, Adam, Matthew, Peter, Arnold, and Taylor—occupy an indeterminate house in an unidentified American suburb and replay a continuous loop of eternal exile and youth. Permanently in their late teens, the seven young men are as fluid and mutable ciphers, although endowed with highly reflexive, and wholly generic, internal lives. "Once you learn how to love, you will also learn how to mutilate it... I want to feel so free you can't even imagine... Let's get out there and eat some popsicles. There is work to be done.” Eventually, the group decides to remove themselves from the safe confines of the house and to embark upon a road trip to the end of the world with their friend, the Whore, and their pet parrot, Jesus H. Christ. The Suiciders is their legacy.Chronicling the last days of a religious cult in rural America, Jeppesen's debut novel Victims was praised by the Village Voice for its "artfully fractured vision of memory and escape,” and by Punk Planet for its masterful balance of "the laconic speech of teenagers with philosophical density.” In The Suiciders, Jeppesen ventures beyond any notion of fixed identity. The result is a dazzling, perversely accurate portrait of American life in the new century, conveyed as a post-punk nouveau roman.

Baudrillard meets Breaking Bad in this stark and bleakly hilarious novel about a descent into an underclass world of born-again Christianity, self-help, and crack."In his journal, Paul liked to make lists: What he ordered from Commissary (shaving cream, toothpaste, deodorant, the transistor radio he had for a week before the guards took it away). The books he picked off the cart (The Bible, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Codependent No More.) What phone calls he made and received; also, Bible Study certificates, letters and cards, his workout routines and his moods (Anxious, Nervous, Trusting in God, but mostly Depressed). Paul has a record of every push-up he did while he was in prison but he cannot remember shit about what happened before his arrest.”—from Summer of HateWaking up from the chilling high of a near-death sex game, Catt Dunlop travels to Albuquerque in 2005 to reinvest some windfall real-estate gains and reengage with something approximating "real life.” Aware that the critical discourse she has used to build her career as a visiting professor and art critic is really a cipher for something else, she hopes that buying and fixing slum buildings will bring her more closely in touch with American life than the essays she writes.In Albuquerque, she becomes romantically involved with Paul Garcia, a recently sober ex-con who has just served sixteen months in state prison for defrauding Halliburton Industries, his former employer, of $873. Almost forty years old, Paul is highly intelligent but has only been out of New Mexico twice. He has no information. With Catt's help, he makes plans to attend UCLA, only to be arrested on a ten-year-old bench warrant en route.Caught in the nightmarish Byzantine world of the legal system, Catt and Paul's empathic attempts to save each other's lives seems doomed to dissolve. Summer of Hate is a novel about flawed reciprocity and American justice, recording recent events through the prism of a beleaguered romance. As lucid and trenchant as ever, Kraus in her newest novel reminds us that the writer can be a first responder of sorts when power becomes invisible, or merely banal.

The third novel in von Schlegell's System Series, set among the water-rich moons of planet Uranus, during Earth's full collapse.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 pale bottom and sex exposed. Was he watching simultaneously from below? The Doll let his tendrils obscure. 5 hours till orbital synch, he remembered. The Doll called up the red-screen into his mindspace and traced the instantly visible tags: Mab's Buoy relay SFS Good Fortune, Wawagawanet 2145270401:33—from SundogzBeginning with Venusia (2005) and continuing with Mercury Station (2009), Mark von Schlegell's System Series has moved backward in time, investigating the contours of time, memory, perception, and control in the inter-planetary system that emerge off-world in the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries during Earth's full collapse. In the latest installment, Sundogz, set among the water-rich moons of planet Uranus, extremist astro-marine "spacers” have constructed an aquatic world of extraordinary scope and ambition, entirely invisible to the System at large. The Good Fortune, a spaceship en route to Moon Miranda, the most beautiful and troublesome of Uranus's satellites, sends out a party to explore rumors of a secret fish farm in the λ ring. Now the "Oan Bubble" must attempt to survive its discovery.The characters in Sundogz traverse a cybernetic world containing traces of nineteenth-century realism, Shakespearean-style wit and violence, and classic fantasy, while exploring possible modes of the imagination's survival in centuries to come.As Jeff Vandermeer noted in Bookforum, von Schlegell's work "addresses the realities of a grim future with grace, humor and intellectual honesty—[his novels] hark back to the heyday of such giants as J. G. Ballard, Ursula Le Guin, John Calvin Batchelor, and Philip K. Dick.”

Previously unpublished plays and writings by one of today's foremost satirical authors.