Bøker i Semiotext(e) / Native Agents-serien

Leash extends the logic of S&M to its inexorable and startling conclusion, darkly and hilariously revealing the masochistic impulse as the urge to disappear from the chores, obligations, and emotional vacuity of daily life.

Tales of life in North Africa that flirt with strategies of revelation and concealment, by the first openly gay writer to be published in Morocco.Tangier is a possessed city, haunted by spirits of different faiths. When we have literature in our blood, in our souls, it's impossible not to be visited by them.—from Another MoroccoIn 2006, Abdellah Taïa returned to his native Morocco to promote the Moroccan release of his second book, Le rouge du tarbouche (The Red of the Fez). During this book tour, he was interviewed by a reporter for the French-Arab journal Tel Quel, who was intrigued by the themes of homosexuality she saw in his writing. Taïa, who had not publically come out and feared the repercussions for himself and his family of doing so in a country where homosexuality continues to be outlawed, nevertheless consented to the interview and subsequent profile, "Homosexuel envers et contre tous” ("Homosexual against All Odds”). This interview made him the first openly gay writer to be published in Morocco.Another Morocco collects short stories from Taïa's first two books, Mon Maroc (My Morocco) and Le rouge du tarbouche, both published before this pivotal moment. In these stories, we see a young writer testing the porousness of boundaries, flirting with strategies of revelation and concealment. These are tales of life in a working-class Moroccan family, of a maturing writer's fraught relationship with language and community, and of the many cities and works that have inspired him. With a reverence for the subaltern—for the strength of women and the disenfranchised—these stories speak of humanity and the construction of the self against forces that would invalidate its very existence. Taïa's work is, necessarily, a political gesture.

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.”

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.

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.

A Situationist International roman à clef, written by Guy Debord's first wife, a founder of the movement and one of its influential thinkers.

An autobiographical coming-of-age novel by the the "only gay man” in Morocco.An autobiographical novel by turn naïve and cunning, funny and moving, this most recent work by Moroccan expatriate Abdellah Taïa is a major addition to the new French literature emerging from the North African Arabic diaspora. Salvation Army is a coming-of-age novel that tells the story of Taïa's life with complete disclosure—from a childhood bound by family order and latent (homo)sexual tensions in the poor city of Salé, through an adolescence in Tangier charged by the young writer's attraction to his eldest brother, to a disappointing arrival in the Western world to study in Geneva in adulthood. In so doing, Salvation Army manages to burn through the author's first-person singularity to embody the complex mélange of fear and desire projected by Arabs on Western culture. Recently hailed by his native country's press as "the first Moroccan to have the courage to publicly assert his difference,” Taïa, through his calmly transgressive work, has "outed” himself as "the only gay man” in a country whose theocratic law still declares homosexuality a crime. The persistence of prejudices on all sides of the Mediterranean and Atlantic makes the translation of Taïa's work both a literary and political event. The arrival of Salvation Army (published in French in 2006) in English will be welcomed by an American audience already familiar with a growing cadre of talented Arab writers working in French (including Muhammad Dib, Assia Djebar, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Katib Yasin).

Essays and stories on fashion, art, and culture in the New York of the 2010s.

A novel set in post-9/11 New York City about a supermodel and the ultimate Broadway blockbuster.Set in post-9/11 New York City, Reena Spaulings was written by a large collective of writers and artists that bills itself as The Bernadette Corporation. Like most contemporary fiction, Reena Spaulings is about a female twenty-something. Reena is discovered while working as a museum guard and becomes a rich international supermodel. Meanwhile, a bout of terrible weather seizes New York, leaving in its wake a strange form of civil disobedience that stirs its citizens to mount a musical song-and-dance riot called "Battle on Broadway." Fashioned in the old Hollywood manner by a legion of professional and amateur writers striving to achieve the ultimate blockbuster, the musical ends up being about a nobody who could be anybody becoming a somebody for everybody. The result is generic and perfect—not unlike Reena Spaulings itself, whose many authors create a story in which New York itself strives to become the ultimate collective experiment in which the only thing shared is the lack of uniqueness.