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Semiotext(e) / Native Agents

Primitive literacy is redundant. Mere words are expelled. We inaugurate a world of pure presence. The mind, that intrudes itself between ourselves and those memories too terrible to know, must keep us moving beyond the grasp of their claw. To control the flow, it will be necessary that political order be imposed always temporarily. The state shall enjoy direct, creative access to the real.

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.

No more jobs, no more taxes, no more checkbook, no more bills, no more credit cards, no more credit, no more money, no more mortgages, no more rent, no more savings, no more junk mail, no more junk, no more mail, no more phones, no more faxes, no more busy signals, no more computers, no more cars, no more drivers' licenses, no more traffic lights, no more airports, no more flying, no more tickets, no more packing, no more luggage, no more supermarkets, no more health clubs...

The Collected Interviews of Wiliam S. Burroughs, 1960–1997

Burroughs Live gathers all the interviews, both published and unpublished, given by William Burroughs, as well as conversations with well-known writers, artists, and musicians such as Tenessee Williams, Timothy Leary, Patti Smith, Keith Richards, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso. The book provides a fascinating account of Burroughs's life as a literary outlaw. Illuminating many aspects of his work and many facets of his mind, it brings out his scathing humor, powerful intelligence, and nightmarish vision.

Los Angeles writer and artist Bob Flanagan created performances with Sheree Rose that shocked and inspired audiences. He combined text, video, and live performance to create a highly personal but universal exploration of childhood, sex, illness, and mortality. The Pain Journal, Flanagan's last finished work, is an extraordinary chronicle of the final year of his life before his death from cystic fibrosis at the age of forty-three.

This odd, transcendent and triumphant novel published in 2000 completes a quasi-autobiographical, radically philosophical series of fictions Howe began with First Marriage, published in 1972. Like Howe, Henny's life spans the tempestuous multi-racial world of hipsters and activists in working-class Boston during the 60s and its subsequent fall-out.

As the rope was tightening around my neck, an Alien made love to me. Belief is a technology for softening the landscape. The world becomes more beautiful when God is in it. Here is what happens inside a person's body when they starve.

In 1970, at the age of twenty-five, Shulamith Firestone wrote and published The Dialectic of Sex, immediately becoming a classic of second wave feminism across the world to this very day. It was one of the few books that dared to look at how radical feminism could and should shape the future; and one whose predictions (the cybernetic revolution, for example) proved startlingly prescient of issues today.

Adventures in Lesbian Reading
Edited by Eileen Myles and Liz Kotz

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.

The Origin of the Species collects stories, manifestos, rants and songs by Homer Erotic lead singer/poet/politico Barbara Barg. Raised as the only Jew in her Arkansas town in the mid-1960s, Barg's subject matter ranges from Nietzsche to Lithuanian pogroms to shoplifting and cocktail-waitressing to the activities of the Ku Klux Klan in her town.

What do we belong to
Soul or chromosome?
Boundaries and bloodshed
Earth seems so far from home

Put together by Chris Kraus just before David Rattray's sudden death and published in 1992, How I Became One of the Invisible has since circulated as a secret history and guide book to the mystical-poetic-outlaw tradition that runs throughout Western civilization from Pythagoras to the prophetic polyphony of 16th century In Nomine music, to the gang of marijuana harvesters and car thieves of East St. Louis, 1961, who become Rattray's friends.

An irreverent and lucid sojourn through the facetious, twisted burps we call sophisticated society, captured by the camera-quick and ruthless eye of the ever-vigilant third person, Madame Realism. Each fiction has a terse analytical agenda, surgically dissecting the mundane, forcing quotidian life off the canvas, out of the museum dioramas and into our laps.

You can say I write stories with sex and violence and therefore my writing isn't worth considering because it uses content much less lots of content. Well, I tell you this: 'Prickly race, who know nothing except how to eat out your hearts with envy, you don't eat cunt'...

Listen, I have been educated.
I have learned about Western
Civilization. Do you know
What the message of Western
Civilization is? I am alone.

Cookie trips through her forty-year odyssey on this planet—from LSD to shopping at the A&P, from birthing Max to shooting Pink Flamingos. The echoes of her passionate commitments will ring in your ears. It is a tragedy to have lost her. Fortunately, along with the memories, she left us this marvelous testament to her intrepid zest for living.

Elizabeth LeComte: Alright, I want to know something and I want the straight dope. Were you ever in the sack with this guy?

Ann Rower: With [Timothy] Leary?

Willem Dafoe: Oh, here it is... "Ann and I ambled up to the bedroom." [laughter]

Ann Rower: Ah, he was a liar. He's so dishonest. I mean, he was a classic paranoid... but like most paranoids he turned out to be right...

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