An anthology of fictive adventures by the Unbearables and collaborators, a free-floating in-your-face scrum of black humorists, chaos-mongers, immediatists, and verse-spouting Beer Mystics, disorganized around recuperating essence away from the humorless commodification of experience. Includes: Judy Nylon, Max Blagg, Bikini Girl, Bruce Benderson, Hakim Bey, Jordan Zinovich, and the Unbearables.
Another mammoth compilation from Downtown New York's 'drinking group with a writing problem', the previous perpetrators of The Worst Book I Ever Read, Crimes of the Beats and Help Yourself!, among other innumerable assaults on decency and good taste. Now they finally turn themselves to their most likely subject matter ever (even if it's frequently more a matter of fantasy and theory than of deviant practice)...
“Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond.” — People In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of two couples, a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing, and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine. This magnificent novel is a story of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, and encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.
Originally published in 2008, Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind is a collection of short stories by up-and-coming author Chavisa Woods. It explores the formative and tumultuous moments in the lives of two women as children and as adults in rural America. Filled with themes of incest, abuse, prejudice, sexuality and escape, Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind is a gripping and intimate work that pushes the boundaries of contemporary fiction.
Help Yourself! is the newest discharge in the Unbearables series of blasts on American culture, in which they dismantle, parody, and otherwise mangle the literary tradition of the Self Help Book. More than 75 individual contributors took on the topic, and in their Unbearable tradition, demolish the myths of self help in more than 75 ways.
Subject: When a loved one dies, the pain of loss can feel unbearable, especially in the case of a traumatizing death that leaves us shouting, 'NO!' with every fiber of our body. The process of grieving can feel wild and nonlinear and often lasts for much longer than other people, the nonbereaved, tell us it should. This book is a companion for life and most difficult times, revealing how grief can open our hearts to connection, compassion, and the very essence of our shared humanity. The author, who is also a bereavement educator, researcher, Zen priest, and leading counselor in the field accompanies the reader along the heartbreaking path of love, loss, and grief. Through moving stories of her encounters with grief over decades of supporting individuals, families, and communities, as well as her own experience with loss, the author opens a space to process, integrate, and deeply honor our grief
Fiction. A serial rapist terrorizes the streets of New York City, forcing a low-rent group of freelancers to go head-to-head with a Fundamentalist-Industrial Complex in a race to solve the crimes. "Neo Phobe aims directly at the paradox that lies at the center of all sexual liberatory writing. Often it suggests brilliant resolutions of this paradox; sometimes it falls victim to it. Everyone should read this book"--Samuel Delany. "This is one of the strangest books I've ever seen"--Barney Rosset. "NEO PHOBE is a playful mystery novel that smartly comments on what it means to be a working-class writer (and detective) in NYC battling nowhere temp jobs, indifferent literary journals, and Christian zealots, respectively. It's also a character sketch of The Unbearables, the anarchic group of verbo-visual terrorists and beer drinkers to which Feast and Kolm claim membership"--Brandon Stosuy.
For those obsessed with Premier League soccer, following your favorite team is a true collective experience, where it is easy to feel as one with thousands of others. It is also an individual one, in which the emotions you feel are your emotions, the experiences you feel are your experiences, and nobody else can perfectly understand. Over the course of the 2019–20 season, two longtime Liverpool FC followers wrote to each other about those emotions and experiences. American writer Michael MacCambridge, living in Austin, Texas, is a devoted Liverpool follower. Five thousand miles away, his friend Neil Atkinson, Liverpool resident and a longtime season ticket holder, is the host of the popular podcast The Anfield Wrap. Each week throughout the historic season, Atkinson and MacCambridge exchanged letters, contemplating Liverpool’s progress, comparing and contrasting their different perspectives on the club and the sport, meditating on the manner in which their shared obsession for Liverpool works its way into nearly every corner of their personal lives, and discussing the differences between how the game is consumed in the United States and the United Kingdom and the role modern media plays in shaping our views of sport. Their collaboration was both timely and serendipitous, as Liverpool marched toward its first ever Premier League title and its first league title in thirty years, with a charismatic manager and the most entertaining team in the sport. In March, of course, the soccer story was overtaken by the larger story of the COVID-19 pandemic wreaking havoc throughout the world, including sports events. In the course of their correspondence, Red Letters provides a real-time account of the pandemic that threatened the very existence of the season that Liverpool followers had been waiting more than a generation to experience. Red Letters provides a different way to examine the culture of a worldwide sport and development of a soccer season—game by game, in real time, with hopes and expectations tested and altered as the season progresses to Liverpool’s Premier League championship, with insight from two avid supporters.
Among The Village Voices 25 Favorite Books of 2006 Winner of the 2007 AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in the Trade Illustrated Book Design category. Sometime after Andy Warhol’s heyday but before Soho became a tourist trap, a group of poets, punk rockers, guerilla journalists, graffiti artists, writers, and activists transformed lower Manhattan into an artistic scene so diverse it became known simply as “Downtown.“ Willfully unpolished and subversively intelligent, figures such as Spalding Gray, Kathy Acker, Richard Hell, David Wojnarowicz, Lynne Tillman, Miguel Piñero, and Eric Bogosian broke free from mainstream publishing to produce a flood of fiction, poetry, experimental theater, art, and music that breathed the life of the street. The first book to capture the spontaneity of the Downtown literary scene, Up Is Up, But So Is Down collects more than 125 images and over 80 texts that encompass the most vital work produced between 1974 and 1992. Reflecting the unconventional genres that marked this period, the book includes flyers, zines, newsprint weeklies, book covers, and photographs of people and the city, many of them here made available to readers outside the scene for the first time. The book's striking and quirky design—complete with 2-color interior—brings each of these unique documents and images to life. Brandon Stosuy arranges this hugely varied material chronologically to illustrate the dynamic views at play. He takes us from poetry readings in Alphabet City to happenings at Darinka, a Lower East Side apartment and performance space, to the St. Mark's Bookshop, unofficial crossroads of the counterculture, where home-printed copies of the latest zines were sold in Ziploc bags. Often attacking the bourgeois irony epitomized by the New Yorker’s short fiction, Downtown writers played ebulliently with form and content, sex and language, producing work that depicted the underbelly of real life. With an afterword by Downtown icons Dennis Cooper and Eileen Myles, Up Is Up, But So Is Down gathers almost twenty years of New York City’s smartest and most explosive—as well as hard to find—writing, providing an indispensable archive of one of the most exciting artistic scenes in U.S. history.
In this rueful tale, written under a simple but pervasive formal constraint, Olympic gold medal winner Ken Honochick and his girlfriend take a cross-country road trip to revisit his brief moment of triumph and his subsequent long haul on the promotions circuit. The result is a smart, flirtatious tour-de-force thats as funny as it is inventive. Under all the comic gusto and technical virtuosity, however, theres also some penetrating thought on our countrys obsession with private foibles and public image, individual achievement and the pressure to cash in on it.