Brandon Stosuy – författare

Among The Village Voices 25 Favorite Books of 2006Winner 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.

An interactive guide to staying creatively curious in your own life, curated by Brandon Stosuy (cofounder of The Creative Independent), with quotes and advice from artists across disciplinesThe second in a series of three interactive guides dedicated to the practical and emotional sides of living a creative life, Stay Inspiredexplores how to grow an idea into a project and how to keep the spark of creativity present in your daily life. This guide poses a series of questions on themes of tapping into your own story and circumstances of inspiration, identifying your influences, finding inspiring communities,and initiating partnerships and collaborations. Working artists from all walks of life—musicians, authors, filmmakers, dancers, designers, and visual artists—offer their responses to the questions posed throughout the book, providing an inspirational framework for discovering new ideas, channeling your influences, and making work in conversation with others.Part memoir, part zine, part "how-to," and oral history, in Stay Inspired,author and curator Brandon Stosuy taps into an incredible network of talent to provide diverse (and diverging) perspectives on how creativitycan be inspired and channeled into your independent work, collaborations, and communities.

From Brandon Stosuy, cofounder of the Creative Independent, an interactive guide to navigating disappointments and finding happy accidents in a creative life, filled with advice from artists across disciplinesThe third in a series of three interactive guides to the practical and emotional sides of living a creative life, How to Fail Successfully tackles the inevitable challenges that come with making work and releasing it into the world. Whether you are confronting “failure” in the form of fear, imposter syndrome, or negative feedback, this book provides insights and exercises to help you reframe these vulnerabilities as vital components to your process. Working artists from all walks of life—such as musicians, authors, filmmakers, dancers, designers, and visual artists—offer their advice throughout the book, providing ample evidence that even the most accomplished among us deal with ongoing self-doubt.Part memoir, part zine, part “how-to,” and part oral history, in How to Fail Successfully author and curator Brandon Stosuy taps into his own experiences and an incredible network of talent to provide diverse (and diverging) perspectives on how success and failure are intertwined. Taken as a stand-alone guide or the finale of a series (including Make Time for Creativity and Stay Inspired), this book provides the support you need to take creative risks and make work on your terms. The book also includes quotes by Jason Reynolds (YA author), Björk (musician), Matthew Day Jackson (visual artist), Josh Fadem (comedian), Hanif Abdurraqib (poet and author), Sasha Grey (actor and DJ), Sigrid Lauren (choreographer), and many more.