Semiotext (E) – förlag

The debut memoir from the unhinged queer genius known as Dynasty Handbag.A freak’s freak, iconoclast performance artist Jibz Cameron is best known for her multimedia act Dynasty Handbag, an alter ego lampooning the tragic absurdity of heterosexuality, queerness, the female body, capitalism, depression, art making, and life itself. With her debut memoir Hell in a Handbag, Cameron traces her warped and inspired perspective from a childhood spent with hippie clowns on the broken-down commune scene of Northern California, to making morbid zines as a teen in the East Bay punk scene, to in-your-face experiences of misogyny in New York City’s avant-garde theater scene, to the grisly birth of Dynasty Handbag and her droll evisceration of contemporary life. An engrossing and swiftly paced story as candid as it is wise, Hell in a Handbag is an immersion in unhinged queer genius.

An analysis of contemporary violence as the new commodity of today's hyper-consumerist stage of capitalism.

“Death has become the most profitable business in existence.”—from Gore Capitalism

Written by the Tijuana activist intellectual Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism is a crucial essay that posits a decolonial, feminist philosophical approach to the outbreak of violence in Mexico and, more broadly, across the global regions of the Third World. Valencia argues that violence itself has become a product within hyper-consumerist neoliberal capitalism, and that tortured and mutilated bodies have become commodities to be traded and utilized for profit in an age of impunity and governmental austerity.

In a lucid and transgressive voice, Valencia unravels the workings of the politics of death in the context of contemporary networks of hyper-consumption, the ups and downs of capital markets, drug trafficking, narcopower, and the impunity of the neoliberal state. She looks at the global rise of authoritarian governments, the erosion of civil society, the increasing violence against women, the deterioration of human rights, and the transformation of certain cities and regions into depopulated, ghostly settings for war. She offers a trenchant critique of masculinity and gender constructions in Mexico, linking their misogynist force to the booming trade in violence.

This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to analyze the new landscapes of war. It provides novel categories that allow us to deconstruct what is happening, while proposing vital epistemological tools developed in the convulsive Third World border space of Tijuana.

The early writings of renowned poet and critical theorist Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog.Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang’s trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping out of an MFA program, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and writing her trenchant book Carceral Capitalism. Alien Daughters charts the dream-seeking misadventures of an “odd girl” from Florida who emerged from punk houses and early Tumblr to become the powerful writer she is today. Anarchic and beautifully personal, Alien Daughters is a strange intellectual autobiography that demonstrates Wang’s singular self-education: an early life lived where every day and every written word began like the Tarot’s Fool, with a leap of faith.

What if capitalism and its social machine were the outcome of a conspiratorial strategy?What if capitalism and its social machine were the outcome of a conspiratorial strategy? This anonymous book considers evidence that they must be that. Further, it argues in favor of passionate counter-conspiracies as the logical form of revolt in our time, when our very souls are said to be at stake.

An intimate memoir of growing up inside legendary Parisian publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit.I wanted to tell the story of Les Éditions de Minuit as I saw them as a child. And also to tell the story of my father, Jérôme Lindon, as I saw him and loved him. Are there archives for that? And how to be an archive of the child that I once was?An Archive tells the story of Les Éditions de Minuit, the legendary Parisian publisher of Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Monique Wittig, Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Bourdieu, Marie NDiaye, and so many others. It is the tale of its editor, Jérôme Lindon, who directed the publishing house from 1948 until his death in 2001. It is also the chronicle of growing up in a family of writers who were, to the eyes of a young child, the temple of literature. Looking back on a childhood immersed in books, Mathieu Lindon draws a portrait of his father, narrating his use of power and his avarice, but also his generosity, his enthusiasm for literature and defense of authors, and his commitment to politics—during the German Occupation, through the Algerian War of Independence, and for the Palestinian cause after the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Opening the archive of his own memory, Lindon gives a moving, ferocious, and often funny account of a defining period of twentieth-century French intellectual history.

A document of New York from an author too close to the story to be a trustworthy eyewitness.Composed of stories, fragmentary essays, and even press releases Stagg has been commissioned to write, Artless captures the media landscape lived and generated in New York during the past half decade. Since the 2016 publication of her debut novel Surveys, Stagg has positioned herself as an in-demand expert on—and critic of—the psychic experience of self-mythology within the cruelly optimistic metaverse of infinite branding. Part voyeur and part participant, Stagg continues her exploration of the branded identity and its elusive, bottomless desire for authenticity.

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

We were supposed to meet Rose McGowan at Café d'Alsace after the party, but she cancelled at the last minute. I saw on Twitter that she had been hit with a drug possession charge, which she insisted was a scheme to keep her Weinstein dirt quiet. I hadn't even read her Weinstein story… I still wanted to know that the articles were being published, and in large quantities, but reading stories of abuse and humiliation was as stupefying as a hangover. I didn't feel empowered; I only felt more hopeless. I wanted to watch the patriarchy go up in flames, but I wasn't excited about what was being pitched to replace it. If we got all of it out in the open, what would we have left? My fear was that guilt would destroy the classics and there'd be no one left to fuck. All movies would be as low-budget and as puritanical as the stuff they play on Lifetime, all of New York would look like a Target ad, every book or article would be a cathartic tell-all, and I'd be sexually frustrated but too ashamed to hook up with assholes, or even to watch porn.—from Sleeveless

Eve Babitz meets Roland Barthes in Sleeveless, Natasha Stagg's follow up to Surveys, her 2016 novel about internet fame. Composed of essays and stories commissioned by fashion, art, and culture magazines, Sleeveless is a scathing and sensitive report from New York in the 2010s. During those years, Stagg worked as an editor for V magazine and as a consultant, creating copy for fashion brands. Through these jobs, she met and interviewed countless industry luminaries, celebrities, and artists, and learned about the quickly evolving strategies of branding. In Sleeveless, she exposes the mechanics of personal identity and its monetization that propelled the narrator of Surveys from a mall job in Tucson to international travel and internet fame.

A call to imagine a less deadly future, written in the shadow of genocide and “ferocious optimism.”After Gaza, it is time to recognize that the attempt to humanize history has failed, and that there will not be a second try. It is time to recognize that the experiment called “civilization” has failed… The abyss is wide open and we cannot help but see it. We must gaze into the abyss, we must gauge the breadth and depth of the abyss. We must draw a map of the abyss, while precipitously falling into it.“Thinking after Gaza” means recognizing the collapse of universal reason and democracy, the humanistic values that were the famed—and fragile—promise of modernity. But it also means searching for ways to escape the grim future awaiting those born in this disenchanted century: this century that promises to be the last, in which thought has lost all political power and the survival instinct struggles to withstand the ferocity of techno-military extermination machines. To the generation born in the twilight of Western civilization, we owe this last act of thinking, so as to imagine the desertion of our barbaric present, along pathways that have yet to be illuminated.The latest essay by renowned Italian autonomist theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Thinking After Gaza is a reflection on the multivalent consequences—political, philosophical, civilizational—of the current genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. Bearing sober witness to the conditions on the ground in the Occupied Territories, while tracking the “ferocious optimism” that has replaced Enlightenment ideals, this book is addressed not only to activists but also to pacifist philosophers, historians, and theologians.

The increasingly chaotic rhythm of our respiration, and the sense of suffocation that grows everywhere: an essay on poetical therapy.

Since the hopeful days of the Occupy movement, many things have changed in the respiration of the world, and we have entered a cycle of spasm, despair, and chaos. Breathing is a book about the increasingly chaotic rhythm of our respiration, about the sense of suffocation that grows everywhere.“I can't breathe.” These words panted by Eric Garner before dying, strangled by a police officer on the streets of  Staten Island, capture perfectly catching the overall sentiment of our time. In Breathing, Franco "Bifo" Berardi comes back to the subject that was the core of his 2011 book, The Uprising: the place of poetry in the relations between language, capital, and possibility. In The Uprising, he focuses on poetry as an anticipation of the trend toward abstraction that led to the present form of financial capitalism. In Breathing, he tries to envision poetry as the excess of the field of signification, as the premonition of a possible harmony inscribed in the present chaos.           The Uprising was a genealogical diagnosis. Breathing is an essay on poetical therapy. How we deal with chaos, as we know that those who fight against chaos will be defeated, because chaos feeds upon war? How do we deal with suffocation? Is there a way out from the corpse of financial capitalism?

A new novel from the celebrated author of Surveys, set in the Michigan suburbs of the early 2000s.Installed alongside the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, Alexander Calder’s public sculpture La Grande Vitesse has come to symbolize the city. Tess moves there from Ypsilanti, Michigan in 2001—the same year that her mother dies, when everything begins to move, for her, in slow motion. Thrust into adolescence nearly rudderless, fifteen-year-old Tess is intoxicated, angsty, and sexually awake. A decade later, inspired by diary entries and TV reruns, she remembers this summer in the suburbs as the one that redefined her. Its echoes of death are frozen in time like the waves represented in the Calder sculpture or the concrete steps leading down to the churning river. She comes to see Grand Rapids as a collection of architecture and emblems, another home to which she cannot return.

A long-form dialogue—on cinema and survival—with the visionary French filmmaker.The virtuous always engage in a pseudoreligious morality. But there’s one thing they never say: the desire for pleasure is thought in motion. It’s what makes you transfigure a dull and repetitive sexual act into something that can bring you to ecstasy and an idea of eternity ... —Catherine Breillat to Murielle JoudetCatherine Breillat has always told just one story: her own, the story of a young girl whose existence was forbidden, who was, from childhood, cut in half, split between her mind and her sexuality, marked by the shame of being born female. She became a filmmaker at a time when choosing that vocation meant disobeying the world. During six months between September 2022 and March 2023, the film critic Murielle Joudet interviewed Catherine Breillat for thirty hours, often following up with further discussion over the phone. Joudet and Breillat discuss each of her films in chronological order, moving freely between Breillat’s cinematic vision, her life, and the situations, artworks, and thought that have inspired her films.From A Real Young Girl (1975) to Last Summer (2023), Breillat has made films in an attempt to recover what she believes was stolen from her— the “unfilmable,” inexhaustible grey area of the feminine where shame, transgression, sensuality, disgust, and the search for oneself intertwine until they become indistinguishable. Her work proposes a haunting imperative to know oneself ... and for her heroines, this spiritual search plays out as an open war with the opposite sex. A conversation with Catherine Breillat is as much a cinema master class as it is a lesson in survival.

On the internet's transformation from communication tool to computational infrastructure.The internet is no more. If it still exists, it does so only as a residual technology, still effective in the present but less intelligible as such. After nearly two decades and a couple of financial crises, it has become the almost imperceptible background of today’s Corporate Platform Complex (CPC)—a pervasive planetary technological infrastructure that meshes communication with computation.In the essays collected in this book, written mostly between the mid-2000s and the late 2010s, Tiziana Terranova bears witness to this monstrous transformation. Mobilizing theories of cognitive capitalism, neo-monadology, and sympathetic cooperation, considering ideas such as the attention economy and its psychopathologies, and evoking the relation between algorithmic automation and the Common, she provides real-time takes on the mutations that have changed the technological, cultural, and economic ethos of the Internet. Mostly conceived, elaborated, and discussed in collective activist spaces, After the Internet is neither apocalyptic lamentation nor melancholic “rise and fall” story of betrayed great expectations. On the contrary, it looks within the folds of the recent past to unfold the potential futurities that the post-digital computational present still entails.

The stirring speech given by Peter Sloterdijk in Lucerne in October 2022.From time immemorial, humanity has had to organize their “metabolism with nature.” For Marx, the most important factor in this process was labor. When Prometheus, according to the myth, brought fire to earth, another crucial input was added. Fire has been used to cook food and harden tools for hundreds of thousands of years. In this sense, it can be said that all history implies the history of the uses of fire.But whereas trees could only be burnt once, labor and fire shifted with the discovery of underground deposits of coal and oil. Modern humanity, according to Peter Sloterdijk, can be considered a collective of arsonists who set fire to the underground forests and moors. If Prometheus were to return to earth today, he might regret his gift; after all, what looms is nothing less than Ekpyrosis, the demise of the world in fire. And only a new, energetic pacifism can prevent this catastrophe.

Why we must reject the illusory consolations of technology and choose revolution over fascism.We are living in apocalyptic times. In Capital Hates Everyone, famed sociologist Maurice Lazzarato points to a stark choice emerging from the magma of today's world events: fascism or revolution. Fascism now drives the course of democracies as they grow less and less liberal and increasingly subject to the law of capital. Since the 1970s, Lazzarato writes, capital has entered a logic of war. It has become, by the power conferred on it by financialization, a political force intent on destruction. Lazzarato urges us to reject the illusory consolations of a technology-abetted "new" kind of capitalism and choose revolution over fascism.

The first complete edition of this notorious novel which maps the 1980s anarchic underground of Los Angeles.Published in excerpts over almost four decades, Jack Skelley’s “secretly legendary” novel is at once an homage to the thrillingly inventive spirit of Kathy Acker’s cut-up novels and a definitive history of LA’s underground culture of the mid-1980s. Composed in bursts, Fear of Kathy Acker depicts Los Angeles through the eyes of a self-mocking narrator. Shifting styles and personae as he moves between Venice and Torrance, punk clubs and shopping malls, Disneyland and Dodger Stadium, Jack Skelley pushes the limits of language and identity while pursuing—much as Kathy Acker did—a quixotic literary mix of discipline and anarchy. In this adrenalized, cosmic, and comic chronicle of Los Angeles, Skelley’s “real life” friends make cameo appearances alongside pop archetypes from Madonna to Billy Idol. This first-ever complete edition of the book includes new essays, playlists, and a map of the 1980s Los Angeles in which its manic protagonist lives and loves.

An acute reappraisal for our time of the very concept of revolution.In order to be effective, union struggles, struggles for national liberation, worker mutualism, or struggles for emancipation were strategies that were necessarily connected to revolution. Starting from the historic defeat of the global Revolution in the mid-1970s, this book draws a portrait—whose elaboration is still lacking—of the concept of revolution. What conditions could lead us to speak of revolution once again?In The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution, Maurizio Lazzarato ponders the fundamental importance of the passage from the historical class struggle (the conflict between capital and labor) to the more recent class struggles that open onto plural trajectories: social, sexual, gender, and race struggles. Expanding the notion of class as a rejoinder to the normative appropriation of minority politics, the revolution is returned as the horizon where subjection can be resorbed.In this sense, Marxist, feminist, anticolonial, and postcolonial theories provide the necessary critical tools to understand the relations between classes and minorities, between the global North and the global South, and between the time of revolutions and the eruption of new subjectivities.

Selections from the work of radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin, famous for her antipornography stance and role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s.

Radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin was a caricature of misandrist extremism in the popular imagination and a polarizing figure within the women's movement, infamous for her antipornography stance and her role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. She still looms large in feminist demands for sexual freedom, evoked as a censorial demagogue, more than a decade after her death. Among the very first writers to use her own experiences of rape and battery in a revolutionary analysis of male supremacy, Dworkin was a philosopher outside and against the academy who wrote with a singular, apocalyptic urgency.

Last Days at Hot Slit brings together selections from Dworkin's work, both fiction and nonfiction, with the aim of putting the contentious positions she's best known for in dialogue with her literary oeuvre. The collection charts her path from the militant primer Woman Hating (1974), to the formally complex polemics of Pornography (1979) and Intercourse (1987) and the raw experimentalism of her final novel Mercy (1990). It also includes “Goodbye to All This” (1983), a scathing chapter from an unpublished manuscript that calls out her feminist adversaries, and “My Suicide” (1999), a despairing long-form essay found on her hard drive after her death in 2005.

The life, times, and mysteries of Fred Halsted, gay porn's first film auteur, in a new, updated, and expanded edition.Fred Halsted’s L.A. Plays Itself (1972) was gay porn’s first masterpiece: a sexually explicit, autobiographical, experimental film whose New York screening left even Salvador Dalí repeatedly muttering “new information for me.” Halsted, a self-taught filmmaker, shot the film over a period of three years in a now-vanished Los Angeles, a city at once rural and sleazy. Although his cultural notoriety at one point equaled that of Kenneth Anger or Jack Smith, Halsted’s star waned in the 1980s with the emergence of a more commercial gay porn industry. After the death from AIDS of his long-time partner, lover, spouse (and tormentor) Joey Yale in 1986, Halsted committed suicide in 1989. In Halsted Plays Himself, acclaimed artist and filmmaker William E. Jones documents his quest to capture the elusive public and private personas of Halsted—to zero in on an identity riddled with contradictions. Jones assembles a narrative of a long-gone gay lifestyle and an extinct Hollywood underground, when independent films were still possible, and the boundary between experimental and pornographic was not yet established. The book also depicts what sexual liberation looked like at a volatile point in time—and what it looked like when it collapsed. The revised and expanded edition of Halsted Plays Himself includes material that came to light since the book’s first publication, including details about the restoration of Halsted’s films by the Museum of Modern Art, the true identities of several key figures in his life, new testimony from family members, and the rediscovery of his feature film Truck It (1973), previously considered lost.

An archive and annotation of Black music-performance culture, produced alongside Harmony Holiday’s first solo museum exhibition, Black Backstage.Life of the Party is an archive and annotation of Black music-performance culture—its poetics and its realities and its ruins, both seen and unseen. Produced concurrent with Black Backstage, Harmony Holiday’s first solo museum exhibition, the book acts as a blueprint, a script, and a ledger for this exhibition as well as a stand-alone record of the territory it covers. Holiday assembles artifacts from this tradition, especially found photographs taken of artists backstage, to tell the story of the culture within the culture, retrieving a secret history of the gestures, murmurs, shouts, and reversals that occur offstage and off the record. Colliding image, text, and even audio (in an album accompaniment to the book that Holiday will also produce as part of this series of works), Life of the Party reveals the backstage as by turns mundane, vulgar, and glorious: a site of sacred ritual behind the spectacle of performance.

Artist Reynaldo Rivera's second monograph, collecting almost four decades of his intimate and illicit "blue" works.Propiedad Privada showcases over one hundred photographs from Reynaldo Rivera's personal archive, introducing never-before-seen images alongside some of the artist's most iconic works. Shot from the 1980s to the present, the candid photographs in this raw, erotic series capture moments of privacy and pleasure. The series features the recurring figures of the artist's lovers, friends, and sisters, pictured in their most undressed states, and movingly portrays relationships that have since ended—loves later lost, glimpsed before their undoing. Closer to the present, the series also includes writers and artists who have more recently entered Rivera's life and agreed to pose seductively, performatively for his camera. Propiedad Privada is the artist's second monograph, following the widely praised Reynaldo Rivera: Notes for a Disappeared Cit (2020). Whereas Notes was an ode to Los Angeles, documenting a furtive subculture of house parties and gay clubs, Propiedad Privada is far more interior, capturing “performances” made for an audience of one.Rivera calls these photographs his “blue” works. There is a sultry moodiness to the series, as well as a fondness for the “indecent” and illicit, for moments that were not staged and not meant to be seen. In an era when self-documenting has become commonplace and candid photography is unhesitatingly shared with strangers, this body of work reaches for intimacy, privacy, self-use. It also upends the predominant representation of gay Latino male sexuality as macho and hardcore. Rivera's subjects, many of them photographed at the height of the AIDS epidemic, are presented neither as predator nor prey, but in more human terms of love, lust, longing, and self-fulfillment. A tender portrait of the artist and his community, Propiedad Privada is both elegiac and documentary. Some of Rivera's subjects have since died, yet are preserved here in peak vitality, fixed in moments of pleasure. Others have become lifelong muses, letting Rivera's lens be witness to their bodies' aging over the years. Many of the photographs depict Rivera himself, his image reappearing throughout the series in mirrors and self-portraits, another body subject to the transformations of time.Emerging from Rivera’s desire, as a young photographer, to defy taboos surrounding nudity and queer sexuality, Propiedad Privada encapsulates almost four decades of work. Complementing this quietly monumental archive is a curated assortment of texts, including an introduction by Lauren Mackler; a set of specially commissioned “blue” writings by authors Constance Debré, Devan Diaz, Raquel Gutierrez, Hedi El Kholti, Chris Kraus, Brontez Purnell, Reynaldo Rivera, Abdellah Taïa, Colm Tóibín, and Justin Torres; and a selection from poet Gil Cuadros’s canonical collection City of God.

A novel of dislocation and psychoanalytic self-revelation, of a fragmented life, strewn from Mexico City to the American Midwest, from California to the tip of Long Island.Exiled from her large extended family in Mexico City, the narrator of Secret Daughter was sent to the United States to live with an uncle’s family when she was six. Her family had hoped to protect the child from her mother’s acute mental illness. Slowly, she adapts to life in a small college town in the Midwest with her loving but weak uncle and his callous wife, but long summer trips back to her extended family in Mexico lead the girl to rightly believe that she is living two separate lives in two separate worlds. Adding to her disorientation is the fact that her adopted parents, when she is twelve, unceremoniously reveal to her that her birth father is, in fact, her presumed father’s best friend.Years later the narrator begins psychoanalysis to try to understand her perpetual state of displacement and what she has lost. As her analysis and her work on this book progress, she—and the reader—become fully immersed in the pain and confusion of self-revelation. Her seductively lyrical, sharp, and rigorous observations bring the world and mindscape of childhood thrillingly close, while that fractured childhood’s relation to the disruptions of her adulthood becomes achingly clear.

The first collected edition of legendary writer, actress, and adventurer Cookie Mueller's stories, featuring the entire contents of her 1990 book Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, alongside more than two dozen others, some previously unpublished.Legendary as an underground actress, female adventurer, and East Village raconteur, Cookie Mueller's first calling was to the written word: "I started writing when I was six and have never stopped completely," she once confessed. Muellerís 1990 Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, the first volume of the Semiotext(e) Native Agents series, was the largest collection of stories she compiled during her life. But it presented only a slice of Mueller's prolific work as a writer. This new, landmark volume collects all of Mueller's stories: from the original contents of Clear Water, to additional stories discovered by Amy Scholder for the posthumous anthology Ask Dr. Mueller, to selections from Mueller's art and advice columns for Details and the East Village Eye, to still "new" stories collected and published here for the first time. Olivia Laing's new introduction situates Mueller's writing within the context of her life—and our times. Thanks to recent documentaries like Mallory Curley's A Cookie Mueller Encyclopedia and Chloé Griffin's oral biography Edgewise, Mueller's life and work have been discovered by a new generation of readers. Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories returns essential source material to these readers, the archive of Mueller's writing itself. Mueller's many mise en scènes—the Baltimore of John Waters, post-Stonewall Provincetown, avant-garde Italy, 1980s New York, an America enduring Reagan and AIDS—patches together a singular personal history and a primer for others. As Laing writes in her introduction, Collected Stories amounts to "a how-to manual for a life ricocheting joyously off the rails . . . a live corrective to conformity, conservatism, and cruelty."

Ann Rower’s forgotten turn-of-the-millennium classic that looks at the lives of Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning with obsessed, louche brilliance.Maybe it was the car, the dangerous thrill of driving around, fast. I’m from the suburbs. I love driving, especially a red car, even a rental. Nothing is really mine. Maybe that’s what I love. Is that sick? I skidded a little, taking a turn too quick, looking at the water not the road. I knew the roads weren’t that safe. There had been many famous accidents out here. I almost did a Jackson—Jackson Pollock’s drunk car tree Saturday night death on this same road. But I was struggling to eat a muffin, not slugging from a pint like he must have been, while juggling his scared girlfriend and her terrified friend.Separating from her long-term partner Jack and beginning a passionate affair with a much younger female student, the narrator of Lee and Elaine takes time off to write. Leaving Manhattan for an off-season Springs, East Hampton rental and haunting the Green River Cemetery where artistic giants of the mid-twentieth century are buried, she becomes obsessed with the lives and friendship of Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, who were both artists and the wives of famous men. They were always so peripheral, she writes. Suddenly I wanted to find out about these women. Find them, period.First published by Serpent’s Tail’s in 2002, the novel was republished as an ebook in 2013 by Emily Books. Written with Rower’s trademark louche and brilliant, mouthy, and deceptively casual style, it remains a forgotten classic of the turn of the millennium. With piercing and hilarious straightforwardness, the narrator turns the process of unearthing art-world gossip and tearing down her own life’s substructure into a searching and original examination of sexuality and friendship, art and ambition.