A Good War Is Hard to Find

A Good War Is Hard to Find The Art of Violence in America David Griffith In the wake of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, American leaders from different fields, politics, journalism, law, psychiatry struggled to understand what happened in the notorious prison, and why. In this astonishingly elegant and passionate series of essays, David Griffth contends that our society’s shift from language to...

All Ears

All Ears Criticism, Essays and Obituaries Dennis Cooper All Ears collects this important novelist’s lesser-known work as a journalist and essayist, and several new previously unpublished pieces. As a journalist, he is solid and well-formed. He has an approachable informality, unawed by massive celebrity. His straightforward interviews with Leonardo DiCaprio, Courtney Love, Keanu Reeves, and Bob Mould disarm...

America: A Prophecy

America: A Prophecy Sparrow, Edited by Marcus Boon America: A Prophecy is the long awaited collection from the writer Robert Christgau called, “one of the funniest men in Manhattan.” From a hilarious spiritual guide to New York City–written after Sparrow tried meditating at a dozen high-traffic landmarks–to the scientific and religious significance of the sky, Sparrow’s unique blend of...

Awake!

Awake! A Reader for the Sleepless edited by Steven Lee Beeber Fiction (including previously unpublished stories by Aimee Bender and Arthur Bradford); essays (from Yale neurobiologists to Priscilla Becker) and the probably true fictions (like Jonathan Ames’s masturbation solution to insomnia); comics (Howard Cruse, Shannon Wheeler); poetry (Charles Simic, Rebecca Wolff)…even Davy Rothbart of Found...

Bottoms Up

Bottoms Up Writing About Sex Edited by Diana Cage Bottoms Up: Writing About Sex follows 12 writers on an adventurous and unrepentant search for sexual intensity and intellectual fulfillment. As one short story writer follows a girl while she cruises the litter-strewn docks of Long Beach disguised as a fag, a poet imagines what if would be like to both be James Dean and be fucked by James Dean. In a third piece,...

Daily Negations

Daily Negations John S. Hall Like many self-help books, Daily Negations can be kept by the toilet and read each morning or evening, depending on your personal habits. Or it could be kept by the bed, or incorporated into one’s daily prayer or meditation routine. The book serves at least two functions. First, Daily Negations will show people who have a negative outlook on life that they are not alone....

Final Girl

Final Girl Daphne Gottlieb Final Girl is the last girl left alive in the syntax of the “slasher” traces the history of the femme fatale in a sequence of poems and stories that display the verve and wit readers have come to expect from Gottlieb. In Final Girl Gottlieb is the survivor, the one who remains to tell the story: what was done to others, what was done to her, what might yet be done to her. Sexy...

Gamers

Gamers Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels Editor: Shanna Compton     Featuring: Jim Andrews Katie Degentesh Drew Gardner Ernest Hilbert Shannon Holman J. Brandon Housley Shelley Jackson Luis Jaramillo K. Thor Jenson Thomas Kelly Nic Kelman Roland Kelts Mark Lamoureux Aaron McCollough Jim Munroe Marc Nesbitt Daniel Nester Whitney Pastorek Richard Powers Todd Rogers Laurel...

Half/Life

Half/Life Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes Laurel Snyder Half/Lifecreates and brands a community that has, until now, not even recognized itself as such. This book takes a disconnected group of people, a Diaspora of artists, and turns the group into a community with a common bond.Half/Life is an anthology of personal stories, written by authors who have all shared the experience of being raised in a half-Jewish...

Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys

Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money and Sex Edited by David Henry Sterry and R.J. Martin Jr. Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sexwas born in the basement of SAGE – Standing Against Global Exploitation – a San Francisco nonprofit dedicated to helping people who have worked in the sex business. Their...

Hotel Theory

Hotel Theory Wayne Koestenbaum Hotel Theory is actually two books in one: a meditation on the meaning of hotels, and a dime-novel (Hotel Women), featuring Lana Turner and Liberace.  The two books, fiction and nonfiction, run concurrently, in twin columns.   The nonfiction ruminations on hotels are divided into eight dossiers, composed of short takes on the presence of hotels in the author’s dreams, in...

Open Letters to America

Open Letters to America Essays by Kevin Powell “Change” has swept America at the end of this first decade of the 21st century, and Kevin Powell, one of our nation’s leading voices, has been both participant and observer. Open Letters to America is Powell’s redemption song for the society he believes possible in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s historic election. In the first essay, Powell issues a...

That’s Revolting!

That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation Edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Ten years ago one might not have imagined the largest national gay rights lobbying group (Human Rights Campaign) endorsing a right-wing Republican Senatorial candidate (Al D’Amato in New York), or the San Francisco Pride parade adopting the Budweiser advertising slogan as its official theme (2002). As...

The Devil Gets His Due

The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler Leslie Fiedler, Edited by Samuele F. S. Pardini Despite his often-unacknowledged influence, academics, intellectuals, and the general audience in America and abroad still read Leslie Fiedler’s work and draw on its concepts. He inspired both reverence (Leonard Cohen penned: “leaning over the American moonlight / like the shyest gargoyle / who...

What Would Bill Hicks Say?

What Would Bill Hicks Say? Edited by Ben Mack and Kristin Pulkkinen If Bill Hicks were alive today, what would Bill Hicks say? In 250 words or less, and in a picture or less, writers, comedians, musicians, and cartoonists rant and let it fly. Fulminating about politics and drugs and smoking and pathetic celebrities, fans capture the essence of Bill Hicks.Just emerging from underground cult status when he died at...