Literature

The Cheap Eaters by Thomas Bernhard

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Description
Translated by Douglas Robertson. THE CHEAP-EATERS have been eating at the Vienna Public Kitchen for years, and true to their name, always the cheapest meals. They become the focus of Koller's scientific attention when he deviates one day from his usual path through the park, leading him to come upon the cheap-eaters and to realize that they must be the focal piece of his years-long, unwritten study of physiognomy. The narrator, a former school friend of Koller's, tells of his relationship with Koller in a single unbroken paragraph that is both dizzying and absorbing. In Koller, the narrator observes a "gradually ever-growing and utterly exclusive interest in thought... We can get close to such a person, but if we come into contact with him we will be repelled." Written in Bernhard's hyperbolic, darkly comic style, THE CHEAP-EATERS is a study of the limits of language and thought.


Author
Thomas Bernhard was one of the most important and unique writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1931, Bernhard published numerous novels and autobiographical writings, as well as short stories, plays, and poetry including THE CHEAP-EATERS (Spurl Editions, 2021) and ON THE MOUNTAIN (Marlboro/Noethwestern, 1991). Many of his prose works feature complex narrative structures and obsessive, misanthropic monologues. After years of chronic lung illness, Bernhard died in Austria in 1989.

Paperback: 104 pages
Publisher: Spurl Editions
Date Published: March 10, 2021
Subjects: Fiction Humorous Black Humor
EAN: 9781943679xxx
Physical Dimensions: 4.50" x 6.40"
Shipping Weight: 0.12 lbs.

Big City by Scot Sothern

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Description
Scot Sothern's profane western satire BIGCITY, is a novel with an unforgettable cast, including the wild Bitch Bantam, pulp writer Slab Pettibone, and his sidekick FuzzyWuzzy the bear in a tale as moving as it is scandalous. BIGCITY is the birth of feminism, robber barons, media stardom, and motion pictures, where teeming masses have come for a new life and a throw of the dice; with gritty realism and absurdist comedy, BIGCITY is a fantastical adventure and love story examining the dynamics of change and the politics of natural selection.

Author
Scot Sothern
is an American photographer and writer best known for his controversial black and white photographs of prostitutes in Southern California, whom he photographed from 1986 to 1990, and again in 2010 when he began photograph and writing about sex workers in Los Angeles Skid Row.

Priestess: Second Edition by Marcella Kroll

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Description
Priestess
is a concept visual art book meets witch’s grimoire, filled with antidotes, spells, mantras, prose, and original art intertwined within the pages by Artist and Psychic Medium, Marcella Kroll. A biography of a witch without being a memoir, this is a modern book of shadows updated for a new era.

Author
Marcella Kroll
is a multimedia artist, ritualist, psychic medium, and metaphysical teacher.

Quick and Easy Guide to Queer and Trans Identities

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Description

A great starting point for anyone curious about queer and trans life, and helpful for those already on their own journeys!


In this quick and easy guide to queer and trans identities, cartoonists Mady G and Jules Zuckerberg guide you through the basics of the LGBT+ world! Covering essential topics like sexuality, gender identity, coming out, and navigating relationships, this guide explains the spectrum of human experience through informative comics, interviews, worksheets, and imaginative examples. A great starting point for anyone curious about queer and trans life, and helpful for those already on their own journeys!

Author

Jules Zuckerberg is a cartoonist, illustrator, and craftsperson living in Brooklyn, NY. They grew up in the middle of the woods of New York State and have always drawn inspiration from their observations of flora and fauna. They've created playful illustrations for children's magazines, journal comics galore, and a number of self-published mini comics. Jules is so excited to debut the microcosm of the Sproutlings in A Quick & Easy Guide to Queer & Trans Identities!

Fucked At Birth by Dale Maharidge

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Description

"This is a book ripped from the headlines, from Black Lives Matter to recently thriving downtowns stripped of office workers and service workers. Those catching the brunt of it all, those with the steepest hills to climb, may have been fucked at birth. But for everyone, as Maharidge observes, the feeling of safety is folly. A sharp wake-up call to heed the new Depression and to recognize the humanity of those hit hardest." —Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW “Dale Maharidge takes us coast to coast in 2020, down highways along which he first reported decades ago. His honed class awareness—unrivaled among contemporary journalists—reveals that today's confluent health, economic and social crises are the logical conclusion to generations of unvalidated, untreated despair in a wealthy nation. Forget hollow commentary from detached television news studios in New York City. Fucked at Birth is the truth.” —Sarah Smarsh,Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Dale Maharidge has spent his career documenting the downward spiral of the American working class. Poverty is both reality and destiny for increasing numbers of people in the 2020s and, as Maharidge discovers spray-painted inside an abandoned gas station in the California desert, it is a fate often handed down from birth. Motivated by this haunting phrase—“Fucked at Birth”—Maharidge explores the realities of being poor in America in the coming decade, as pandemic, economic crisis and social revolution up-end the country. Part raw memoir, part dogged, investigative journalism,Fucked At Birth channels the history of poverty in America to help inform the voices Maharidge encounters daily. In an unprecedented time of social activism amid economic crisis, when voices everywhere are rising up for change, Maharidge’s journey channels the spirits of George Orwell and James Agee, raising questions about class, privilege, and the very concept of “upward mobility,” while serving as a final call to action. From Sacramento to Denver, Youngstown to New York City,Fucked At Birth dares readers to see themselves in those suffering most, and to finally—after decades of refusal—recalibrate what we are going to do about it.

Author

For two decades, Dale Maharidge has been one of America's leading chroniclers of poverty. Alongside photographer Michael Williamson, his bookAnd Their Children After Them won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1990, revisiting the places and people of depression-era America, depicted in Walker Evans's and James Agee'sLet Us Now Praise Famous Men. Also with Williamson, Maharidge wroteJourney to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, which Bruce Springsteen has credited as an influence for songs such as "Youngstown" and "The New Timer".

The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

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Description

Today’s gay youth have dozens of queer peer heroes, both fictional and real, but former gay teenager Grace Perry did not have that luxury. Instead, she had to search for queerness in the (largely straight) teen cultural phenomena the aughts had to offer: in Lindsay Lohan’s fall from grace, Gossip Girl, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl,” country-era Taylor Swift, and Seth Cohen jumping on a coffee cart. And, for better or worse, these touch points shaped her adult identity. She came out on the other side like many millennials did: in her words, gay as hell.

Throw on your Von Dutch hats and join Grace on a journey back through the pop culture moments of the aughts, before the cataclysmic shift in LGBTQ representation and acceptance—a time not so long ago, which many seem to forget.

Author
GRACE PERRY’s work has been published in a variety of outlets, including The New Yorker, New York magazine’s The Cut, BuzzFeed, Outside, and Eater. She is also a longtime, regular contributor to The Onion and the feminist satire site Reductress. Most of her work, comedy and journalism alike, interrogates the intersection of queerness, pop culture and the internet. She lives in LA.

Animal: A Novel by Lisa Taddeo

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Description

Joan has spent a lifetime enduring the cruelties of men. But when one of them commits a shocking act of violence in front of her, she flees New York City in search of Alice, the only person alive who can help her make sense of her past. In the sweltering hills above Los Angeles, Joan unravels the horrific event she witnessed as a child—that has haunted her every waking moment—while forging the power to finally strike back.

Animal is a depiction of female rage at its rawest, and a visceral exploration of the fallout from a male-dominated society.

Author

Lisa Taddeo is the author of Three Women. She has contributed to The New York Times, New York magazine, Esquire, Elle, Glamour, and many other publications. Her nonfiction has been included in the anthologies Best American Political Writing and Best American Sports Writing, and her short stories have won two Pushcart Prizes. She lives with her husband and daughter in New England.

Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland

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A physician's "remarkable" account of how right-wing backlash policies have mortal consequences (Minneapolis Star Tribune) -- even for the white voters they promise to help.

Description

In election after election, conservative white Americans have embraced politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But as physician Jonathan M. Metzl shows in Dying of Whiteness shows, the policies that result actually place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, Metzl examines how racial resentment has fueled progun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. e shows these policies' costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates.

Now updated with a new afterword, Dying of Whiteness demonstrates how much white America would benefit by emphasizing cooperation rather than chasing false promises of supremacy.

Author

Jonathan M. Metzl
is the Frederick B. Rentschler II professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University and director of its Center for Medicine, Health, and Society. He is the author of several books and a prominent expert on gun violence and mental illness. He hails from Kansas City, Missouri, and lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism

Description
Anarcho-Blackness
seeks to define the shape of a Black anarchism. Classical anarchism tended to avoid questions of race—specifically Blackness—as well as the intersections of race and gender. Bey addresses this lack, not by constructing a new cannon of Black anarchists but by outlining how anarchism and Blackness already share a certain subjective relationship to power, a way of understanding and inhabiting the world. Through the lens of Black feminist and transgender theory, he explores what wecan learn by making this kinship explicit, including how anarchism itself is transformed by the encounter. If the state is predicated on a racialized and gendered capitalism, its undoing can only be imagined and undertaken by a political theory that takes race and gender seriously.

Author
Marquis Bey is Assistant Professor of African American Literature and English at Northwestern University.

We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival

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Description

This collection of narrative essays by sex workers presents a crystal-clear rejoinder: there's never been a better time to fight for justice. Responding to the resurgence of the #MeToo movement in 2017, sex workers from across the industry—hookers and prostitutes, strippers and dancers, porn stars, cam models, Dommes and subs alike—complicate narratives of sexual harassment and violence, and expand conversations often limited to normative workplaces.

Writing across topics such as homelessness, motherhood, and toxic masculinity,We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival gives voice to the fight for agency and accountability across sex industries. With contributions by leading voices in the movement such as Melissa Gira Grant, Ceyenne Doroshow, Audacia Ray, femi babylon, April Flores, and Yin Q, this anthology explores sex work as work, and sex workers as laboring subjects in need of respect—not rescue.

About the Author

Natalie West
is a Los Angeles based writer and educator. She worked as a professional Dominatrix while obtaining her PhD in Gender Studies. Her personal essays have appeared in Salon, Autostraddle, Kink Academy, Columbia Journal, and them. She moonlights as a sex work, BDSM, and queer community authenticity consultant for film and television.

Tina Horn hosts and produces the long-running kink podcast Why Are People Into That?! She is also the creator and writer of the sci-fi comic book series SfSx (Safe Sex). Her reporting on sexual subcultures and politics has appeared in Rolling Stone, Hazlitt, Glamour, Jezebel, and elsewhere; she is the author of two nonfiction books and has contributed to numerous anthologies including the queer horror collection Theater of Terror and the feminist essay collection Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World. Horn has lectured on sex worker politics and queer BDSM identities at universities and community centers all over North America. She is a LAMBDA Literary Fellow, the recipient of two Feminist Porn Awards, and holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence. Originally from Northern California, she now lives in Brooklyn.