en-US Wed, 09 Apr 2025 05:55:16 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 436806
Story of the Eye, written in 1928, is his best-known work; it is unashamedly surrealistic, both disgusting and fascinating, and packed with seemingly endless violations. It's something of an underground classic, rediscovered by each new generation. Most recently, the Icelandic pop singer Björk Guðdmundsdóttir cites Story of the Eye as a major inspiration: she made a music video that alludes to Bataille's erotic uses of eggs, and she plans to read an excerpt for an album.

Warning: Story of the Eye is graphically sexual, and is only suited for adults who are not easily offended.]]> 103 Georges Bataille 0872862097 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 soon, currently-reading 3.71 1928
author: Georges Bataille
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1928
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
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]]> 60843483 WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

The diary of one of France’s most important, award-winning writers during the year she had a passionate and secret love affair with a Russian diplomat.

Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters, saying “his desire for me is the only thing I can be sure of.� She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives only to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death.
Ìý
Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any that she has written, a haunting, desperate view of strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.]]> 240 Annie Ernaux 1644212196 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 4 soon-2 3.47 2001
author: Annie Ernaux
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/09
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: soon-2
review:

]]> 56616 Double Indemnity gives us an X-ray view of guilt, of duplicity, and of the kind of obsessive, loveless love that devastates everything it touches. First published in 1935, this novel reaffirmed James M. Cain as a virtuoso of the roman noir.

Walter Huff was an insurance salesman with an unfailing instinct for clients who might be in trouble, and his instinct led him to Phyllis Nirdlinger. Phyllis wanted to buy an accident policy on her husband. Then she wanted her husband to have an accident. Walter wanted Phyllis. To get her, he would arrange the perfect murder and betray everything he had ever lived for.]]> 115 James M. Cain 0679723226 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.07 1936
author: James M. Cain
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1936
rating: 0
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]]> 25807 The Stranger - is the fever-pitched tale of a drifter who stumbles into a job, into an erotic obsession, and into a murder.]]> 116 James M. Cain 0752861743 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.79 1934
author: James M. Cain
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1934
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
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]]> 9464733 When a plane crash strands thirteen teen beauty contestants on a mysterious island, they struggle to survive, to get along with one another, to combat the island's other diabolical occupants, and to learn their dance numbers in case they are rescued in time for the competition.]]> 396 Libba Bray 0439895979 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.62 2011
author: Libba Bray
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
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]]> 22713921 The Image of a Drawn Sword is Jocelyn Brooke's only true novel. Yet in this exploration of friendship, sexuality, guilt, alienation and power he reveals an underlying autobiographical element in which his own physical experiences in the army are translated into a Kafkaesque vision where fantasy and reality are disturbingly blurred.]]> 144 Jocelyn Brooke 0140062947 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.00 1950
author: Jocelyn Brooke
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1950
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> 2140215 208 Michael Nelson 0854490205 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.49 1958
author: Michael Nelson
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.49
book published: 1958
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> 97459 The Temple and dated 1929. Stephen Spender immediately obtained a copy of his old draft manuscript � admired in the early thirties by his London publisher, but remaining unpublished because of the sensitivity of the contents and fear of libel actions � and read it with astonished pleasure. He then rewrote it in part, taking care not to diminish its ardent youthfulness, its innocence and cynicism, in the immediacy of its view of the last days of Weimar Germany, on the eve of Hitler's rise to power.

It is, as one might expect, and autobiographical novel. Vividly present along with the protagonist, and not much disguised, are the two other members of the famous triumvirate Auden-Spender-Isherwood. Here are the experiences of a twenty-year-old Oxford poet on vacation in Hamburg, who then travels down the Rhine with two companions. We see his response to the bronzed young Germans � the children of the sun � their friendships, parties, sexuality, naturism (especially their cult of the naked body), and all the gauche hedonism that was soon to vanish under the Nazis.

Clearly The Temple is a novel of historical and literary importance,. But it is, as well, an entertaining and moving story of a young man's awakening.]]> 224 Stephen Spender 0802135242 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.82 1988
author: Stephen Spender
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> 2648111 95 Nelson Rodrigues ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.98 1943
author: Nelson Rodrigues
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1943
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> 187219 95 Nelson Rodrigues 8520906478 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.16 1960
author: Nelson Rodrigues
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1960
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> 1000025
This edition includes a foreword by W.H. Auden and an Introduction by Corvo biographer A.J.A. Symons.]]> 299 Frederick Rolfe 0306802589 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.86 1934
author: Frederick Rolfe
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1934
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> 9757482
When it was first published in 1947, The Age of Anxiety ―W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem―immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named. Beginning as a conversation among four strangers in a barroom on New York's Third Avenue, Auden's analysis of Western culture during the Second World War won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired a symphony by Leonard Bernstein as well as a ballet by Jerome Robbins. Yet reviews of the poem were sharply divided, and today, despite its continuing fame, it is unjustly neglected by readers.

This volume―the first annotated, critical edition of the poem―introduces this important work to a new generation of readers by putting it in historical and biographical context and elucidating its difficulties. Alan Jacobs's introduction and thorough annotations help today's readers understand and appreciate the full richness of a poem that contains some of Auden's most powerful and beautiful verse, and that still deserves a central place in the canon of twentieth-century poetry.]]> 200 W.H. Auden 069113815X ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.02 1947
author: W.H. Auden
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1947
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> 59096376 124 Hervé Guibert 1943679142 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.03 2013
author: Hervé Guibert
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> 206013114 It’s mid morning. Cool. Not many coffee bars open. I, the brave one, god of any telephone kiosk, walk down Dean Street, see the man of the day; raincoat, shoulders round, hair black, falling out; heavenly blue eyes cast down into his own hell. Bold as brass I cross the road stopping dead in front of him. He raises his eyes, so sadly that I love him for it.

Leda is lost. Bouncing from job to job, from coffee bar to house party, he spends his days watching the hours pass and waiting for the night to arrive. Trysts in the rubble of a bombsite follow hours spent in bedsits with near strangers, as Leda is forced to find intimacy in unusual places.

Semi-homeless and estranged from his given family, he relies on the support of his chosen one: a community of older gay men and divorced women who feed and clothe him, gently encouraging him to find a foothold in a society which excludes him at every turn. And then there is Daniel, a buttoned-up man of the Lord, for whom Leda nurses an unrequited obsession � one which sends him spiralling into self-destruction.

This newly discovered, never-before-published novel � which pre-dates the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 � is a portrait of a lost Soho, as well as an important document of queer, working-class life, from a voice long overlooked.

Mark Hyatt was born in South London in 1940, and died by suicide outside Blackburn in 1972. His selected poems, So Much For Life, edited by Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts, is forthcoming with Nightboat Books (2023). Hyatt received little or no formal education, and learned to read and write as an adult. Love, Leda (c. 1965) is his only known novel.]]> 144 Mark Hyatt 1643622455 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.67 2023
author: Mark Hyatt
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 2287 Other Voices, Other Rooms is a literary touchstone of the mid-twentieth century. In this semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel, thirteen-year-old Joel Knox, after losing his mother, is sent from New Orleans to live with the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at Skully’s Landing, the decaying mansion in rural Alabama, his father is nowhere to be found. Instead, Joel meets his morose stepmother, Amy, eccentric cousin Randolph, and a defiant little girl named Idabel, who soon offers Joel the love and approval he seeks.

Fueled by a world-weariness that belied Capote’s tender age, this novel tempers its themes of waylaid hopes and lost innocence with an appreciation for small pleasures and the colorful language of its time and place.

This new edition, featuring an enlightening Introduction by John Berendt, offers readers a fresh look at Capote’s emerging brilliance as a writer of protean power and effortless grace.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 232 Truman Capote 0679745645 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.80 1948
author: Truman Capote
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1948
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> 1476658 Bertram Cope's Year. Though Fuller was well known as an accomplished realist and had published twelve previous novels, this was his first to address sexual ambivalence. Bertram Cope, a young college teaching assistant, is befriended by Medora Phillips, a rich society type who tries to match him with three eligible young women. However, Bertram is emotionally attached only to his friend and housemate, Arthur Lemoyne. The portrayal of various friendships makes it an ironic and witty comedy of manners.]]> 320 Henry Blake Fuller 1885983263 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.66 1919
author: Henry Blake Fuller
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1919
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> 203613915 A probing, inspiring exploration of mysticism not as religious practice but as a mode of experience and way of life by one of the most provactive philosophical thinkers of our time.Why mysticism? Evelyn Underhill defined mysticism as “experience in its most intense form,â€� and in his new book the philosopher Simon Critchley poses a simple question to the Wouldn’t you like to taste this intensity? Wouldn’t you like to be lifted up and out of yourself into a sheer feeling of aliveness, both your life and those of the creatures that surround you? If so, it might be well worthwhile trying to learn what is meant by mysticism and how it can shift, elevate, and deepen the sense of our lives.ÌýMysticism is not primarily a theoretical issue. It's not a question of religious belief but of felt experience and daily practice. A rough and ready definition of mysticism is that it is a way of systematically freeing yourself of your standard habits, your usual fancies and imaginings so as to see what is there and stand with what is there ecstatically. Mysticism is the practical possibility of the achievement of a fluid openness between thought and existence.ÌýThis is a book about trying to get outside oneself, to lose oneself, while knowing that the self is not something that can ever be fully lost. It is also book about Julian of Norwich, Anne Carson, Annie Dillard, and T. S. Eliot, and how writing and poetry can help to show us the way there. It is a book full of learning, puzzlement, pleasure, and wonder. It opens the door to mysticism not as something unworldly and unimaginable, but as a way of life. Mysticism as start now.]]> 336 Simon Critchley 1681378248 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 currently-reading 3.80
author: Simon Critchley
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.80
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> 124006343 256 Zuzanna Ginczanka 1954218109 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 5.00
author: Zuzanna Ginczanka
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/13
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]]> 380994 A Lover's Discourse, at its 1978 publication, was revolutionary: Roland Barthes made unprecedented use of the tools of structuralism to explore the whimsical phenomenon of love. Rich with references ranging from Goethe's Werther to Winnicott, from Plato to Proust, from Baudelaire to Schubert, A Lover's Discourse artfully draws a portrait in which every reader will find echoes of themselves.]]> 234 Roland Barthes 0374521611 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 currently-reading 4.43 1977
author: Roland Barthes
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.43
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/06
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]]> 28446322 Unfolding in animated, crystalline prose, an emotionally raw, devastatingly powerful memoir of one young woman's extraordinary coming of age—a tale of gender and identity, freedom and addiction, rebellion and survival in the 1980s and 1990s, when punk, poverty, heroin, and art collided in the urban bohemia of New York's Lower East Side.

Born into the beautiful bedlam of downtown New York in the eighties, iO Tillett Wright came of age at the intersection of punk, poverty, heroin, and art. This was a world of self-invented characters, glamorous superstars, and strung-out sufferers—ground zero of drag and performance art. Still, no personality was more vibrant and formidable than iO's mother's. Rhonna, a showgirl and young widow, was a mercurial, erratic Glamazon and iO's fiercest defender, her only authority in a world with few boundaries and even fewer indicators of normal life. At the center of Darling Days is the remarkable relationship between a fiery kid and her domineering Ma—a bond defined by freedom and control, excess and sacrifice; by heartbreaking deprivation, agonizing rupture, and, ultimately, forgiveness.

Darling Days is also a provocative examination of culture and identity, and of the cour­age and resilience of a child listening closely to her deepest self. When a group of boys refuse to let six-year-old iO play ball, she instantly adopts a new persona, becoming a boy named Ricky—a choice her parents support and celebrate. It is the start of a profound exploration of gender and identity through the tenderest years, and the beginning of a life invented and reinvented at every step.]]> 400 iO Tillett Wright 0062368222 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.25 2016
author: iO Tillett Wright
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/21
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]]> 60582780
Based on Cărtărescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel’s investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.

The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide.

Combining fiction with autobiography and historyâ€� the scientists Nicolae Tesla and George Boole, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript―Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the Communist present.]]> 639 Mircea Cărtărescu 1646052021 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.32 2015
author: Mircea Cărtărescu
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 10287367 150 William S. Burroughs ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 4 3.39 1985
author: William S. Burroughs
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.39
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/07
date added: 2025/02/19
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]]> 58678702 67 Annie Ernaux 1644213575 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.98 1991
author: Annie Ernaux
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/18
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]]> 150252
This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voiceâ€�29 “tangosâ€� of narrative verse that take us vividly through erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only award-winning poet Anne Carson could create a work that takes on the oldest of lyrical subjects–love–and make it this powerful, this fresh, this devastating.]]> 160 Anne Carson 0375707573 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 5 favorites 4.22 2001
author: Anne Carson
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/21
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: favorites
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]]> 61049 Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.

Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is.

"A profound love story . . . sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender." -- The New York Times Book Review

"A deeply odd and immensely engaging book. . . . [Carson] exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday."ÌýÌý-- The Village Voice

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

National book Critics Circle Award Finalist]]> 160 Anne Carson 037570129X ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 4 soon 4.28 1998
author: Anne Carson
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/03
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: soon
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]]> 303941 267 David Wojnarowicz 0802136710 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 5 soon-2 4.39 1998
author: David Wojnarowicz
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/14
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: soon-2
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]]> 28524605
In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.]]> 114 Ben Lerner 1910695157 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 4 3.80 2016
author: Ben Lerner
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> 385672 263 George Oppen 0811206157 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.53 1972
author: George Oppen
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.53
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 20743896
Heavily illustrated from Jarman's collection of postcards, the book combines text and visual imagery in a way which foreshadows his subsequent style as an artist and filmmaker. With the majority of the first edition having been destroyed by Jarman, this new edition makes available a missing, significant piece of his oeuvre.

The facsimile retains the book's original format, with a silver mirror cover, and an image accompanying each poem, printed in a striking green ink. Additional material comes in the form of a new Foreword and Afterwords by Sophie Mayer, Tony Peake and Keith Collins.

A Finger in the Fishes Mouth is the only book being published as part of Jarman 2014, a year-long season of events to celebrate Jarman's life and work. Limited to 700 copies.]]> 148 Derek Jarman ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 4 hbd derek jarman 4.05 2014
author: Derek Jarman
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/02/01
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hbd derek jarman
]]> 770397 The Man With Night Sweats shows him writing at the height of his powers, equally in command of classical forms and of looser, more colloquial measures, and ready to address a wide range of themes, both intimate and social. The book ends with a set of poems about the deaths of friends from AIDS. With their unflinching directness, compassion and grace, they are among the most moving statements yet to have been provoked by the disease.]]> 96 Thom Gunn 0571162576 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 4 4.02 1992
author: Thom Gunn
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/26
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the hug, the differences, odysseus on hermes, a sketch of the great dejection, the life of the otter, tenderloin, barren leaves, the man with the night sweats, lament, sacred heart
]]> 46025
What follows is a compulsive journey of discovery, decadence, and deviousness that leads Rilke into a dark underworld of transvestite clubs, seedy bars, and porn shops. In this hidden city haunted by a host of vividly drawn characters, Rilke comes face to face with the dark desires and illicit urges that lurk behind even the most respectable facades.

]]> 294 Louise Welsh 1841954748 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.55 2002
author: Louise Welsh
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 60907139
In three poems, one play, and three short stories, Stéphane Bouquet’s Common Life offers a lively, searching vision of contemporary life, politics, and sociality. At a moment at which the fabric of everyday social life is increasingly threatened across the globe, this book is a necessary exercise of the literary imagination: what, it asks, does it mean to inhabit the world together today? With humor and sincerity, Common Life imagines the utopias of collectivity, friendship and love that might enable hope for the present and the future.]]> 128 Stéphane Bouquet 164362153X ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.25 2016
author: Stéphane Bouquet
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/26
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]]> 50763367 114 Stéphane Bouquet 1643620053 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.79 2013
author: Stéphane Bouquet
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/26
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]]> 51542245 A rollicking, sexy memoir of a young poet making his way in 1960s New York City

When he graduated from Columbia in 1958, John Giorno was handsome, charismatic, ambitious, and eager to soak up as much of Manhattan's art and culture as possible. Poetry didn't pay the bills, so he worked on Wall Street, spending his nights at the happenings, underground movie premiers, art shows, and poetry readings that brought the city to life. An intense romantic relationship with Andy Warhol—not yet the global superstar he would soon become—exposed Giorno to even more of the downtown scene, but after starring in Warhol's first movie, Sleep, they drifted apart. Giorno soon found himself involved with Robert Rauschenberg and later Jasper Johns, both relationships fueling his creativity. He quickly became a renowned poet in his own right, working at the intersection of literature and technology, freely crossing genres and mediums alongside the likes of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin.

Twenty-five years in the making, and completed shortly before Giorno's death in 2019, Great Demon Kings is the memoir of a singular cultural pioneer: an openly gay man at a time when many artists remained closeted and shunned gay subject matter, and a devout Buddhist whose faith acted as a rudder during a life of tremendous animation, one full of fantastic highs and frightening lows. Studded with appearances by nearly every it-boy and girl of the downtown scene (including a moving portrait of a decades-long friendship with Burroughs), this book offers a joyous, life-affirming, and sensational look at New York City during its creative peak, narrated in the unforgettable voice of one of its most singular characters.]]> 368 John Giorno 0374166307 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.87 2020
author: John Giorno
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> 28215694 A Terrace in Rome describes the tormented life of Geoffroy Meaume, a 17th-century engraver of encrypted shadows and erotic prints. After a passionate affair in his youth concludes with his face being burned by acid thrown by his lover's jealous fiancé, Meaume undertakes a lifetime of wandering, his psyche forever engraved by the memory of the woman who spurned him. With a face of boiled leather and a mind haunted by a nightmare of desire, he devotes himself to the black-and-white world of etchings and mezzotints, forsaking the paradise of color to engage in a science of shadows. This fragmented narrative of a man attacked by images is related in 47 short chapters which themselves act as engravings; a tale told by an antiquarian, full of fragmented vision and sexual hell.

First published in French in 2000, A Terrace in Rome received the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française that same year, and went on to be translated into 19 languages. This is its first appearance in English. Pascal Quignard (born 1948) has written over 60 books of fiction, essays, and his own particular genre of philosophical reflection that straddles the personal journal, historical narrative and poetic theory. His books in English include Albucius, All the World's Mornings, The Sexual Night, Sex and Terror, On Wooden Tablets: Apronenia Avitia, and The Salon in Wurttemberg, as well as the multiple volumes of his ongoing book project The Last Kingdom, which, to date, includes The Roving Shadows, The Silent Crossing and Abysses.]]> 117 Pascal Quignard 1939663164 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.00 2000
author: Pascal Quignard
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> 152653 First published in 1968, this book begins with a beguiling thirty-three page essay and has five fictions: the celebrated novella "The Pedersen Kid," "Mrs. Mean," "Icicles," "Order of Insects," and the title story.

]]> 240 William H. Gass 0879233745 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.03 1968
author: William H. Gass
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1968
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> 128971 368 Kurt Seligmann 0517150328 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.91 1948
author: Kurt Seligmann
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1948
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> 85862 Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Delany tackles the question of why public restrooms, peepshows, and tree-filled parks are necessary to a city's physical and psychological landscape. He argues that starting in 1985, New York City criminalized peep shows and sex movie houses to clear the way for the rebuilding of Times Square. Delany's critique reveals how Times Square is being "renovated" behind the scrim of public safety while the stage is occupied by gentrification. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue paints a portrait of a society dismantling the institutions that promote communication between classes, and disguising its fears of cross-class contact as "family values." Unless we overcome our fears and claim our "community of contact," it is a picture that will be replayed in cities across America.]]> 203 Samuel R. Delany 0814719201 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 currently-reading 4.18 1999
author: Samuel R. Delany
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 217721558 150 Marouane Bakhti 1739516133 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 4 4.10
author: Marouane Bakhti
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/16
date added: 2024/12/16
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]]> 260091
Camus captures the immediacy of sexual experiences with French farm boys and businessmen, New York "cowboys," California intellectuals, leather boys, and amyl-sniffing queens in narratives filled with wit and affection. Camus does not justify, plead or interpret; he simply tells all -- from the first interested glances and small talk to the details of physical intimacy and final partings.

Tricks is new, unique, important--an original experiment in the depiction of sexuality. It is the first book to chart this one aspect of contemporary gay life directly and objectively without the distortions of sentimentality, sensationalism, or fantasy.]]> 252 Renaud Camus 1852424141 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.87 1981
author: Renaud Camus
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6344588 211 Keith Waldrop 0520258789 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.94 2009
author: Keith Waldrop
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 9990667 80 Dawn Lundy Martin 0984459847 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.26 2011
author: Dawn Lundy Martin
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/15
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]]> 63579599 A long awaited collection of poems by Mark Hyatt, one of the great lost writers of mid-century British poetry.

Scarcely published in his lifetime, Hyatt’s work ­survives thanks to the intervention of poets and friends who saved his manuscripts and kept his poems in circulation. Queer in the decades before Gay Liberation; Romani; incarcerated in prisons and asylums; illiterate into adulthood: it’s tempting to read Hyatt according to the familiar script of the doomed poet, resounding with loneliness and isolation. But his poetry―“hot and tender,â€� funny and sad―tells another story: of love, liberatory commitment, and desire.]]> 224 Mark Hyatt ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.54 2023
author: Mark Hyatt
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/15
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]]> 6256534 96 Brian Teare 0520258762 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.29 2009
author: Brian Teare
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/15
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]]> 235836 112 Brian Teare 0299194043 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.16 2003
author: Brian Teare
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/15
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]]> 9554807 73 Brian Teare 1934103160 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.52 2010
author: Brian Teare
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/15
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]]> 61284599
David Melnick's Nice: Collected Poems spans twenty crucial years of gay life and experimentation with poetic form, bringing together four masterworks of American literature: Eclogs (1967-70), ten episodes in the urban afterlife of pastoral; PCOET (1972), written in an unknown tongue, verse for a world that's yet to be; Men in Aida (1983-85), Melnick's masterpiece, a giddy epic of queer community; and A Pin's Fee (1988), a backward glance and elegy, a cry of pain, howl of anger.]]> 240 David Melnick 1643621572 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.43 2023
author: David Melnick
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/15
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]]> 181569899 0 John Wieners 1739702972 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 5 4.14
author: John Wieners
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/15
date added: 2024/12/15
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]]> 25322085 Wayne Koestenbaum is one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today. His alarmingly focused attention to detail goes beyond lunacy into hilarious and brilliant clarity. John Waters"]]> 416 Wayne Koestenbaum 1937658406 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.05 2015
author: Wayne Koestenbaum
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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]]> 179270385
This book of thirty-six poetic bulletins by the humiliation-advice-giver Wayne Koestenbaum will teach you how to cruise, how to dream, how to decode a crowded consciousness, how to find nuggets of satisfaction in unaccustomed corners, and how to sew a language glove roomy enough to contain materials gathered while meandering. Koestenbaum wrote many of these poems while walking around New York City. He’d jot down phrases in a notebook or dictate them into his phone. At home, he’d incorporate these fragmented gleanings into overflowing quasi sonnets. Therefore each poem functions as a coded diary entry, including specific references to sidewalk events and peripatetic perceptions. Flirting, remembering, eavesdropping, gazing, squeezing, Koestenbaum invents a novel way to cram dirty liberty into the tight yet commodious space of the sonnet, a fourteen-lined cruise ship that contains ample suites for behavior modification, libidinal experiment, aura-filled memory orgies, psychedelic Bildungsromane, lap dissolves, archival plunges, and other mental saunterings that conjure the unlikely marriage of Kenneth Anger and Marianne Moore. Carnal pudding, anyone? These engorged lyrics don’t rhyme; and though each builds on a carapace of fourteen lines, many of the lines spawn additional, indented tributaries, like hoop earrings dangling from the stanzasâ€� lobes. Koestenbaum’s poems are comic, ribald, compressed, symphonic. They take liberties with ordinary language, and open up new pockets for sensation in the sorrowing overcoat of the “now.â€� the training wheels have been removed from poetry’s bicycle, and the wheeling flâneur is finally allowed a word pie equal to fantasy's appetite. Stubble—a libidinal detail—matters when you’re stranded on the archipelago of your most unsanctioned yet tenaciously harbored impulses.]]> 104 Wayne Koestenbaum 1635902061 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.00
author: Wayne Koestenbaum
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.00
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]]> 10635115
The lives of people both famous and obscure are filled with scarlet-letter moments when their dirty laundry sees daylight. In these moments we not only witness the reversibility of "success," of prominence, but also come to visceral terms with our own vulnerable selves. We can't stop watching the scene of shame, identifying with it and absorbing its nearness, and relishing our imagined immunity from its stain, even as we acknowledge the universal, embarrassing predicament of living in our own bodies. With an unusual, disarming blend of autobiography and cultural commentary, noted poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum takes us through a spectrum of mortifying circumstances―in history, literature, art, current events, music, film, and his own life. His generous disclosures and brilliant observations go beyond prurience to create a poetics of abasement. Inventive, poignant, erudite, and playful, Humiliation plunges into one of the most disquieting of human experiences, with reflections at once emboldening and humane.]]> 184 Wayne Koestenbaum 0312429223 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.83 2011
author: Wayne Koestenbaum
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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]]> 1126732
Hardly a day goes by without the media focusing an often sympathetic beam on gay life--and, with AIDS, on gay death. Gay plays on Broadway, big book awards to authors writing on gay subjects, Hollywood movies with gay themes, gay and lesbian studies at dozens of universities, openly gay columnists and even editors at national mainstream publications, political leaders speaking in favor of gay rights: it seems that straight America has finally begun to listen to homosexual America.

Still, Bersani notes, not only has homophobia grown more virulent, but many gay men and lesbians themselves are reluctant to be identified as homosexuals. In Homos, he studies the historical, political, and philosophical grounds for the current distrust, within the gay community, of self-identifying moves, for the paradoxical desire to be invisibly visible. While acknowledging the dangers of any kind of group identification (if you can be singled out, you can be disciplined), Bersani argues for a bolder presentation of what it means to be gay. In their justifiable suspicion of labels, gay men and lesbians have nearly disappeared into their own sophisticated awareness of how they have been socially constructed. By downplaying their sexuality, gays risk self-immolation--they will melt into the stifling culture they had wanted to contest.

In his chapters on contemporary queer theory, on Foucault and psychoanalysis, on the politics of sadomasochism, and on the image of "the gay outlaw" in works by Gide, Proust, and Genet, Bersani raises the exciting possibility that same-sex desire by its very nature can disrupt oppressive social orders. His spectacular theory of "homo-ness" will be of interest to straights as well as gays, for it designates a mode of connecting to the world embodied in, but not reducible to, a sexual preference. The gay identity Bersani advocates is more of a force--as such, rather cool to the modest goal of social tolerance for diverse lifestyles--which can lead to a massive redefining of sociality itself, and of what we might expect from human communities.]]> 208 Leo Bersani 0674406206 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.84 1995
author: Leo Bersani
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/08
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]]> 2549298 ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý In pursuit of new forms of intimacy they take up a range of concerns across a variety of contexts. To test the hypothesis that the essence of the analytic exchange is intimate talk without sex, they compare Patrice Leconte’s film about an accountant mistaken for a psychoanalyst, Intimate Strangers , with Henry James’s classic novella The Beast in the Jungle . A discussion of the radical practice of barebacking—unprotected anal sex between gay men—delineates an intimacy that rejects the personal. Even serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and the Bush administration’s war on terror enter the scene as the conversation turns to the way aggression thrills and gratifies the ego. Finally, in a reading of Socratesâ€� theory of love from Plato’s Phaedrus , Bersani and Phillips call for a new form of intimacy which they term “impersonal narcissismâ€�: a divestiture of the ego and a recognition of one’s non-psychological potential self in others. This revolutionary way of relating to the world, they contend, could lead to a new human freedom by mitigating the horrifying violence we blithely accept as part of human nature.
ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Charmingly persuasive and daringly provocative, Intimacies is a rare opportunity to listen in on two brilliant thinkers as they explore new ways of thinking about the human psyche.]]> 144 Leo Bersani 0226043517 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.81 2008
author: Leo Bersani
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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]]> 208176495 160 Ariana Reines ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 4 soon-2 4.52
author: Ariana Reines
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.52
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/03
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves: soon-2
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]]> 196674636 Survival is a moral quandary in this jagged, otherworldly debut charting forbidden love during an apocalypse.

In a near future devastated by war and unspecified natural disaster, a young man and his mother cling to survival at the edge of a forest. Society is militarized and dangerous, with men with shaved heads patrolling the land as families are uprooted and nature is all but decimated. The young man spends his days helping his mother, who is traumatized from her experience working in the ominous Factory, and exchanging letters with his lover, Boris, who lives in a city on the other side of the forest. It’s barely a life, but it’s life nonetheless.

After a brutal act of desperate violence and the arrival of armed men at their doorstep, the young man leaves his mother and finds Boris, who travels with him through the forest to the city. Escaping slavers and trekking through the empty landscape, the two find moments of intimacy despite their circumstances. But as their survival comes with increasingly violent demands, the young man is forced to confront whether, in his effort to stay alive, he’s become the very thing he’s fought to escape.

An award-winning, breakout novel from a blazingly original Catalonian poet, Pol Guasch’s Napalm in the Heart is breathtaking in its beauty and devastation. Sparse, quick, and wrestling with big ideas, from the despoiling of the environment and totalitarianism to queerness and manhood, Guasch’s debut is an unrelenting and extraordinarily artful exploration of the moral murkiness of survival.]]> 256 Pol Guasch 0374612951 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.45 2021
author: Pol Guasch
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/03
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]]> 25349230 80 Felix Bernstein ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.16 2015
author: Felix Bernstein
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/27
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]]> 7152818
A founder of Queer theory contends that the ruling classes have invented homosexuality as a sexual ghetto, splitting and mutilating desire in the process.

Alone in his forest dwelling, an ogre had spent years building machines to force his visitors to make love to one another: machines with pulleys, chains, clocks, collars, leather leggings, metal breastplates, oscillatory, pendular, or rotating dildos. One day, some adolescents who had lost their way, seven or eight brothers, entered the ogre's house...—F°ù´Ç³¾ The Screwball Asses

Our asshole is revolutionary.—Guy Hocquenghem

Workers of the world, masturbate!—Front Homosexuel d'Action Revolutionnaire slogan

First published anonymously in Félix Guattari's Recherches in the notorious 1973 issue on homosexuality (seized and destroyed by the French government), The Screwball Asses remains a dramatic treatise on erotic desire. In this classic underground text, queer theorist and post-'68 provocateur Guy Hocquenghem takes on the militant delusions of the gay liberation movement. Hocquenghem, founder and leader of the Front Homosexuel d'Action Revolutionnaire, vivisects not only the stifled mores of bourgeois capitalism but the phallocratic concessions of so-called homophiles, and, ultimately, the very act of speaking desire (and non-desire). Rejecting any “pure theoryâ€� of homosexuality that claims its “othernessâ€� as a morphology of revolution, he contends that the ruling classes have invented homosexuality as a sexual ghetto, splitting and mutilating desire in the process. It is only when non-desire and the desire of desire are enacted simultaneously through speech and body that homosexuality can finally be sublimated under the true act of “making love.â€� There are thousands of sexes on earth, according to Hocquenghem, but only one sexual desire. Available in English for the first time, The Screwball Asses is a revelatory disquisition, earning Hocquenghem his rightful place among the minoritarian elite of Gilles Deleuze, Jean Genet, and Tony Duvert.]]> 88 Guy Hocquenghem 1584350814 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 5 soon-2 4.04 1973
author: Guy Hocquenghem
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1973
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/19
date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: soon-2
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]]> 2098692 Hard to Find book 156 Guy Hocquenghem 2070780554 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.20 1994
author: Guy Hocquenghem
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/19
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]]> 1322371 Significant as one of the earliest products of the international gay liberation movement, Hocquenghem's work was influenced by the extraordinary energies unleashed by the political upheavals of both the Paris "May Days" of 1968 and the gay and lesbian political rebellions that occurred in cities around the world in the wake of New York's Stonewall riots of June 1969.
Drawing on the theoretical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and on the shattering effects of innumerable gay "comings-out," Hocquenghem critiqued the influential models of the psyche and sexual desire derived from Lacan and Freud. The author also addressed the relation of capitalism to sexualities, the dynamics of anal desire, and the political effects of gay group-identities.
Homosexual Desire remains an exhilarating analysis of capitalist societies' pervasive fascination with, and violent fear of, same-sex desire and addresses issues that continue to be highly charged and productive ones for queer politics.]]> 160 Guy Hocquenghem 0822313847 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.97 1972
author: Guy Hocquenghem
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6917725 120 Bruce Boone 0982264526 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.21 2009
author: Bruce Boone
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/17
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]]> 8158959 A major discovery: The lost diary of a great mind—and an intimate, deeply moving study of grief

The day after his mother's death in October 1977, the influential philosopher Roland Barthes began a diary of mourning. Taking notes on index cards as was his habit, he reflected on a new solitude, on the ebb and flow of sadness, and on modern society's dismissal of grief. These 330 cards, published here for the first time, prove a skeleton key to the themes he tackled throughout his work. Behind the unflagging mind, "the most consistently intelligent, important, and useful literary critic to have emerged anywhere" (Susan Sontag), lay a deeply sensitive man who cherished his mother with a devotion unknown even to his closest friends.]]> 272 Roland Barthes 080906233X ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 3 4.14 2009
author: Roland Barthes
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/13
date added: 2024/11/13
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]]> 59585356 0 Susan Finlay 1913430081 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.68 2022
author: Susan Finlay
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 43517944 106 Andrea Long Chu 1788737377 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 4 soon-2 3.58 2019
author: Andrea Long Chu
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: soon-2
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]]> 55183930 Guillaume Dustan' first three novels, published in French between 1996 and 1998, describing the narrator's sexual odyssey through a Paris still haunted by AIDS.

This volume collects a suite of three wildly entertaining and trailblazing short novels by the legendary French anti-assimilationist LGBTQ+ writer Guillaume Dustan. Published sequentially in France between 1996 and 1998, the three novels are exuberant and deliberately affectless accounts of the narrator's sexual odyssey through a Parisian club and bath scene still haunted by AIDS.

In My Room (1996) takes place almost entirely in the narrator's bedroom. The middle volume, I'm Going Out Tonight (1997) finds him venturing out onto the gay scene in one long night. Finally, in Stronger Than Me (1998) the narrator reflects on his early life, which coincided with the appearance and spread of the AIDS virus in France.

A close contemporary of Dennis Cooper, Brett Easton Ellis, Kevin Killian, and Gary Indiana, Guillaume Dustan's deadpan autofiction is at once satirical and intimate, and completely contemporary.]]> 384 Guillaume Dustan 1635901421 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 5 soon, favorites 4.19 2013
author: Guillaume Dustan
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/09
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves: soon, favorites
review:

]]> 52692571
The philosopher and activist Simone Weil was one of the most courageous thinkers of the twentieth century. Here she writes, with honesty and moral clarity, about the manipulation of language by the powerful, the obligations of individuals to one another and the needs - for order, equality, liberty and truth - that make us human.

One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists.]]> 128 Simone Weil 0241472903 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read, soon-2 3.53
author: Simone Weil
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.53
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/07
shelves: to-read, soon-2
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]]> 730139 Gravity and Grace was the first ever publication by the remarkable thinker and activist, Simone Weil. In it Gustave Thibon, the farmer to whom she had entrusted her notebooks before her untimely death, compiled in one remarkable volume a compendium of her writings that have become a source of spiritual guidance and wisdom for countless individuals. On the fiftieth anniversary of the first English edition - by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1952 - this Routledge Classics edition offers English readers the complete text of this landmark work for the first time ever, by incorporating a specially commissioned translation of the controversial chapter on Israel. Also previously untranslated is Gustave Thibon's postscript of 1990, which reminds us how privileged we are to be able to read a work which offers each reader such 'light for the spirit and nourishment for the soul'. This is a book that no one with a serious interest in the spiritual life can afford to be without.]]> 224 Simone Weil 0415290015 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 4.32 1947
author: Simone Weil
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1947
rating: 0
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]]> 59012057
Part revisionist history, part historical biography and based on the hugely popular podcast series, Bad Gays subverts the notion of gay icons and queer heroes and asks what we can learn about LGBTQ history, sexuality and identity through its villains and baddies. From the Emperor Hadrian to notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors excavate the buried history of queer lives. This includes fascist thugs, famous artists, austere puritans and debauched bon viveurs, imperialists, G-men and architects.

Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge the mainstream assumptions of sexual identity. They show that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century and that its interpretation has been central to major historical moments of conflict from the ruptures of Weimar Republic to red-baiting in Cold War America.

Amusing, disturbing and fascinating, Bad Gays puts centre stage the queer villains and evil twinks in history.]]> 368 Huw Lemmey 1839763272 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read, soon, soon-2 3.56 2022
author: Huw Lemmey
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 42983724 WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . .

A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?]]> 274 Olga Tokarczuk 0525541330 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read, soon-2 3.92 2009
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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]]> 306941 No Future, Edelman urges queers to abandon the stance of accommodation and accede to their status as figures for the force of a negativity that he links with irony, jouissance, and, ultimately, the death drive itself.

Closely engaging with literary texts, Edelman makes a compelling case for imagining Scrooge without Tiny Tim and Silas Marner without little Eppie. Looking to Alfred Hitchcock’s films, he embraces two of the director’s most notorious creations: the sadistic Leonard of North by Northwest, who steps on the hand that holds the couple precariously above the abyss, and the terrifying title figures of The Birds, with their predilection for children. Edelman enlarges the reach of contemporary psychoanalytic theory as he brings it to bear not only on works of literature and film but also on such current political flashpoints as gay marriage and gay parenting. Throwing down the theoretical gauntlet, No Future reimagines queerness with a passion certain to spark an equally impassioned debate among its readers.]]> 208 Lee Edelman 0822333694 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read, soon-2 3.72 2004
author: Lee Edelman
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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]]> 51969760 New York Times Notable Book (2020)
A Guardian and Boston.com Best Book of 2020
A Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2020

The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse - by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals - propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumours and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Fernanda Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village. Through the stories of Luismi, Norma, Brando and Munra, Fernanda Melchor paints a portrait of lives governed by poverty and violence, machismo and misogyny, superstition and prejudice. Like Roberto Bolano's 2666 or William Faulkner's greatest novels, HURRICANE SEASON takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence - real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around. Written with a brutal lyricism that is as affecting as it is enthralling, HURRICANE SEASON, Fernanda Melchor's first novel to appear in English, is a formidable portrait of contemporary Mexico and its demons, brilliantly translated by the award-winning translator Sophie Hughes.]]> 229 Fernanda Melchor 1913097099 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read, soon-2 4.08 2017
author: Fernanda Melchor
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> 52045757 Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba â€� the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people â€� and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detailâ€� of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.]]> 144 Adania Shibli 191309717X ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read, soon-2 4.26 2017
author: Adania Shibli
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> 18285
Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.]]> 223 Sara Ahmed 0822339145 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read, soon-2 4.32 2006
author: Sara Ahmed
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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]]> 18492351 250 Jonathan Kemp 0615870864 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read, soon-2 3.81 2013
author: Jonathan Kemp
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/07
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]]> 5896385 100 Leonid Andreyev 0946626413 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read, soon, soon-2 4.40 1904
author: Leonid Andreyev
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1904
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/07
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]]> 1334617 145 René Crevel 0974968099 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read, soon, soon-2 4.04 1925
author: René Crevel
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1925
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/07
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]]> 36304803 Zupancic argues that sexuality is at the point of a "short circuit" between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link between being and knowledge in their very negativity.

]]> 164 Alenka ZupanÄ�iÄ� ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read, soon-2 4.33
author: Alenka Zupan�i�
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/07
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]]> 927438 Mixing documents, interviews, fiction, theory, poetry, psychiatry and anthropology, Polysexuality became the encyclopedia sexualis of a continent that is still emerging. Originally conceived as a special Semiotext(e) issue on homosexuality at the end of the 70s, "Polysexuality" quickly evolved into a more complex and iconoclastic project whose intent was to do away with recognized genders altogether, considered far too limitative. The project landed somewhere between humor, anarchy, science-fiction, utopia and apocalypse. In the few years that it took to put it together, it also evolved from a joyous schizo concept to a darker, neo-Lacanian elaboration on the impossibility of sexuality. The tension between the two, occasionally perceptible, is the theoretical subtext of the issue. Upping the ante on gender distinctions, Polysexuality started by blowing wide open all sexual classifications, inventing unheard-of categories, regrouping singular features into often original configurations, like Corporate Sex, Alimentary Sex, Soft or Violent Sex, Discursive Sex, Self- Sex, Animal Sex, Child Sex, Morbid Sex, or Sex of the Gaze. Mixing documents, interviews, fiction, theory, poetry, psychiatry and anthropology, Polysexuality became the encyclopedia sexualis of a continent that is still emerging. What it displayed in all its forms could be called, broadly speaking, the Sexuality of Capital. (Actually the issue being rather hot, it was decided to cool it off somewhat by only using "capitals" throughout the issue. It was also the first issue for which we used the computer). The Polysexuality issue was attacked in Congress for its alleged advocation of animal sex. Includes work by Alain Robbe-Grillet, F�lix Guattari, Paul Verlaine, William S. Burroughs, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, Roland Barthes, Paul Virilio, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and more.]]> 300 François Peraldi 1570270112 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read, soon-2 4.16 1981
author: François Peraldi
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/07
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]]> 14367458
The Young-Girl is not always young; more and more frequently, she is not even female. She is the figure of total integration in a disintegrating social totality.
â€Äì°ù´Ç³¾ Theory of the Young-Girl

First published in France in 1999, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl dissects the impossibility of love under Empire. The Young-Girl is consumer society's total product and model citizen: whatever “type� of Young-Girl she may embody, whether by whim or concerted performance, she can only seduce by consuming. Filled with the language of French women's magazines, rooted in Proust's figure of Albertine and the amusing misery of (teenage) romance in Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, and informed by Pierre Klossowski's notion of “living currency� and libidinal economy, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl diagnoses—and makes visible—a phenomenon that is so ubiquitous as to have become transparent.

In the years since the book's first publication in French, the worlds of fashion, shopping, seduction plans, makeover projects, and eating disorders have moved beyond the comparatively tame domain of paper magazines into the perpetual accessibility of Internet culture. Here the Young-Girl can seek her own reflection in corporate universals and social media exchanges of “personalitiesâ€� within the impersonal realm of the marketplace. Tracing consumer society's colonization of youth and sexuality through the Young-Girl's “freedomâ€� (in magazine terms) to do whatever she wants with her body, Tiqqun exposes the rapaciously competitive and psychically ruinous landscape of modern love.]]> 144 Tiqqun 158435108X ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read, soon-2 3.67 1999
author: Tiqqun
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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]]> 1348104 109 Michel Foucault 0942299027 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read, soon-2 4.04 1966
author: Michel Foucault
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/07
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]]> 62854763 223 Jamieson Webster 1916425097 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 currently-reading 4.14
author: Jamieson Webster
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/05
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 108656
Winner of the first Renato Poggioli/William Weaver Award of PEN American Center

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975), who is best known in this country as an inspired filmmaker, was also the most outspoken and original Italian writer of his generation, the author of distinguished and controversial novels and plays, political and literary criticism, and, above all, poetry. His poems are widely considered the most important contribution to Italian literature since Montale and, along with the work of Brecht and Neruda, represent the most powerful political poetry of the century. This dual-language book presents his major poems as well as an autobiographical essay, which together make for an outstanding introduction to Pasolini's exceptional gifts as a poet.]]> 256 Pier Paolo Pasolini 0374524696 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 5 4.09 1970
author: Pier Paolo Pasolini
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1970
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/04
date added: 2024/11/04
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]]> 32165827 284 Bruce LaBruce 3960341008 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.67
author: Bruce LaBruce
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.67
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/30
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]]> 23935 The Job is William S. Burroughs at work, attacking our traditional values, condemning what he calls "the American nightmare," and expressing his often barbed views on Scientology, the police, orgone therapy, history, women, writing, politics, sex, drugs, and death. His conversation splices images of death-by-hanging with elevators and airports, the story of his drug addiction and cure with ideas on the use of hieroglyphs.]]> 224 William S. Burroughs 0140118829 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.04 1969
author: William S. Burroughs
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/30
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]]> 563730 131 Dennis Cooper 080213212X ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.65 1989
author: Dennis Cooper
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> 773161 96 Federico García Lorca 0140255834 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.40 1928
author: Federico García Lorca
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1928
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/30
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]]> 45892271 In the highly anticipated follow-up to his beloved debut, What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell deepens his exploration of foreignness, obligation, and desire

Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the far south, and political protesters flood the streets with song.

In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he’s come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past. A queer student’s confession recalls his own first love, a stranger’s seduction devolves into paternal sadism, and a romance with another foreigner opens, and heals, old wounds. Each echo reveals startling insights about what it means to seek connection: with those we love, with the places we inhabit, and with our own fugitive selves.]]> 240 Garth Greenwell 0374124582 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 3 3.82 2020
author: Garth Greenwell
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/11
date added: 2024/10/30
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]]> 134891 Fragments of wisdom from the ancient world

In the sixth century b.c.—twenty-five hundred years before Einstein—Heraclitus of Ephesus declared that energy is the essence of matter, that everything becomes energy in flux, in relativity. His great book, On Nature, the world's first coherent philosophical treatise and touchstone for Plato, Aristotle, and Marcus Aurelius, has long been lost to history-but its surviving fragments have for thousands of years tantalized our greatest thinkers, from Montaigne to Nietzsche, Heidegger to Jung. Now, acclaimed poet Brooks Haxton presents a powerful free-verse translation of all 130 surviving fragments of the teachings of Heraclitus, with the ancient Greek originals beautifully reproduced en face.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 97 Heraclitus 0142437654 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 4 4.20 -501
author: Heraclitus
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.20
book published: -501
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/19
date added: 2024/10/30
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]]> 382975
The story is like a great puzzle . . . invested with a vibrant, almost tangible reality.
—The New York Times

Although many of the other “boom� writers may have received more attention—especially Fuentes and Vargas Llosa—Donoso and his masterpiece may be the most lasting, visionary, strangest of the books from this time period. Seriously, it’s a novel about the last member of an aristocratic family, a monstrous mutant, who is surrounded by other freaks so as to not feel out of place.
—Publishers Weekly

Nicola Barker has said:

"I'm no expert on the topic of South American literature (in fact I'm a dunce), but I have reason to believe (after diligently scouring the internet) that Chile's Jose Donoso, while a very highly regarded author on home turf, is little known on this side of the Atlantic. His masterpiece is the fabulously entitled The Obscene Bird of Night. It would be a crass understatement to say that this book is a challenging read; it's totally and unapologetically psychotic. It's also insanely gothic, brilliantly engaging, exquisitely written, filthy, sick, terrifying, supremely perplexing, and somehow connives to make the brave reader feel like a tiny, sleeping gnat being sucked down a fabulously kaleidoscopic dream plughole."]]> 438 José Donoso 1567920462 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.16 1970
author: José Donoso
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1970
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/30
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]]> 18226520 Sex, or the Unbearable is a dialogue between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, two of our leading theorists of sexuality, politics, and culture. In juxtaposing sex and the unbearable they don't propose that sex is unbearable, only that it unleashes unbearable contradictions that we nonetheless struggle to bear. In Berlant and Edelman's exchange, those terms invoke disturbances produced in encounters with others, ourselves, and the world, disturbances that tap into threats induced by fears of loss or rupture as well as by our hopes for repair.

Through virtuoso interpretations of works of cinema, photography, critical theory, and literature, including Lydia Davis's story "Break It Down" (reprinted in full here), Berlant and Edelman explore what it means to live with negativity, with those divisions that may be irreparable. Together, they consider how such negativity affects politics, theory, and intimately felt encounters. But where their critical approaches differ, neither hesitates to voice disagreement. Their very discussion—punctuated with moments of frustration, misconstruction, anxiety, aggression, recognition, exhilaration, and inspiration—enacts both the difficulty and the potential of encounter, the subject of this unusual exchange between two eminent critics and close friends.]]> 168 Lauren Berlant 0822355949 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 3 3.86 2013
author: Lauren Berlant
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/28
date added: 2024/10/28
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]]> 171254
In her first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice―one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject.

Butler takes as her starting point one’s ability to answer the questions “What have I done?� and “What ought I to do?� She shows that these question can be answered only by asking a prior question, “Who is this ‘I� who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?� Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory.

In three powerfully crafted and lucidly written chapters, Butler demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In brilliant dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, she eloquently argues the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought.

Butler offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn’t an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves?

In this invaluable book, by recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as “fallible creaturesâ€� to create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness.]]> 160 Judith Butler 0823225046 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.20 2003
author: Judith Butler
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/28
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]]> 405193 240 Bruce Fink 0691015899 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.29 1995
author: Bruce Fink
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/28
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]]> 58604924
Advancing strong claims about sex, pleasure, power, intersectionality, therapy, and governance, Davis and Dean shed new light on enduring questions of equality at a historical moment when democracy appears ever more precarious.]]> 206 Oliver Davis 1496230590 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.66
author: Oliver Davis
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.66
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/28
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]]> 1058800
Dean shows how the Lacanian unconscious "deheterosexualizes" desire, and along the way he reveals how psychoanalytic thinkers as well as queer theorists have failed to exploit the full potential of this conception of desire. The book elaborates this by investigating social fantasies about homosexuality and AIDS, including gay men's own fantasies about sex and promiscuity, in an attempt to illuminate the challenges facing safe-sex education. Taking on many shibboleths in contemporary psychoanalysis and queer theory—and taking no prisonersâ€� Beyond Sexuality offers an antidote to hagiographical strains in recent work on psychoanalysis, Foucault, and sexuality.]]> 318 Tim Dean 0226139352 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.76 2000
author: Tim Dean
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6320398 251 Tim Dean 0226139395 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.92 2009
author: Tim Dean
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 404522 150 Alice Notley 0140587640 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.31 1996
author: Alice Notley
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> 562766 304 Joel Sanders 1568980760 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.92 1996
author: Joel Sanders
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> 11161565 The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory� as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

This is a John Hope Franklin Center book]]> 211 J. Jack Halberstam 0822350289 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 3 4.05 2011
author: J. Jack Halberstam
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/24
date added: 2024/10/24
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]]> 22026539 â€Äì°ù´Ç³¾ In the Deep A hypnotic account of three days and nights plucked from the summer of 1955, In the Deep maps the origins, development, and meaning of Pierre Guyotat's creative vocation. To read it is to inhabit the life of an adolescent boy who is just discovering his calling to write, while also tormented by the questions left unanswered by his Catholic upbringing. Faced with his faith's failure, he feels the need to invent another one—one much darker and conflicted—which he believes will be his destiny. In the Deep leads us through the foundations of Guyotat's infamous “beat-sheetâ€�: the masturbatory writing practice that caused a scandal in the 1970s when he first disclosed it, and which—although he has since disowned it—remains fundamental to any understanding of Guyotat's oeuvre. Unlike Guyotat's other works, which deploy the sustained and taxing invention of an altogether other language—and another reality beyond any notion of morality-â€� In the Deep is written in an almost classical language, borrowing its timeless rhythmic prose from Latin syntax, and riddled with interrogatives that are part of a French tradition harking back to Rabelais. Nonetheless, as a contemporary De Rerum Natura , at once comic and profound, this narrative explores the same issues that run through all of Guyotat's the always precarious grounding to sex, humanity, ethics, and God.]]> 408 Pierre Guyotat 1584351616 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.90 2010
author: Pierre Guyotat
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> 1537808 512 Pierre Guyotat 1840680628 ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 4.09 1967
author: Pierre Guyotat
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> 7583006 232 Pierre Guyotat 158435089X ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç 0 to-read 3.95 2006
author: Pierre Guyotat
name: ²¹²Ô³Ùó²Ô¾±´Ç
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: to-read
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