Daphne Gottlieb

This Lambda Literary Award nominee is a book of fierce, original poetry by one of San Francisco's leading poets and performers. Educated without being didactic, lyrical without being doggerel, passionate without being over the top and sexy without being prurient, Why Things Burn is everything poetry should be, without many of the things that poetry unfortunately is. These pieces work both in performance and on the page. They tackle sexuality, lesbian issues, rape, modern urban living, and the author's Jewish heritage, with a sometimes kooky but always sophisticated view of life.

Poems

Why Things Burn

The one who remains to tell the story -- the "final girl" -- is the last girl left alive in this bracing cycle of poems that draw on slasher movies, captivity fantasies, queer theory, and death from breast cancer. Sexy and tart, low-down and high-hearted poems such as Suture, Slash, Vamp, and Bride of Reanimator articulate the dark desires, fears, and traumas out of which pop culture is made. Author Daphne Gottlieb is the winner of the 2002 Firecracker Award and a 2002 Lambda Finalist.

Final Girl

Broken hearts, scattered dreams, post-punk politics and postmodern cut-up collages spiral and flow through award-winning poet Daphne Gottlieb's latest collection of poetry and short fiction. Whether she's writing about unanticipated outcomes, her mother's passing or absurd situations, Gottlieb's deeply personal insights into the complex areas where life and contemporary culture collide offer readers a uniquely voiced, thought-provoking perspective.

15 Ways to Stay Alive

In the wake of the tech invasion in the Bay Area, in transient hotels and in rent-controlled buildings, the residents try to hold on in the city at the edge of the world. In these stories, Daphne Gottlieb chronicles inner and outer worlds both real and surreal.  A hurricane farm. A cat burglar who can't remember where he is. A woman whose dog levitates. Heartrending and darkly magical, Pretty Much Dead is part fable, part witness, and part chorus with the voices that are only heard when they start to yell.

Pretty much dead

Final girl

A Graphic Novel

Jokes and the Unconscious

Fusing pornography and postfeminist theory, transcript and tell-all, these playful, penetrating poems and stories reach off the page in search of what it is to be known, both to the masses and to the "Other." Gertrude Stein's work is co-opted and re-seen in an attempt to unpack the relationship between love and war; Walt Whitman makes a command performance in dismembered bits of forced formal verse; and The Exorcist and The Devil in Miss Jones are sutured together in an attempt to locate the horror of desire.

Kissing Dead Girls

"Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader is the world's first literary anthology about sneaking and cheating, getting caught and getting laid, and even having your heart broken just when you thought you were safe. Major shapers of contemporary writing share space with fresh talent, each with a different take on desire and its aftermath. Stephen Elliott remembers the dominatrix who two-timed him with a square, while Lori Selke spins steamy erotica about just how quickly queer marriage can degenerate into queer extramarital activity. Neal Pollack recalls the early days of the Internet when anything seemed possible - even destroying the marriages of people you've never met - while Matthue Roth wonders if it's possible to cheat on God. Cris Mazza, Susannah Breslin, Kevin Sampsell, Gina Frangello, Merri Lisa Johnson, and nineteen other writers prove that here there are no victims, no villains, and no innocent bystanders. Only lovers, with all the responsibility the word implies."--BOOK JACKET.

An Adultery Anthology

Homewrecker

poems

Why things burn

Kissing dead girls

David Shields

Enough About You is a book about David Shields. But it is also a terrifically engrossing exploration and exploitation of self-reflection, self-absorption, full-blown narcissism, and the impulse to write about oneself. In a world awash with memoirs and tell-alls, Shields has created something unique; he invites the reader into his mind as he turns his life into a narrative. With moving and often hilarious candor, Shields explores the connections between fiction and nonfiction, stuttering and writing, literary forms and literary contents, art and life; he confronts bad reviews of his earlier books; he examines why he read a college girlfriend's journal; he raids a wide range of cultural figures (from Rousseau, Nabokov, and Salinger to Bill Murray, Adam Sandler, and Bobby Knight) for what they have to tell him about himself; he quotes a speech he wrote on the occasion of his father's ninetieth birthday and then gives us the guilt-induced dream he had when he failed to deliver the speech; he also writes about basketball and sexuality and Los Angeles and Seattle, but he is always meditating on the origins of his interest in autobiography, on the limits and appeals of autobiography, on the traps and strategies of it, and finally, how to use it to get to the world.

Daphne Gottlieb

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