Wayne Koestenbaum

"Toward what goal do I aspire, ever, but collision? Always accident, concussion, bodies butting together . . . By collision I also mean metaphor and metonymy: operations of slide and slip and transfuse." In his new nonfiction collection, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passenger's leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for "stranger"; Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friend's stinky feet. Wayne dreams about a handjob from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenberg's squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences. He directly proposes assignments to readers: "Buy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina." "Describe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed." "Find in every orgasm an encyclopedic richness . . . Reimagine doing the laundry as having an orgasm, and reinterpret orgasm as not a tiny experience, temporally limited, occurring in a single human body, but as an experience that somehow touches on all of human history." Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play.

Essays

Figure It Out

Wayne Koestenbaum returns with a zesty and hyper-literate collection of personal and critical essays Wayne Koestenbaum has been described as "an impossible lovechild from a late-night, drunken three-way between Joan Didion, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag" (Bidoun). In My 1980s and Other Essays, a collection of extravagant range and style, he rises to the challenge of that improbable description. My 1980s and Other Essays opens with a series of manifestos—or, perhaps more appropriately, a series of impassioned disclosures, intellectual and personal. It then proceeds to wrestle with a series of major cultural figures, the author's own lodestars and lodestones: literary (John Ashbery, Roberto Bolaño, James Schuyler), artistic (Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol), and simply iconic (Brigitte Bardot, Cary Grant, Lana Turner). And then there is the personal—the voice, the style, the flair—that is unquestionably Koestenbaum. It amounts to a kind of intellectual autobiography that culminates in a string of passionate calls to creativity; arguments in favor of detail and nuance, and attention; a defense of pleasure, hunger, and desire in culture and experience. Koestenbaum is perched on the cusp of being a true public intellectual—his venues are more mainstream than academic, his style is eye-catching, his prose unfailingly witty and passionate, his interests profoundly wide-ranging and popular. My 1980s should be the book that pushes Koestenbaum off that cusp and truly into the public eye.

My 1980s and Other Essays

Hotel Theory is two books in one: a meditation on the meaning of hotels, and a dime novel (Hotel Women) featuring Lana Turner and Liberace. Typical of Wayne Koestenbaum’s invigoratingly inventive style, the two books — one fiction, one nonfiction — run concurrently, in twin columns, and the articles “a,” “an,” and “the” never appear. The nonfiction ruminations on hotels are divided into eight dossiers, composed of short takes on the presence of hotels in the author’s dreams as well as in literature, film, and history. Guest stars include everyone from Oscar Wilde to Marilyn Monroe. Hotel Theory gives (divided) voice to an aesthetic of hyperaesthesia, of yearning. It is an oblique manifesto, the place where writing disappears. A new mode of theorizing — in fiction, in fragment, through quotation and palimpsest — arises in this dazzling work.

8 Dossiers ; Hotel Women : 18 Chapters

Hotel Theory

Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire

The Queen's Throat

"If Debussy and Robert Walser had collaborated on an opera, it would sound like this."--John Ashbery "The mad genius of Pale Fire with the florid outlaw sexuality of Jean Genet"--Kirkus Reviews For five years, concert pianist Theo Mangrove has been living at his family's home in East Kill, New York, recovering from a nervous breakdown that derailed his career, and attempting to relieve his relentless polysexual appetite in the company of male hustlers, random strangers, music students, his aunt, and occasionally his wife. As he prepares for a comeback recital in Aigues-Mortes, a walled medieval town in southern France, he becomes obsessed with the idea that the Italian circus star Moira Orfei must join him there to perform alongside him. Extravagantly (and tragicomically) describing his hallucinatory plans in a series of twenty-five notebooks, he assembles an incantatory meditation on performance, failure, fame, decay, and delusion. A new edition of a "dazzlingly seductive" fever dream written in "brilliant poetic vernacular" (Bookforum) by a beloved poet and cultural critic, now with an introduction by Rachel Kushner.

A Novel; Or, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes

Circus

Humiliation

Camp Marmalade

Pepe Karmel

Kurt Kauper

Work in Progress

Paintings

Andy Warhol

Ultramarine

A brilliant, irreverent, penetrating and wholly original deconstruction of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, American icon. In an eclectic gallery of fantasies and tableaus, Wayne Koestenbaum explains the late First Lady's mesmeric hold on America by discovering the myths and metaphors that have been associated with her. Photos.

Interpreting an Icon

Jackie Under My Skin

Kate Zambreno

Lauren Aimee Curtis

Emily Bitto

Luc Sante

Travis Jeppesen

Natalie Eilbert

Brigitta B. Wagner

Annabel Brady-Brown

Leo Goldsmith

Madeleine Martiniello

Max Nelson

Matthew Porterfield

Agnès Godard

Elena Gomez

Claudia La Rocco

James Lattimer

Justin Wolfers

Rebecca Harkins-Cross

Lauren Carroll Harris

Fireflies Issue #5 pairs a living legend of French cinema with an artist yet to receive due recognition outside of her native Germany, despite being one of the country's pre-eminent cineastes. The issue discusses, dismantles, reinterprets and creatively plays with their cinema, featuring insightful longform interviews with both directors, alongside 29 responses from critics, novelists, poets, filmmakers and visual artists who work with video, sound, photography and sculpture.

Agnès Varda

Fireflies #5

'Properly analytical ... always entertaining' TIME OUT 'Should tempt both those generally familiar with Andy Warhol and, even more, young people who have trouble imagining how popular art can challenge the status quo' L A TIMES Painter, filmmaker, photographer, philosopher, all-round celebrity, Andy Warhol is an outstanding cultural icon. He revolutionised art by bringing to it images from popular culture - such as the Campbell's soup can and Marilyn Monroe's face - while his studio, the Factory, where his free-spirited cast of 'superstars' mingled with the rich and famous, became the place of origin for every groundswell shaping American culture. In many ways he can be seen as the precursor to today's 'celebrity artists' such as Tracey Emin and Damian Hurst. But what of the man behind the white wig and dark glasses? Koestenbaum gives a fascinating, revealing and thought-provoking picture of pop art's greatest icon.

"A new book of essays by the cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum, author of The Queen's Throat and Jackie Under My Skin"--

Mary Ann Caws

Susan Lewis

Matthew Moore

Will Alexander

Chris Campanioni

Tamas Panitz

Ghérasim Luca

Osvaldo Lamborghini

Léon-Paul Fargue

Ted Rees

Denise Newman

Evan Isoline

Sara Crangle

Joshua Bird

Billie Chernicoff

M. T. C. Cronin

Xeno Muir Pam Dick

Spencer Everett

Josh Fomon

Kirsten Ihns

Jack Jung

Jed Munson

Garrett Phelps

Genya Turovskaya

Utterance As a Fraught Passage: Aporia

Vestiges_06

Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire

The Queen's Throatire

Alisa Solomon

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Orhan Pamuk

Jianying Zha

Ruben Martinez

Xi Xi

This is the first issue of a literary review which aims to present challenging and innovative modern world literature.

False Start

Venue

Examining how Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis transformed our definitions of personal identity and style, a cultural critique explores Jackie's iconography in the context of literature, film, and the imagination and frees her from the propaganda often tied to her image. 30,000 first printing.

Witty, quirky, irreverent, economical of means but certainly not of feelings, stylish and illuminating, these are poems in which all filters to free association have been removed. Wayne Koestenbaum's poems use dreams, fantasies and play to articulate the authors' passions. The poetry is filled with startling apercus about family, friends, intellectual passions of the moment, popular culture, religion and stardom.

New Poems

Best-selling Jewish Porn Films

Wayne Koestenbaum considers the meaning of humiliation in this eloquent work of cultural critique and personal reflection. 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.

Wayne Koestenbaum

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