"This is the first English translation of an important novel by one of America's foremost contemporary writers. Experimental in form, lacking a strict narrative line and a conventional plot, it is a strange and shocking portrait of a woman's intense incestuous love for her brother. She is eccentric at the beginning of the story and grows progressively more alienated from reality as she recalls her past during a stay at the Villa Serbelloni above Lake Como in Bellagio, Italy, where she has gone to write a novel." "The book consists of her reminiscences of her dead brother which are addressed to him. It offers at once a highly poetic evocation of a troubled mind, an apparently realistic portrayal of life among her friends: the writers, artists, and musicians she knew, from the 60's to the present time, and a mordant and brutal commentary on a kind of family attachment that is found throughout the world. Her feelings and fantasies are described through her own language, subtly and sensitively, and she herself is depicted with keen psychological insight. One of the few works of fiction to treat the incestuous relationship from the viewpoint of the victim/perpetrator."--BOOK JACKET.

The Triumph of Vulgarity in a thinker's guide to rock 'n' roll. Rock music mirrors the tradition of nineteenth-century Romaniticsm, Robert Patison says. Whitman's "barbaric yawp" can still be heard in the punk rock of the Ramones, and the spirit that inspired Poe's Eureka lives on in the lyrics of Talking Heads. Rock is vulgar, Pattison notes, and vulgarity is something that high culture has long despised but rarely bothered to define. This book is the first effort since John Ruskin and Aldous Huxley to describe in depth what vulgarity is, and how, with the help of ideas inherent in Romaniticism, it has slipped the constraints imposed on it by refined culture and established its own loud arts. The book disassembles the various myths of rock: its roots in black and folk music; the primacy it accords to feeling and self; the sexual omnipotence of rock stars; the satanic predilictions of rock fans; and rock's high-voltage image of the modern Prometheus wielding an electric guitar. Pattison treats these myths as vulgar counterparts of their originals in refined Romantic art and offers a description and justification of rock's central place in the social and aesthetic structure of modern culture. At a time when rock lyrics have provoked parental outrage and senatorial hearings, The Triumph of Vulgarity is required reading for anyone interested in where rock comes from and how it works.

Shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize The story of art collective Gran Fury—which fought back during the AIDS crisis through direct action and community-made propaganda—offers lessons in love and grief. In the late 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was annihilating queer people, intravenous drug users, and communities of color in America, and disinformation about the disease ran rampant. Out of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an art collective that called itself Gran Fury formed to campaign against corporate greed, government inaction, stigma, and public indifference to the epidemic. Writer Jack Lowery examines Gran Fury’s art and activism from iconic images like the “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster to the act of dropping piles of fake bills onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Lowery offers a complex, moving portrait of a collective and its members, who built essential solidarities with each other and whose lives evidenced the profound trauma of enduring the AIDS crisis. Gran Fury and ACT UP’s strategies are still used frequently by the activists leading contemporary movements. In an era when structural violence and the devastation of COVID-19 continue to target the most vulnerable, this belief in the power of public art and action persists.

A journalist who covered the failed manhunt for Andrew Cunanan pieces together the story of the killing spree that ended with the murder of fashion mogul Gianni Versace. Reprint.