A beautifully-illustrated, celebratory anthology exploring sadness—and the transformative power of tears. When was the last time you cried? Was it because you were sad? Or happy? Overwhelmed, or frustrated? Maybe from relief or from pride? Was it in public or in private? Did you feel better afterwards, or worse? The reasons that we cry—and the circumstances in which we shed a tear—are often surprising and beautiful. Sad Happens is a collective, multi-faceted archive of tears that captures the complexity and variety of these circumstances. We hear from Mike Birbiglia on the role that grief and pain have in comedy; Jia Tolentino on how motherhood made her cry in both hormonal joy and fervent rage; and Hanif Abdurraqib on the intimacy of crying on planes. We hear from Phoebe Bridgers on poignant moments of departure and JP Brammer on the strange disappointments of success; Matt Berninger on becoming a crybaby in his adulthood and Hua Hsu on crying during a moment of public uncertainty. We also hear from everyday people in a range of professions: an actor on the tips she learned from drag queens about preserving a full face of makeup while crying; a zookeeper on mourning the animals who have died during her tenure; a bartender on crying in the walk-in; and a TV critic on the shows that have moved her. Brimming with humanity, this anthology is confirmation that sad happens—but so does joy, love, a sense of community, and a host of other emotions. By turns moving and affirming, Sad Happens is an emotional balm and visual delight.

From Brandon Stosuy, cofounder of the Creative Independent, an interactive guide to navigating disappointments and finding happy accidents in a creative life, filled with advice from artists across disciplinesThe third in a series of three interactive guides to the practical and emotional sides of living a creative life, How to Fail Successfully tackles the inevitable challenges that come with making work and releasing it into the world. Whether you are confronting "failure" in the form of fear, imposter syndrome, or negative feedback, this book provides insights and exercises to help you reframe these vulnerabilities as vital components to your process. Working artists from all walks of life-such as musicians, authors, filmmakers, dancers, designers, and visual artists-offer their advice throughout the book, providing ample evidence that even the most accomplished among us deal with ongoing self-doubt.Part memoir, part zine, part "how-to," and part oral history, in How to Fail Successfully author and curator Brandon Stosuy taps into his own experiences and an incredible network of talent to provide diverse (and diverging) perspectives on how success and failure are intertwined. Taken as a stand-alone guide or the finale of a series (including Make Time for Creativity and Stay Inspired), this book provides the support you need to take creative risks and make work on your terms. The book also includes quotes by Jason Reynolds (YA author), Bjoerk (musician), Matthew Day Jackson (visual artist), Josh Fadem (comedian), Hanif Abdurraqib (poet and author), Sasha Grey (actor and DJ), Sigrid Lauren (choreographer), and many more.

An interactive guide to staying creatively curious in your own life, curated by Brandon Stosuy (cofounder of The Creative Independent), with quotes and advice from artists across disciplines The second in a series of three interactive guides dedicated to the practical and emotional sides of living a creative life, Stay Inspired explores how to grow an idea into a project and how to keep the spark of creativity present in your daily life. This guide poses a series of questions on themes of tapping into your own story and circumstances of inspiration, identifying your influences, finding inspiring communities, and initiating partnerships and collaborations. Working artists from all walks of life-musicians, authors, filmmakers, dancers, designers, and visual artists-offer their responses to the questions posed throughout the book, providing an inspirational framework for discovering new ideas, channeling your influences, and making work in conversation with others. Part memoir, part zine, part "how-to," and oral history, in Stay Inspired, author and curator Brandon Stosuy taps into an incredible network of talent to provide diverse (and diverging) perspectives on how creativity can be inspired and channeled into your independent work, collaborations, and communities.

A guided journal for exploring how to fit creativity and meaning into everyday life The first in a series of three guided journals dedicated to living a creative life, Making Time for Creativity explores how we find space in our days to express ourselves, develop our talents, and do the things that matter. This journal provides a series of writing prompts on the themes of defining work-life balance, creating daily rituals, setting intentions, meeting goals, and taking time off from creativity. Working artists from all walks of life-musicians, authors, filmmakers, dancers, designers, and visual artists-offer their responses to these prompts, providing an inspiring framework for reflecting on how you can use your own time meaningfully. In Making Time for Creativity, Brandon Stosuy, the cofounder and editor in chief of The Creative Independent, a growing resource for creative people, taps into an incredible network of talent to provide diverse (and divergent) perspectives on how creativity can be prioritized amid all the other demands on our time.

From music writer and The Creative Independent/Kickstarter Editor in Chief Brandon Stosuy, comes an entertaining new board book that introduces the many moods, styles, and senses of music to the youngest audiophiles--because music is for everyone, and music is for you. Featuring Amy Martin's dynamic art style, Music Is... explains music through our eyes and ears so that the sense of hearing is transformed into a visual experience. A pitch-perfect board book that is sure to strike a chord with readers of all ages.

Among The Village Voices 25 Favorite Books of 2006 Winner of the 2007 AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in the Trade Illustrated Book Design category. Sometime after Andy Warhol's heyday but before Soho became a tourist trap, a group of poets, punk rockers, guerilla journalists, graffiti artists, writers, and activists transformed lower Manhattan into an artistic scene so diverse it became known simply as "Downtown." Willfully unpolished and subversively intelligent, figures such as Spalding Gray, Kathy Acker, Richard Hell, David Wojnarowicz, Lynne Tillman, Miguel Pinero, and Eric Bogosian broke free from mainstream publishing to produce a flood of fiction, poetry, experimental theater, art, and music that breathed the life of the street. The first book to capture the spontaneity of the Downtown literary scene, Up Is Up, But So Is Down collects more than 125 images and over 80 texts that encompass the most vital work produced between 1974 and 1992. Reflecting the unconventional genres that marked this period, the book includes flyers, zines, newsprint weeklies, book covers, and photographs of people and the city, many of them here made available to readers outside the scene for the first time. The book's striking and quirky design-complete with 2-color interior-brings each of these unique documents and images to life. Brandon Stosuy arranges this hugely varied material chronologically to illustrate the dynamic views at play. He takes us from poetry readings in Alphabet City to happenings at Darinka, a Lower East Side apartment and performance space, to the St. Mark's Bookshop, unofficial crossroads of the counterculture, where home-printed copies of the latest zines were sold in Ziploc bags. Often attacking the bourgeois irony epitomized by the New Yorker's short fiction, Downtown writers played ebulliently with form and content, sex and language, producing work that depicted the underbelly of real life. With an afterword by Downtown icons Dennis Cooper and Eileen Myles, Up Is Up, But So Is Down gathers almost twenty years of New York City's smartest and most explosive-as well as hard to find-writing, providing an indispensable archive of one of the most exciting artistic scenes in U.S. history.

The critically acclaimed adventures of an ex-Goth, ex-straight-girl, ex-lesbian, ex-Catholic schoolgirl on the road in 1990s America. Published by Semiotext(e) to critical acclaim in 1998, Michelle Tea's debut novel The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America quickly established Tea as an exciting new literary talent and the voice of a new generation of queer, bisexual, transgendered, and straight youth. The Village Voice called Passionate Mistakes "the legacy of thirty years of feminism," and Eileen Myles, writing in the Nation, hailed the novel as "a hunk of lyric information that coolly, then frantically, describes the car wreck of her generation. "The too-smart, caustic, and radiant narrator of Passionate Mistakes is, at twenty-seven, an ex-Goth, ex-drummer, ex-straight girl, ex-lesbian separatist vegan graduate of vocational high school in the working class town of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Written with lyrical precision and charm, the novel describes a journey with no final destination, a fast-paced and picaresque road trip that yields a redemptive vision of an America that has nothing left to offer its youth. This new edition of a Semiotext(e) classic includes critical essays by Brandon Stosuy and Eileen Myles that describe Michelle Tea's achievement as a literary innovator and cultural icon. Michelle Tea is the prolific author of the Lambda Award-winning Valencia, the graphic novel Rent Girl, the "inspired queer bildungsroman" Rose of No Man's Land, and other books. She was a 1999 recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for fiction. Her critically acclaimed books have appeared on "books of the year" lists in publications ranging from the Voice Literary Supplement to the San Francisco Chonicle. She lives in San Francisco.

A zine-cum-artist's book, "Mirror Me" was developed from a collaborative exhibition and performance organized by the writer Brandon Stosuy and the artist Kai Althoff at Dispatch, and displayed at White Columns. It features new materials by artists, writers and musicians such as Adam Helms, Matt Zaremba, Mitch Kehe, Nick Z., Peter Sotos, Philip Best, Scott Campbell, Theo Stanley, Yair Oelbaum and Zach Baron.