Introduced by Hilton Als, in 'one of the best novels about adolescence in American literature' (New York Times) two siblings come of age in a mountainous wilderness ... 'One of the strangest and angriest novels of the twentieth century.' Lauren Groff 'An extraordinary, savage novel.' Olivia Laing 'I love this novel.' Patricia Lockwood She would not feel safe until the beautiful animal was dead. Ralph and Molly are inseparable siblings: united against the stupidity of daily routines, their prim mother and prissy older sisters, the world of adult authority. One summer, they are sent from their childhood home in suburban Los Angeles to their uncle's Colorado mountain ranch, where they write, hunt, roam. But this untamed wilderness soon becomes tainted by dark stirrings of sexual desire - and as the pressures of growing up drive an irrevocable rift between them, their innocent childhoods hurtle towards a devastating end . . . 'Beautiful, and sensitive, and quickening.' Eileen Myles 'A glimmer of genius.' Rumaan Alam 'Breathtakingly original.' Tessa Hadley 'A brilliant achievement [to] set beside Carson McCullers's masterwork The Member of the Wedding.' Joyce Carol Oates

Explore Frank Walter’s relationship to Antigua through a range of works and writings that express his intimate connection to Caribbean nature, landscape, and place. “Nothing seems to be reworked—it is as if each piece drew or painted itself without being adjusted, revised, or fussed over.” — Hyperallergic Influenced by his studies of agriculture and the sugar industry in the former British colony of Antigua as well as his extensive travels in England, Scotland, and West Germany, Walter created work inspired by his thoughts, knowledge, journeys, and surroundings—work that encompassed painting, drawing, writing, sculpture, photography, and sound. This focused selection focuses on paintings—tender, quiet, and lush—that transcend the traditional tourist’s view of island life in favor of perspectives that explore how and why we look at where we are. Published on the occasion of the 2022 exhibition at David Zwirner, this catalogue includes an introduction by the show’s curator Hilton Als. Barbara Paca, the leading expert on Walter, writes a text detailing her personal experience meeting Walter and being in his presence. An essay by Charlie Porter takes readers on a walk as he muses about Walter’s life and the nature depicted in his paintings. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro travels to Antigua to explore the history of the island and Walter’s lasting impact there.

This story of a man living every day in fear of his life for simply being black is as powerful today as it was when it was first published in 1947. The novel takes place in the space of four days in the life of Bob Jones, a black man who is constantly plagued by the effects of racism. Living in a society that is drenched in race consciousness has no doubt taken a toll on the way Jones behaves, thinks, and feels, especially when, at the end of his story, he is accused of a brutal crime he did not commit. "One of the most important American writers of the twentieth century ...[a] quirky American genius..."--Walter Mosley, author of Bad Boy Brawly Brown, Devil in a Blue Dress "If He Hollers is an austere and concentrated study of black experience, set in southern California in the early forties."--Independent Publisher

This is the definitive visual account of the gay liberation movement in New York, following the Stonewall uprising in Greenwich Village in 1969, an event that marked the coming-out of New York's gay community. As a direct outcome of Stonewall, gay pride marches were held in 1970 in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Fifty years later Pride will be celebrated in thousands of cities across the world. Including more than 190 photographs by Fred W. McDarrah chronicling the movement in all its glory, the book includes reflective essays by major figures such as Alan Ginsbery, Hilton Als and Sir Ian McKellan.

Chisenhale Gallery launches the second title in its Chisenhale Books series, Nikita Gale: IN A DREAM YOU CLIMB THE STAIRS. Marking the finale of Gale's Chisenhale exhibition, Gale's first artist's book contains an intergenerational conversation with conceptual artist Barbara Kruger and a short meditation by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hilton Als. These feature alongside contributions by artist and Chisenhale Gallery alum P. Staff and Dr. Benedicte Boisseron, author of Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question. Through the lens of a multifaceted practice, Gale examines themes of invisibility and audibility, interrogating the dynamic between performer and spectator, structure, and decay. Produced with great care, this extraordinary book is reflective of the artist's practice. Four visual essays, hand-annotated by Gale -- Absence, Ruin, Silence, Dog -- explore themes central to the work. Nikita Gale: IN A DREAM YOU CLIMB THE STAIRS deploys throw-outs, gatefolds, five different types of papers, and a subtly disruptive design to delve into Nikita Gale's art.

This richly illustrated book is the first monograph to explore the prolific career of the celebrated photographer Anthony Barboza. Anthony Barboza (b. 1944) is a celebrated artist and writer who has made thousands of photographs in the studio and on the street since 1963. A member of the Kamoinge collective of photographers in New York, Barboza is largely self-taught and has an inimitable, highly intuitive vision that he refers to as "eye dreaming," or "a state of mind that's almost like meditation." Throughout the years he has made countless commercial images, including celebrity portraits, advertisements, and album covers. His personal photographic projects illuminate his deep investment in the art and concerns of Black communities, not only in the United States but also around the globe. This lavishly illustrated volume follows Barboza's prolific career from his youth in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to his formative years in New York in the 1960s, to the present day. An introduction by renowned author and critic Hilton Als underscores Barboza's importance and impact. An essay by curator Aaron Bryant contextualizes Barboza's life and career as they map against major civil rights events in the United States. In an intimate interview between the artist and curator Mazie M. Harris, Barboza offers astute, humorous, and intimate musings on his long career, foundational influences, and artistic legacy. This monograph, the first on the artist, will appeal to aficionados of photography and Black art and culture.

In this brilliant two-part memoir, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hilton Als distills into one cocktail the deep and potent complexities of love and of loss, of Prince and of power, of desire and of race. It's delicious and it's got the kick of a mule, especially as Als swirls into his mix the downtown queer nightclub scene, the AIDS crisis, Prince's ass in his tight little pants, an ill-fated peach pie, Dorothy Parker, and his desire for true love. Always surprising and stealthily-even painfully-moving, Als plumbs longing: "I inched closer to him as he danced to you, Prince. But already he was you, Prince, in my mind. He had the same coloring, and the same loneliness I wanted to fill with my admiration. I couldn't love him enough. We were colored boys together. There is not enough of that in the world, Prince-but you know that. Still, when other people see that kind of fraternity they want to kill it. But we were so committed to each other, we never could work out what that violence meant. There was so much love between us. Why didn't anyone want us to share it?"

The Tuskegee Institute records the lynching of 3,436 blacks between 1882 and 1950. This is probably a small percentage of these murders, which were seldom reported, and led to the creation of the NAACP in 1909, an organization dedicated to passing federal anti-lynching laws. Through all this terror and carnage someone -- many times a professional photographer -- carried a camera and took pictures of the events. These lynching photographs were often made into postcards and sold as souvenirs to the crowds in attendance. These images are some of photography's most brutal, surviving to this day so that we may now look back on the terrorism unleashed on America's African-American community and perhaps know our history and ourselves better. The almost one hundred images reproduced here are a testament to the camera's ability to make us remember what we often choose to forget.

Long awaited, the first survey of the work of one of America's foremost contemporary fine art photographers For almost 40 years, Catherine Opie has been documenting with psychological acuity the cultural and geographic identity of contemporary America. This unique artist monograph presents a compelling visual narrative of Opie's work since the early 1980s, pairing images across bodies of work to form a full picture of her artistic vision. With more than 300 beautiful illustrations and made in close collaboration with Opie, the book marks a turning point in the consideration of this artist's work to date.

Places for the Spirit is a stunning collection of over 80 documentary photographs of African American folk gardens -- and their creators -- in the Deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina). These landscapes have a unique historical significance due to the design elements and spiritual meanings that have been traced to the yards and gardens of American slaves and further back to their prior African heritage. These deceptively casual or whimsical foliage arrangements are subtle and symbolic reminders of the divine in everyday life, the cycles of nature, and implied right and wrong ways to live. In the spirit of "outsider" art traditions, blues musical roots, and other such folk manifestations, these gardens have a unique aesthetic and cultural significance. Over 20 years in the making, this is the first collection of fine art photography to document this subject and, as such, it adds greatly to our understanding and appreciation of this disappearing element of African American culture.

Jen Fain is a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of 1970s New York. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as she finds it. Simultaneously novel, memoir, commonplace book, confession, and critique - Speedboat is funny, disturbing, cutting, brilliant unlike anything that had come before. Since it burst onto the scene in the 1970s, it has enthralled generations of readers and been a touchstone for writers including David Foster Wallace, Claudia Rankine and Jenny Offill. With an introduction by Hilton Als

"This book will change you." --Chicago Tribune White Girls is about, among other things, blackness, queerness, movies, Brooklyn, love (and the loss of love), AIDS, fashion, Basquiat, Capote, philosophy, porn, Eminem, Louise Brooks, and Michael Jackson. Freewheeling and dazzling, tender and true, it is one of the most daring and provocative books of recent years, an invaluable guide to the culture of our time.

'I defy you to read this book and come away with a mind unchanged' John Jeremiah Sullivan 'Als has a serious claim to be regarded as the next James Baldwin' Observer 'I see how we are all the same, that none of us are white women or black men; rather, we're a series of mouths, and that every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love' White Girls is about, among other things, blackness, queerness, movies, Brooklyn, love (and the loss of love), AIDS, fashion, Basquiat, Capote, philosophy, porn, Louise Brooks and Michael Jackson. Freewheeling and dazzling, tender and true, it is one of the most highly acclaimed essay collections in years. 'A voice that's new, that comes as if from a different room. I defy you to read this book and come away with a mind unchanged' John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead 'Effortless, honest and fearless' Rich Benjamin, The New York Times 'Als is one of the most consistently unpredictable and surprising essayists out there, an author who confounds our expectations virtually every time he writes' David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times 'A comprehensive and utterly lovely collection of one of the best writers around' Eugenia Williamson, Boston Globe

Daring, fiercely original, and brilliant, The Women is at once a memoir, a psychological study, a sociopolitical manifesto, and an incisive adventure in literary criticism. It is conceived as a series of portraits analyzing the role that sexual and racial identity played in the lives and work of the writer's subjects. Als begins with his mother, a self-described "Negress", who would not be defined by the limitations of race and gender. He goes on to ask who the mother of Malcolm X was, and shows how her mixed-race background and eventual descent into madness contributed to her son's misogyny and racism. He describes how the brilliant, Harvard-educated Dorothy Dean rarely identified with other blacks or women, but deeply empathized with white gay men. Finally, he portrays the late Owen Dodson, a poet and dramatist who was female-identified and who played an important role in the author's own social and intellectual formation. Als submits both racial and sexual stereotypes to his inimitable scrutiny with relentless humor and sympathy. The results are exhilarating. The Women is that rarest of books: a memorable work of self-investigation that creates a form all its own.

This text explores the story of a song that foretold a movement, and the lady who dared to sing it. In 1939, the performance of the song's evocative lyrics portraying the lynching of a black man in the Southern US sparked controversy, and sometimes violence, wherever Billie Holiday went. It was 25 years before Dr Martin Luther King Jr, led his famous march on Washington, yet "Strange Fruit" lived on. In this text Margolick chronicles its effect on those who experienced it first-hand: musicians, artists, journalists, intellectuals, students and even the waitresses and bartenders who worked in the clubs.

Over a brief, twelve-year career, the Iranian director and playwright Reza Abdoh broke all of the conventions of American theater, pushing actors and audiences past their limits to create hallucinatory, at times nightmarish, dreamscapes shot through with humor, song, and an unlikely spirituality. His productions addressed the bitter political realities of his time- the systemic devaluation of black life, governmental indifference to the AIDS crisis, sexual repression, genocide in Europe, and war in the Middle East-with harrowing eloquence. Just before his death he ordered that his plays should never be performed again. Profusely illustrated, the catalogue contains new essays on the influence and reception of Abdoh's works in theater, film, and video, published and unpublished interviews with the director, and conversations with his friends and colleagues, as well as scripts of his plays and contemporary reviews.

Drawing Us In is essential reading for art lovers: the only anthology on why we need visual art.

In this unique collection, some of our finest writers explore the place of visual art in their lives. Dorothy Allison explains how a painting in a Baptist church taught her as a child that art connects people from disparate backgrounds. Alfred Kazin reflects on his wanderings through New York's museums as a teenager. Mary Gordon finds that Bonnard's still lifes put in perspective her mother's struggle with illness and aging. For these and other contributors, visual art makes us see what we haven't seen before; it surprises, transforms, and comforts us. There are other perspectives too: critic Dave Hickey claims that art has no deep moral purpose and that the artist shouldn't have to work under this burden. Art, he writes, is just a whole lot of fun and therein lies its revolutionary potential.

The first novel published by an African American, Clotel takes up the story, in circulation at the time, that Thomas Jefferson fathered an illegitimate mulatto daughter who was sold into slavery. Powerfully reimagining this story, and weaving together a variety of contemporary source materials, Brown fills the novel with daring escapes and encounters, as well as searing depictions of the American slave trade. An innovative and challenging work of literary invention, Clotel is receiving much renewed attention today.

William Wells Brown, though born into slavery, escaped to become one of the most prominent reformers of the nineteenth century and one of the earliest historians of the black experience. This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition reproduces the first, 1853, edition of Clotel and includes, as did that edition, his autobiographical narrative, "The Life and Escape of William Wells Brown," plus newly written notes.