Lynne Tillman

Andrew Durbin

M. G. Lord

The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories gathers together Lynne Tillman's groundbreaking fiction/essays on culture and places, monuments, artworks, iconic TV shows, and received ideas, written in the third person to record the subtle, ironic, and wry observations of the playful but stern "Madame Realism." Through her use of a fictional character, Tillman devised a new genre of writing that melded fiction and theory, sensation, and critical thought, disseminating her third-person art writer's observations in such magazines as Art in America and in a variety of art exhibition catalogs and artist books. Two decades after the original publication of these texts, her approach to investigation through embodied thought has been wholly absorbed by a new generation of artists and writers. Provocative and wholly pleasurable, Tillman's stories/essays dissect the mundane with alarming precision. As Lydia Davis wrote of her work, "Our assumptions shift. The every day becomes strange, paradox is embraced, and the unexpected is always around the corner." This new collection also includes the complete stories of Tillman's other persona, the quixotic author Paige Turner (whose investigation of the language of love overshoots any actual experience of it), and additional stories and essays that address figures such as the "Translation Artist" and Cindy Sherman.

The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories

Two writers sail to Patmos to search for a lost portrait of the cult French writer Herve Guiber, discovering They discover an island in denial of the global turmoil surrounding it, from the refugees interned on nearby Samos to the fascists rising in Europe and America.Two writers sail to the remote Greek island of Patmos, where St. John received the Book of Revelation, to search for a lost portrait of the French writer and photographer Herv� Guibert. Once they arrive, they find themselves mired in Patmos' uneasy sense of timelessness, where history and the present jumble together. In their hunt for the painting of the iconic gay novelist, they discover that the island's isolation from the global catastrophe surrounding it, from the refugees interned on nearby Samos to the fascist rise in Europe and the United States, is more pose than reality.

Skyland

Debut novel that navigates disaster, belonging, pre-apocalypse, the cultural public & psychic devastation.

MacArthur Park

Andrew Durbin's Mature Themes is a hybrid text of poetry, art criticism, and memoir focused on the subject of disingenuity-and what constitutes "personal experience" both online and IRL when to "go deep" in a culture of so many unreliable communication technologies is to resend a text at 3 AM. Throughout the book, Durbin's voice mutates into others in order to uncover the fading specters of meaning buried under the pristine surfaces of art and Hollywood, locating below them the other realities that structure our experience of both.

Mature Themes

The cinematic, never-before-told story of two intimately entangled artists who redefined queer art. When Paul Thek met Peter Hujar in the winter of 1956 in Coral Gables, Florida, a slow-simmering connection began to burn. Thek, twenty-three and living in Miami, was handsome and itching to make it as a painter; in the twenty-two-year-old Hujar, a shy, sensual photographer, he’d found a kindred spirit. By 1960, they were dating and living in New York, beginning decades of sex, love, competition, and reconciliation—an entanglement that changed American art forever. Surrounded by a robust creative scene populated by Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, Fran Lebowitz, John Waters, and David Wojnarowicz, Thek and Hujar’s profoundly influential careers, from the early 1960s through the late 1980s, differed as much as the men themselves. The unpredictable and often overlooked Thek crafted visceral installations and sculptures, while Hujar, celebrated and sociable, took penetrating portraits of his world, queer and otherwise. Yet even at their most estranged, and even after their deaths from AIDS, both men were united by a pursuit of liberation—from artistic and sexual limits, from anything short of changing the world. Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was unravels, for the first time, the intertwined stories and work of two boundaryburning, paradigm-tilting, never more relevant American artists. Weaving together deft art criticism with moving portraits of both men's inner lives, and assembled with exhaustive research, Durbin’s book is an ode to a lost but still-living world—and two men who defined it.

A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek

The Wonderful World That Almost Was

Peter Hujar

Paul Thek and Peter Hujar: Stay Away from Nothing

Elena Ferrante

Edith Pearlman

Paul Crenshaw

Simone White

Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer

Natasha Lvovich

Sara Batkie

Shannon Burns

Kim Vodicka

Lydia Conklin

Douglas Watson

Taylor Fox

Benjamin T. Miller

Jess Dutschmann

Cean Gamalinda

Laura Goldstein

Debbie Hu

Jason Katzenstein

Sue Landers

Kelin Loe

Laura Marie Marciano

Filip Marinovich

Miranda McLeod

Steve Roggenbook

Matthew Socia

Casey Wiley

A Literary Journal

Epiphany Issue 13

Poetry. Fiction. Nonfiction. Art. Edited by Andrew Durbin. SAY BYE TO REASON AND HI TO EVERYTHING is a collection of chapbooks by Dodie Bellamy, Cecilia Corrigan (with illustrations by Jocelyn Spaar), Amy De'Ath, Lynne Tillman, and Jackie Wang. Each chapbook is uniquely designed with an accompanying cover by artist Nayland Blake and features new or previously uncollected works by each writer.

Say Bye to Reason and Hi to Everything

Andrew Durbin

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