Download or read book SCUM Manifesto written by Valerie Solanas and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classic radical feminist statement from the woman who shot Andy Warhol “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” Outrageous and violent, SCUM Manifesto was widely lambasted when it first appeared in 1968. Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, self-published the book just before she became a notorious household name and was confined to a mental institution. But for all its vitriol, it is impossible to dismiss as the mere rantings of a lesbian lunatic. In fact, the work has proved prescient, not only as a radical feminist analysis light years ahead of its time—predicting artificial insemination, ATMs, a feminist uprising against underrepresentation in the arts—but also as a stunning testament to the rage of an abused and destitute woman. In this edition, philosopher Avital Ronell’s introduction reconsiders the evocative exuberance of this infamous text.
Download or read book Valerie Solanas written by Breanne Fahs and published by The Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authoritative biography of the 60s countercultural icon who wrote SCUM Manifesto, shot Andy Warhol, and made an unforgettable mark on feminist history. Valerie Solanas is one of the most polarizing figures of 1960s counterculture. A cult hero to some and vehemently denounced by others, she has been dismissed but never forgotten. Known for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968 and for writing the infamous SCUM Manifesto, Solanas became one of the most famous women of her era. But she was also diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and spent much of her life homeless or in mental hospitals. Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, a sui generis vision of radical gender dystopia, predicted ATMs, test-tube babies, the Internet, and artificial insemination long before they existed. It has sold more copies and been translated into more languages than nearly all other feminist texts of its time. And yet, shockingly little work has investigated the life of its author. This book is the first biography about Solanas, including original interviews with family, friends (and enemies), and numerous living Warhol associates. It reveals surprising details about Solanas’s life: the children nearly no one knew she had, her drive for control over her own writing, and her elusive personal and professional relationships. Valerie Solanas reveals the tragic, remarkable life of an iconic figure. It is “not only a remarkable biographical feat but also a delicate navigation of an unwieldy, demanding, and complex life story” (BOMB Magazine).
Download or read book Valerie written by Sara Stridsberg and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fever dream of a novel—strangely funny, entirely unconventional—Valerie conjures the life, mind, and art of American firebrand Valerie Solanas In April 1988, Valerie Solanas—the writer, radical feminist, author of the SCUM Manifesto and would-be assassin of Andy Warhol—was discovered dead at fifty-two in her hotel room, in a grimy corner of San Francisco, alone, penniless, and surrounded by the typed pages of her last writings. In Valerie, a nameless narrator revisits the room where Solanas died, the courtroom where she was tried and convicted of attempting to murder Andy Warhol, the Georgia wastelands where she spent her childhood and was repeatedly raped by her father and beaten by her alcoholic grandfather, and the mental hospitals where she was shut away. A leading feminist in Sweden and one of the most acclaimed writers in Scandinavia, Sara Stridsberg here blurs the boundaries between history and fiction, self-making and storytelling, madness and art, love and tragedy. Through imagined conversations and monologues, reminiscences and rantings, she reconstructs this most intriguing and enigmatic of women, reaching back in time to amplify her voice and bring her powerful, heartbreaking story into new light.
Download or read book I Shot Andy Warhol written by Mary Harron and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I Shot Andy Warhol is the script of the art-house film telling the story of Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist and author of the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, who made headlines in 1968 when she attempted to kill Andy Warhol.
Download or read book Females written by Andrea Long Chu and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of today’s most original thinkers on gender offers a provocative take on the current feminist movement, exploring “desire as the force shaping our identifies, the paradoxes of liberation politics, and her own gender transition” (Bookforum). “[Females] is always smart, sometimes sincere, and unpredictable about when it will pinch your arm or clutch its nails around your heart.” —Vice Everyone is female, and everyone hates it. Females is Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire. Drawing inspiration from a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas—the woman who wrote the SCUM Manifesto and shot Andy Warhol—Chu aims her searing wit and surgical intuition at targets ranging from performance art to psychoanalysis, incels to porn. She even has a few barbs reserved for feminists like herself. Each step of the way, she defends the indefensible claim that femaleness is less a biological state and more a fatal existential condition that afflicts the entire human race—men, women, and everyone else. Or maybe she’s just projecting. A thrilling new voice who has been credited with launching the “second wave” of trans studies, Chu shows readers how to write for your life, baring her innermost self with a morbid sense of humor and a mordant kind of hope.
Download or read book Acts of Gaiety written by Sara Warner and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2012-10-26 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against queer theory's long-suffering romance with mourning and melancholia and a national agenda that urges homosexuals to renounce pleasure if they want to be taken seriously, Acts of Gaiety seeks to reanimate notions of "gaiety" as a political value for LGBT activism by recovering earlier mirthful modes of political performance. The book mines the archives of lesbian-feminist activism of the 1960s–70s, highlighting the outrageous gaiety—including camp, kitsch, drag, guerrilla theater, zap actions, rallies, manifestos, pageants, and parades alongside "legitimate theater”-- at the center of the social and theatrical performances of the era. Juxtaposing figures such as Valerie Solanas and Jill Johnston with more recent performers and activists including Hothead Paisan, Bitch and Animal, and the Five Lesbian Brothers, Sara Warner shows how reclaiming this largely discarded and disavowed past elucidates possibilities for being and belonging. Acts of Gaiety explores the mutually informing histories of gayness as politics and as joie de vivre, along with the centrality of liveliness to queer performance and protest.
Download or read book The Faculty of Dreams written by Sara Stridsberg and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In April 1988, Valerie Solanas - the writer, radical feminist and would-be assassin of Andy Warhol - was discovered dead in her hotel room, in a grimy corner of San Francisco. She was only 52; alone, penniless and surrounded by the typed pages of her last writings. In The Faculty of Dreams, Sara Stridsberg revisits the hotel room where Solanas died, the courtroom where she was tried and convicted of attempting to murder Andy Warhol, the Georgia wastelands where she spent her childhood, where she was repeatedly raped by her father and beaten by her alcoholic grandfather, and the mental hospitals where she was interned. Through imagined conversations and monologues, reminisces and rantings, Stridsberg reconstructs this most intriguing and enigmatic of women, articulating the thoughts and fears that she struggled to express in life and giving a powerful, heartbreaking voice to the writer of the infamous SCUM Manifesto.
Download or read book Milk and Filth written by Carmen Giménez Smith and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Adding to the Latina tradition, Carmen Giménez Smith, politically aware and feminist-oriented, focuses on general cultural references rather than a sentimental personal narrative. She speaks of sexual politics and family in a fierce, determined tone voracious in its opinions about freedom and responsibility. The author engages in mythology and art history, musically wooing the reader with texture and voice. As she references such disparate cultural figures as filmmaker Lars Von Trier, Annie from the film Annie Get Your Gun, Nabokov’s Lolita, Facebook entries and Greek gods, they appear as part of the poet’s cultural critique. Phrases such as “the caustic domain of urchins” and “the gelatin shiver of tea’s surface” take the poems from lyrical images to comic humor to angry, intense commentary. On writing about “downgrading into human,” she says, “Then what? Amorality, osteoporosis and not even a marble estuary for the ages.” Giménez Smith’s poetic arsenal includes rapier-sharp wordplay mixed with humor, at times self-deprecating, at others an ironic comment on the postmodern world, all interwoven with imaginative language of unexpected force and surreal beauty. Revealing a long view of gender issues and civil rights, the author presents a clever, comic perspective. Her poems take the reader to unusual places as she uses rhythm, images, and emotion to reveal the narrator’s personality. Deftly blending a variety of tones and styles, Giménez Smith’s poems offer a daring and evocative look at deep cultural issues.
Download or read book Feminism s Queer Temporalities written by Sam McBean and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-16 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite feminism’s uneven movements, it has been predominantly understood through metaphors of generations or waves. Feminism's Queer Temporalities builds on critiques of the limitations of this linear model to explore alternative ways of imagining feminism’s timing. It finds in feminism’s literary and cultural archive narratives of temporality that might now be diagnosed as queer, where queer designates modes of being historical that exceed the linear and the generational. Few theorists have looked to popular feminist figures, literature, and culture to theorize feminism’s timing. Through methodologically creative readings, McBean explores non-generational, anti-linear, and asynchronous time in the figure of Antigone, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, the film Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains, Valerie Solanas and SCUM Manifesto, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. The first to substantially bring together the ways in which time has come to matter in both feminist and queer disciplines, this book will appeal to students and scholars of feminist, queer and gender studies, cultural studies and literary studies.
Download or read book Against Memoir written by Michelle Tea and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The PEN Award-winning essay collection about queer lives: “Gorgeously punk-rock rebellious.”—The A.V. Club The razor-sharp but damaged Valerie Solanas; a doomed lesbian biker gang; recovering alcoholics; and teenagers barely surviving at an ice creamery: these are some of the larger-than-life, yet all-too-human figures populating America’s fringes. Rife with never-ending fights and failures, theirs are the stories we too often try to forget. But in the process of excavating and documenting these queer lives, Michelle Tea also reveals herself in unexpected and heartbreaking ways. Delivered with her signature honesty and dark humor, this is the first-ever collection of journalistic writing by the author of How to Grow Up and Valencia. As she blurs the line between telling other people’s stories and her own, she turns an investigative eye to the genre that’s nurtured her entire career—memoir—and considers the price that art demands be paid from life. “Eclectic and wide-ranging…A palpable pain animates many of these essays, as well as a raucous joy and bright curiosity.” —The New York Times “Queer counterculture beats loud and proud in Tea’s stellar collection.” —Publishers Weekly (starred) “The best essay collection I've read in years.”—The New Republic Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Download or read book Burn It Down written by Breanne Fahs and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2024-02-27 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A must-read, an antidote to powerlessness, a literary companion for the ages." –Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir "Editors' Choice" –New York Times Book Review A comprehensive collection of feminist manifestos, chronicling rage and dreams from the nineteenth century to the present day A landmark collection spanning two centuries and four waves of feminist activism and writing, Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge. The manifesto—raging, demanding, quarreling and provocative—has always been central to feminism, and it’s the angry, brash feminism we need now. Collecting over seventy-five manifestos from around the world, Burn It Down! is a rallying cry and a call to action. Among this confrontational sisterhood, you’ll find the Dyke Manifesto by the Lesbian Avengers, The Ax Tampax Poem Feministo by the Bloodsisters Project, The Manifesto of Apocalyptic Witchcraft by Peter Grey, Simone de Beauvoir’s pro-abortion Manifesto of the 343, Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female by Frances M. Beal, and many more. Feminist academic and writer Breanne Fahs argues that we need manifestos in all their urgent rawness, for it is at the bleeding edge of rage and defiance that new ideas are born.
Download or read book Bombshell written by James Reich and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bombshell is a feminist nuclear thriller set twenty-five years after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, in which an alienated young Russian woman born in its shadow undertakes a road trip across the U.S., waging a guerrilla war against the nuclear industry and leaving in her wake a trail of destruction and assassinations. Obsessed with would-be Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas, Varyushka Cash recreates her atomic past through escalating violence and her one true goal: an assault on the Indian Point nuclear plant on the bank of the Hudson River. All along she is relentlessly pursued by the CIA, eager to capture Varyushka on charges of domestic terrorism. The cat-and-mouse chase leads to a final showdown in a decimated and irradiated New York, there on the cusp of a frightening new future. The initial draft of Bombshell was completed five months before the Fukushima catastrophe, written from the author’s morbid suspicion that the twenty-fifth anniversary of catastrophe at Chernobyl, Pripyat, and beyond would be marked by an echo in the present, shadowed by the real threat present in our unguarded and deteriorating nuclear facilities. Bombshell is a combustible and commercial step forward by one of our most creative and intellectual writers today.
Download or read book The Lonely City written by Olivia Laing and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-03 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by thousands of strangers. This roving cultural history of urban loneliness centers on the ultimate city: Manhattan, that teeming island of gneiss, concrete, and glass. How do we connect with other people, particularly if our sexuality or physical body is considered deviant or damaged? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens? Laing travels deep into the work and lives of some of the century's most original artists in a celebration of the state of loneliness.
Download or read book Men Are Better Than Women written by Dick Masterson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-04-08 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a process of exhaustive man research he calls "keeping his eyes open," Dick Masterson has compiled a Magnum-size list of the ways men are better than women. It is an infallible compendium of man's greatness, filled with the most egregiously fallacious arguments ever put to words, but with some kind of miraculous, rock-solid man logic dripping like motor oil from every sentence. It is a manifesto more memorable than bullshit like High Fidelity or which Axe baby powder Maxim thinks you should slap on your nuts before clubbing, more chock-full of devastating man quotes than Oscar Wilde with two wangs. Most important, it is the only one of its kind. In Men Are Better Than Women, Dick Masterson dispenses logic from his man mouth into the eyes of his male readers like some kind of mighty mother man eagle with nutrient-rich word vomit. It's a book that makes you feel like driving a train into a dynamite factory and then tearing a telephone book apart with your bare hands, just because that's the way men have always done it. Masterson's chapters are simple and self-contained, demand no commitments from readers, and have an immediate payoff. Men Are Better Than Women is a dangerous work of satire -- not dangerous in a revolutionary sense, but dangerous in that it walks the razor-thin line between cruelty and absurdity. That line is called hilarious.
Download or read book Letters of T S Eliot Volume 8 written by T. S. Eliot and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 1121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eliot is called upon to become the completely public man. He gives talks, lectures, readings and broadcasts, and even school prize-day addresses. As editor and publisher, his work is unrelenting, commissioning works ranging from Michael Roberts's The Modern Mind to Elizabeth Bowen's anthology The Faber Book of Modern Stories. Other letters reveal Eliot's delight in close friends such as John Hayward, Virginia Woolf and Polly Tandy, and his colleagues Geoffrey Faber and Frank Morley, as well as his growing troupe of godchildren - to whom he despatches many of the verses that will ultimately be gathered up in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939). The volume covers his separation from first wife Vivien, and tells the full story of the decision taken by her brother, following the best available medical advice, to commit her to an asylum - after she had been found wandering in the streets of London. All the while these numerous strands of correspondence are being played out, Eliot struggles to find the time to compose his second play, The Family Reunion (1939), which is finally completed in 1938.
Download or read book The Letters of T S Eliot written by T. S. Eliot and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 914 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume One: 1898–1922 presents some 1,400 letters encompassing the years of Eliot's childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, through 1922, by which time the poet had settled in England, married his first wife, and published The Waste Land. Since the first publication of this volume in 1988, many new materials from British and American sources have come to light. More than two hundred of these newly discovered letters are now included, filling crucial gaps in the record and shedding new light on Eliot's activities in London during and after the First World War. Volume Two: 1923–1925 covers the early years of Eliot's editorship of The Criterion, publication of The Hollow Men, and his developing thought about poetry and poetics. The volume offers 1,400 letters, charting Eliot's journey toward conversion to the Anglican faith, as well as his transformation from banker to publisher and his appointment as director of the new publishing house Faber & Gwyer. The prolific and various correspondence in this volume testifies to Eliot's growing influence as cultural commentator and editor.
Download or read book Two Sisters written by Åsne Seierstad and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The riveting true story of two sisters’ journey to the Islamic State and the father who tries to bring them home Two Sisters, by the international bestselling author Åsne Seierstad, tells the unforgettable story of a family divided by faith. Sadiq and Sara, Somali immigrants raising a family in Norway, one day discover that their teenage daughters, Leila and Ayan, have vanished—and are en route to Syria to aid the Islamic State. Seierstad’s riveting account traces the sisters’ journey from secular, social democratic Norway to the front lines of the war in Syria, and follows Sadiq’s harrowing attempt to find them. Employing the same mastery of narrative suspense she brought to The Bookseller of Kabul and One of Us, Seierstad puts the problem of radicalization into painfully human terms, using instant messages and other primary sources to reconstruct a family’s crisis from the inside. Eventually, she takes us into the hellscape of the Syrian civil war, as Sadiq risks his life in pursuit of his daughters, refusing to let them disappear into the maelstrom—even after they marry ISIS fighters. Two Sisters is a relentless thriller and a feat of reporting with profound lessons about belief, extremism, and the meaning of devotion.
