Bøger udgivet af Soft Skull Press

When Michael Muhammad Knight sets out to write the definitive biography of his “Anarcho-Sufi” hero and mentor, writer Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), he makes a startling discovery that changes everything. At the same time that he grows disillusioned with his idol, Knight finds that his own books have led to American Muslim youths making a countercultural idol of him, placing him on the same pedestal that he had given Wilson.In an attempt to forge his own path, Knight pledges himself to an Iranian Sufi order that Wilson had almost joined, attempts to write the Great American Queer Islamo-Futurist Novel, and even creates his own mosque in the wilderness of West Virginia. He also employs the “cut-up” writing method of Bey’s friend, the late William S. Burroughs, to the Qur’an, subjecting Islam’s holiest scripture to literary experimentation.William S. Burroughs vs. the Qur’an is the struggle of a hero-worshiper without heroes and the meeting of religious and artistic paths, the quest of a writer as spiritual seeker.

"Timeline detailing the life events and literary accomplishments of the writers who became known as the Beat Generation"--P. (4) of cover.

In the last of Times Square's peep shows, a man pays $40 to watch a girl strip naked behind glass. These institutions, left over from the days when 42nd Street was the vicious center of vice, will soon disappear completely from a rapidly gentrifying New York City, their stories lost forever. Yet, the story of the peeps is too interesting and too vital to the history of Times Square not to be told. In "The Last of the Live Nude Girls," Sheila McClear pulls back the curtain back on the little-documented world of the peep shows and their history. A late bloomer from the Midwest, McClear became a stripper in the peeps after finding herself adrift in New York. But after-dark Times Square seeped into her blood, and she ended up staying much longer than she imagined. The story she tells is not just of her own coming-of-age--nor is it one of sex and vice and salaciousness. Rather, it is a redemptive narrative of modern life on the fringes of society in New York City.

From Melville to Madoff, the Confidence Man is an essential American archetype. George Roy Hill’s 1973 film The Sting treats this theme with a characteristic dexterity. The movie was warmly received in its time, winning seven Academy Awards, but there were some who thought the movie was nothing more than a slight throwback. Pauline Kael, among others, felt Hill’s film was mechanical and contrived: a callow and manipulative attempt to recapture the box-office success of Robert Redford and Paul Newman’s prior pairing, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid. Matthew Specktor’s passionate, lyric meditation turns The Sting on its head, on its side, and right-side-up in an effort to unpack the film’s giddy complexity and secret, melancholic heart. Working off interviews with screenwriter David S. Ward and producer Tony Bill, and tacking from nuanced interpretation of its arching moods and themes to gimlet-eyed observation of its dizzying sleights-of-hand, Specktor opens The Sting up to disclose the subtle and stunning dimensions—sexual, political, and aesthetic—of Hill’s best film. Through Specktor’s lens, The Sting reveals itself as both an enduring human drama and a meditation on art-making itself, an ode to the necessary pleasure of being fooled at the movies.

Written between 1989 and 2008, the poems in Kevin Powell's powerful new collection encompass everything from his early role as a renowned slam poet (and original cast member of MTV's "Real World") to his current incarnation as a poet operating away from the scene. Within this rich tapestry of musings, confession, and introspection, Powell weaves issues like racism, black self-hatred, and gender violence with his own anguished revelations about sex, love, and misogyny. Sampling from the personal and the political, Powell reshapes them into a provocative soundtrack for the times.

"With all the graphic adaptations of mythology flying around, it's about time someone got to old Gilgamesh . . . Winegarner's adaptation demonstrates the extensive debt mythology and religion owe this ancient tale." --BooklistBefore the Bible and legendary figures like Hercules, King Arthur, and Beowulf, there was Gilgamesh. As the king of Uruk, a city in ancient Mesopotamia, Gilgamesh protected his people from harm, battling a multitude of fierce demons with the steadfast help of his brother, Enkidu.But Gilgamesh's reign faced the ultimate challenge from the power-hungry goddess Ishtar, who proposed marriage only to be unceremoniously spurned by Gilgamesh. Ishtar's rage led Gilgamesh to his greatest battle, a battle that shook Gilgamesh to his core and led him to travel further than any other man-to the land of the gods on a quest to find immortality.Written down on cuneiform tablets nearly five thousand years ago, Gilgamesh's story was originally recorded in the form of an epic poem. In this bold retelling of the ancient legend-presented for the first time in graphic novel form-graphic novelist Andrew Winegarner revitalizes the ultimate adventure story. His illustrations breathe new life into the story of humanity's first hero, and the result is a page-turning take on the world's oldest epic poem.

Deep Focus is a series of film books with a fresh approach. Take the smartest, liveliest writers in contemporary letters and let them loose on the most vital and popular corners of cinema history: midnight movies, the New Hollywood of the sixties and seventies, film noir, screwball comedies, international cult classics, and more. Passionate and idiosyncratic, each volume of Deep Focus is long-form criticism that’s relentlessly provocative and entertaining.Christopher Sorrentino’s examination of Death Wish is the second entry in the series. The fourth collaboration between director Michael Winner and actor Charles Bronson, Death Wish was the apotheosis of a succession of films hitting screens during the seventies—including Bullitt, Dirty Harry, and Walking Tall—that tacked against a prevailing liberal wind in Hollywood cinema. Exploiting audience fears of a bestial “other” infesting American cities, and explicitly linking law and order with a pastoral ideal of the Old West (and exurban subdivisions), its glib endorsement of vigilantism infuriated liberal critics even as it filled theaters with cheering audiences. Sorrentino examines Death Wish in its various contexts—as movie, as provocation, as social commentary, as political tautology, and as depiction of urban life—and considers its lasting influence on cinema.

Michael Muhammad Knight embarks on a quest for an indigenous American Islam in a series of interstate odysseys. Traveling 20,000 miles by Greyhound in sixty days, he squats in run-down mosques, pursues Muslim romance, is detained at the U.S.-Canadian border with a trunkload of Shia literature, crashes Islamic Society of North America conventions, stink-palms Cat Stevens, and limps across Chicago to find the grave of Noble Drew Ali, filling dozens of notebooks along the way. The result is this semi-autobiographical book, with multiple histories of Fard and the landscape of American Islam woven into Knight’s own story.In the course of his adventures, Knight sorts out his own relationship to Islam as he journeys from punk provocateur to a recognized voice in the community, and watches first-hand the collapse of a liberal Islamic dream. The book’s extensive cast of characters includes anarchist Sufi heretics, vegan kungfu punks, tattoo-sleeved converts in hard-core bands, spiritual drug dealers, Islamic feminists, slick media entrepreneurs, sages of the street, the grandsons of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, and a group called Muslims for Bush.

"A fascinating scrapbook documenting a time in the life of a female musician . . . Tales of tours, blowouts, relationships with names such as The Cramps, Pantera, Ramones, Alice Cooper, Kyuss, Monster Magnet, Marilyn Manson, Coffin Joe and Danzig make this book essential as a time capsule of a certain era in the world of hard rock." —Uber RockArt rock? Noise rock? Punk-metal? Alternative? White Zombie may have been unclassifiable, but it didn't stop them from carving out a place for themselves in music history. The band became a multiplatinum, two-time Grammy nominee with the release of their 1992 album, La Sexorcisto. But while most people will remember their bizarre look and macabre lyrics, what many failed to realize was that their lanky, high-octane bass player was a woman.I'm In the Band combines eleven years of tour diaries, flyers, and personal photos and ephemera to chart White Zombie's rise from the gritty music scene of New York's Lower East Side in the eighties to arena headliners during the nineties. It also shares the unlikely story of a female musician who won the respect and adoration of male metal musicians and fans. From 1985 to 1996, Sean Yseult was the sole woman not only in White Zombie, but in the entire metal scene.With I'm In the Band, Yseult has created both a coffee table book and a striking visual memoir. Her personal memorabilia offers fans a unique vantage on the life of a mega-band during rock's last golden age.

Associated with key 1960s avant garde figures such as Ginsberg, Burroughs, Rauschenberg, and Johns, John Giorno was an early pioneer of multimedia poetry through Giorno Poetry Systems, which also distributed a who's who of the American underground from Patti Smith to Sonic Youth. Giorno's use of transgressive material and in-your-face, amplified delivery was also a key influence on punk/new wave pioneers such as Suicide, Throbbing Gristle, and Black Flag. Not just a poet but a sexual, spiritual, and political radical, Giorno helped pioneer the open celebration of queer sexuality in poetry in the 1960s. "Subduing Demons in America" offers the best of Giorno's revolutionary poetry, from his striking Pop Art-influenced poems of the 1960s to the psychedelic, echo-laden, multitracked cut-ups of the 1970s with their explosive configurations of queer sex, spiritual practice, and the bohemian Good Life. Also here are the pared-down punk/hip-hop performance poems that Giorno performed in the 1980s.

There’s a megalomaniac professor digging a hole outside his flat. His small stake in the amphetamine market in Brixton is being threatened by a mysterious Chinese man. And the Milk Marketing Board has taken out a contract on his life. Welcome to the bizarre, obsessive world of Alby Starvation.Alby’s doctor refuses to believe he’s allergic to just about everything (which he is), especially milk. But when Alby soon discovers that his ongoing ailments are directly linked to the consumption of said product, he gives it up and is cured. Only thing is, he goes on to suggest this remedy to a number of other people suffering from milk allergies. In Millar’s surreal backyard, the Milk Marketing Board sees sales slump to an alltime low. So there’s only one thing left to do: put out a contract on Alby Starvation. Now Alby must save both his life and his precious comic collection.In Martin Millar’s surreal tale of the urban counterculture—a world full of shoplifting, deaththreats, paranoia, and video game arcades—Alby’s frantic struggle to avoid being shot falls somewhere between Irvine Welsh and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

As the gay mainstream prioritizes the attainment of straight privilege over all else, it drains queer identity of any meaning, relevance, or cultural value, writes Matt Bernstein Sycamore, aka Mattilda, editor of That's Revolting! . This timely collection shows what the new queer resistance looks like. Intended as a fistful of rocks to throw at the glass house of Gaylandia, the book challenges the commercialized, commodified, and hyperobjectified view of gay/queer identity projected by the mainstream (straight and gay) media by exploring queer struggles to transform gender, revolutionize sexuality, and build community/family outside of traditional models. Essays include “Dr. Laura, Sit on My Face,” “Gay Art Guerrillas,” “Legalized Sodomy Is Political Foreplay,” and “Queer Parents: An Oxymoron or Just Plain Moronic?”

Following on from his rollicking trilogy, Irish Wine, Dick Wimmer returns with five exuberant new tales about Seamus Boyne, the greatest painter in the world.Among the cast of characters back with him to continue the wild ride are the Boynes' saucy daughter, Tory, and Seamus's best friend, the writer Gene Hagar. Fast-paced and irreverent, these stories offer more of Wimmer at his best--an alchemist who stirs emotional turmoil into tomfoolery and misadventure to create hilarious adventures that leave readers wanting more.

This exhaustive study focuses on the New York filmmakers that coalesced around the radical manifesto espoused by downtown filmmaker Nick Zedd: "none shall emerge unscathed." Placing their work within the wider alternative film and downtown post-punk scenes, "Deathtripping" offers detailed analyses of the movement's films alongside interviews with the filmmakers and their collaborators, including Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, Tommy Turner, Beth B, Joe Coleman, and Lydia Lunch. Also discussed are seminal influences such as the Kuchar brothers, Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol as well as the history of underground and trash cinema.

"Playing Right Field" refers to an early experience of the author and his brother, Lloyd, who played Little League together; they were forced to share one team T-shirt because their father the multimillionaire was too cheap to buy one for each of them.

J. Eric Miller grew up in a cabin in the woods of Colorado. That experience of silence, darkness, and depth is evident throughout the stories in this book. Typical is "Invisible Fish," in which a night clerk in a mall pet store tortures the animals at night. Dumbfounded, the storeowners bludgeon to death a chimpanzee, the only animal in the store they imagine is capable of such atrocities. An entry in the new series "Soft Skull ShortLit -- Pocket Books for a New World, " this book deals with the strange and often violent manifestations of desire with an eye to deconstructing and diffusing them. These are edgy short stories that explore the boundless human capacity for cruelty.

Although the stories and essays are diverse in subject and voice--and some explore tangential activities from tree eating to the historical and cultural significance of boulders--they all express certain approaches common to skateboarders everywhere.