San Diego State University Press Blog

22,000th and With a Bullet! Amazon.com and The Hurt Business

2008-04-21T20:35:00.000-07:00

Oliver Mayer's The Hurt Business has jumped to 22,000th on Amazon--not a bad first day for a day-old book! Congratulations, Oliver!

Oliver Mayer's The Hurt Business Collection is Now Available via Amazon.com

2008-04-21T13:44:00.000-07:00

update here.

Perversions on Parade: Brazilian Literature of Transgression and Postmodern Anti-Aesthetics in Glauco Mattoso by Steven F. Butterman

2008-03-27T19:34:00.000-07:00

Perversions on Parade
Brazilian Literature of Transgression and Postmodern Anti-Aesthetics in Glauco Mattoso
by Steven F. Butterman
Trade Paperback $25.00
AVAILABLE DIRECT ONLINE! $18.95 plus shipping via AMAZON.COM

This is the first book-length scholarly treatment in English of the Brazilian poet Glauco Mattoso's work, some of which was written during Brazil's most recent dictatorship (1964-85). The author highlights Mattoso's themes of homosexuality, fetishism, and symbolic sadomasochism within a context of a comparative examination of transgressive literature in the Western canon (for example, the French poete maudit, such as Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Verlaine) with particular emphasis on Luso-Brazilian literature from the Middle Ages to the present. Steven F. Butterman's PERVERSIONS ON PARADE, a respected 2005 issue from Hyperbole Books, an imprint of San Diego State University Press, has recently been featured in the University of Miami newspaper, The Hurricane; click here for the original story.

Perversions on Parade is a 2005 Hyperbole Books Volume. Christened in 2004 as an imprint of San Diego State University Press, Hyperbole Books is dedicated to publishing cutting-edge, over-the-top experiments in critical theory, literary criticism and graphic narrative. Imagine some odd, bastard child of SEMIOTEXT[e], Taschen, and Fantagraphics Books raised in the dumpster behind Powells, and you begin to wide the wave of Hyperbole Books. Remember, "Buy the Hype."

Kathy Acker Critical Study Volume with Hyperbole Books, an imprint of SDSU Press

2008-03-26T20:12:00.000-07:00

DEVOURING INSTITUTIONS

Devouring Institutions: The Life Work of Kathy Acker
Edited by Michael Hardin

ISBN: 1879691701 | 2005 | 272pp paperback*
illustrated: 2bw photos/map*

HYPERBOLE BOOKS, an imprint of
SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
ORDER NOW | ONLINE | $14.95 plus shipping
FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL HARDIN...

In April 1996, I organized a conference at which Kathy Acker was the keynote speaker,1 but could not imagine how to introduce such a complex writer and artist, and so I delegated that responsibility; now, however, I do not have such a luxury. I had met Kathy before, but it was while she was at this conference that she received the news that her biopsy had come back positive for breast cancer. Thus, when I heard on Monday, December 1, 1997 that she had died the day before, I felt a great loss. I was shocked-I knew she was a fighter and if anyone could beat cancer, she could-but at the same time, I had not heard from her since August. A few days later, I was informed of the news by the executor of her estate, so I asked how Kathy would have wanted to be remembered, thinking a memorial event in Houston might be nice, but he said, "keep her work alive." That was the germination for this collection, and I can happily state that since then, most of her work has come back into print, Grove released two new collections in fall 2002-The Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker and Rip-off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America-and NYU sponsored a conference on Kathy Acker in November, 2002. However, there remains a dearth of critical articles and books on her work, and her fiction is not taught as often as one might expect, given its relevance to contemporary literature and theory. To that end, Devouring Institutions is meant to be an introduction to Kathy Acker, with its essays being merely thirteen ways of looking at one of the most innovative, controversial, and difficult of American writers...

It is essential--particularly in these beige days through which the narratologically bland lead the narratologically bland--to explore and celebrate the brilliantly mad fictive possibility spaces Kathy Acker left behind. The essays in Devouring Institutions accomplish just that: together, they form a rich, important, multifaceted act of reminding about one of the most significant innovative writers of the last century.

Lance Olsen

Devouring Institutions is a welcome contribution to the study of Kathy Acker's oeuvre and influence. Hers was a subversive intellect that made an indelible mark on American literature of the 20th century.

Amy Scholder,
editor of Bodies of Work, Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective, and Essential Acker

Devouring Institutions: The Life Work of Kathy Acker is, to my knowledge, the first book-length manuscript that examines thoroughly, profoundly, and scholarly the Work of Kathy Acker. It will go a long way in introducing one of the most provocative, original, intellectual, and profound American writers of the late 20th century to the American reading public and the Academy. It will shatter the simplistic representation of Kathy Acker as a writer who simply wants to use profanity and pornography to shock the reader. Signifying the Western outlaw tradition of Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Henry Miller, and William S. Burroughs; appropriating, plagiarizing, and rewriting the Western, canonical texts and art of Cervantes, Dickens, Faulkner, Hawthorne, Genet, Twain, Artaud, Rimbaud, Freud, and others; engaging, reverberating against, and conversing with the poststructuralist and postmodernist theories of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Cixous, and Irigaray; and exposing the violence and repression of the patriarchy and of capitalism in the late 20th century; Kathy Acker produces a body of literature that textualizes, undermines, and critiques the major social, political, sexual, and economic issues/forces confronting Western humanity as it enters the 21th century. Many of the essays in Devouring Institutions unearth and make available to the reader the artistry, the complex vision, the humanity, the beauty, and the political convictions of Kathy Acker and her Work. I think Devouring Institutions will not only establish Kathy Acker and her Work as a site of critical domain, but also will make an invaluable contribution to American scholarship.

Professor W. Lawrence Hogue
The University of Housto

A welcome and necessary addition to the Acker canon.

Diane Fare
the Literary Encyclopedia

Table of Contents

Kathy Acker: An Introduction
Michael Hardin

Writing between Madness and Paralysis

"The Madness Outside Gender: Travels with Don Quixote and Saint Foucault."
Carol Siegel
Washington State University-Vancouver

"Kathy Acker and Literary Madness: Erecting a Pornographic Shell."

Robert Mazzola

"The Paralyzing Tensions of Radical Art in a Postmodern World: Kathy Acker's Last Novels as Exploratory Fictions."

Svetlana Mintcheva
Arts Advocacy Project, National Coalition Against Censorship

Building the Body of Desires

"Re-Educating the Body: Kathy Acker, Georges Bataille, and the Postmodern Body in My Mother: Demonology."

Terry Engebretsen
Idaho State University

"Too Much Is Never Enough: A Kaleidoscopic Approach to the Work of Kathy Acker."

Gayle Fornataro
Long Beach State University

"The Lay of the Land: Piracy and the Iterant Body in Kathy Acker's Pussy, King of the Pirates."

Sheri Weinstein
SUNY-Buffalo

"Between Theory and Autobiography: Negotiating Desire, Sex, and Love in the Work of Kathy Acker."

Michael Hardin
Bloomsburg University

Attacking Language

"Residues or Revolutions of the Language of Acker and Artaud."

Carla Harryman
Wayne State University

"Words Hurt! Acker's Appropriation of Myth in Don Quixote."

Jan Corbett
Delaware Valley College

"Kathy Acker's Radical Performance Writing in Eurydice in the Underworld and Other Texts."

Catherine Rock
University of Alberta

Post-Plagiarism

"Beyond Appropriation: Pussy, King of the Pirates and a Feminist Critique of Intellectual Property."

Caren Irr
Brandeis University

"Voice, Politics, Copyright."
Nicole CooleyQueens College

"Scavenging the E-Wreck: Kathy Acker, the Internet, and Artis Electronica."

Trevor Dodge
Idaho State University.

Kathy Acker
A Primary and Secondary Bibliography

A Description of Distant Roads: Original Journals of the First Expedition into California, 1769-1770 by Juan Crespí

2008-03-19T07:29:00.001-07:00

A Description of Distant Roads: Original Journals of the First Expedition into California, 1769-1770 by Juan Crespí
Edited and Translated by Alan K. Brown.
San Diego State University Press,
2001. ISBN 1-879691-64-
890 pages || deluxe hard cover edition || $60.00

ONLINE SPECIAL via Amazon.com! $44.95

This volume includes the complete journals of Juan Crespí in Spanish and English. Este tomo incluye los diarios completos de Juan Crespí en español y ingles.

Alan K. Brown's opus makes available for the first time the complete journals of Juan Crespí, the Franciscan friar who accompanied the first expeditions that established Spanish presence in Alta California. Beginning at the northern edge of the mission frontier of Baja California, the 1769 expedition trekked overland some three hundred miles to establish San Diego. From there, Crespí and the contingent of military personnel and Indian auxiliaries traveled northward on to Monterey and back again. Crespí journals provide the first detailed observations about the new land of Alta California and its peoples. This book is an essential source for the history of Spanish occupation of Alta California and the native Americans inhabiting the land.

This volume, which is the result of some forty years of research by Alan K. Brown, brings together what Crespí wrote in its entirety. All other printed and manuscript versions were censored, heavily edited, condensed, and excerpted by Serra, Palou, and othersalterations that dropped out critical detail and valuable information. This edition makes all other printed versions of Crespí's journals obsolete. Brown has stitched together the complete journals from different manuscript versions in archives in Europe and the Americas. They are presented by the editor in the original Spanish with detailed annotations and comparisons of alternate versions of sections of the text. As well, Brown provides a new English translation of the full texts.

The work includes an extensive introduction by Alan K. Brown that in itself is a valuable contribution to the history of the period and gives a detailed and realistic vision of the life of Crespí. The volume also contains detailed explanatory notes, an index of sites, a general index, and a list of references.

What the experts are saying:

"Thanks to the erudition and detective work of Alan K. Brown and the high scholarly standards of SDSU Press, we no longer have to depend on a flawed version of this essential account of the founding of Spanish California. This is the definitive edition, in English AND Spanish."

David J. Weber, Dedman Professor of History, Southern Methodist University, and author of The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992) and many other books on the Spanish-Mexican borderlands.

"This work will be an integral part of any collection of basic California historical materials. Researchers in related fields such as anthropology, historical geography, and ethnobotany, along with history buffs and mission aficionados will seize upon it as a Îmust read itemâ and it becomes an instant Îmust possessâ title for any California library reference collection. Alan K. Brown deserves immense credit for his monumental research, editing, and analytical effort that produced this volume."

Harry W. Crosby, author of Antigua California, Mission Colony on the Peninsular Frontier, (1994).

"Alan K. Brown has provided historians, scholars, and researchers with a tremendous gift. His monumental and authoritative translation of Crespí's complete journals will quickly become an indispensable work for all who study the history of California. The introduction to Brown's work is, in and of itself, a masterful piece of research and writing. The extensive and thorough footnotes attest to Brown's careful attention to detail and desire to include the latest scholarship in his work. Brown's translations from the original Spanish texts are superbly done. They remain faithful to the Spanish but are "reader-friendly." Having the Spanish version of the original journals available in the text for comparison purposes greatly increases the value of Brown's contribution to researchers."

Rose Marie Beebe, President, California Mission Studies Association and Professor of Spanish, Santa Clara University

Oliver Mayer's THE HURT BUSINESS! A New Spring 2008 Title From Hyperbole Books and SDSU Press

2008-03-10T06:34:00.000-07:00

Hyperbole Books is thrilled to announce the immanent release of The Hurt Business: Oliver Mayer's Early Works [+] PLUS in April 2008. More information on the book is here. For the proof of the new title's wraparound cover click here.

On the right, L.A. playwright Oliver Mayer with his wife, the actress Marlene Forte.

Four Pages from an Interview with Oliver Mayer from Hyperbole Books's THE HURT BUSINESS

2008-03-10T02:20:00.000-07:00

Fluxus! SDSU Press's Best-selling Study of Fluxus by Owen F. Smith...

2008-03-09T14:36:00.000-07:00

Fluxus: The History of an Attitude is based on the Owen F. Smith's exhaustive archival research tracking the physical remains of this fascinating interdisciplinary and international arts movement that began in the 1960s. Smith, in his "introduction," says, "Fluxus was once called 'the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties,' but for anyone seeking to learn more about the historical nature of Fluxus and its conceptual framework it might more readily seem to be just plain frustrating rather than radical. This is in part the case because Fluxus is historically complex and philosophically difficult to define. This very ambiguity, however, is an aspect of its radicality. Fluxus is both an attitude towards art-making and culture that is not historically limited, and a specific historical group. As an attitude, Fluxus is part of a larger conceptual development that is a significant, although often overlooked, current of the twentieth-century Western avant-garde. This attitude is in part traceable to the network of interrelated ideas about culture, politics, and society explored earlier in the twentieth century by the Futurists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists. Some of these same ideas were later explored after World War II by artists associated with groups such as Letterism, International Situationism, Nouveau Realisme, and Fluxus itself." Also, Smith claims the Fluxus is still very much alive today and that "Fluxus is by nature anti-reductivist, for it does not seek the illumination of some end or fact but celebrates participation in a non-hierarchal density of experience. In this way Fluxus does not refer to a style or even a procedure as such but to the presence of a totality of social activities. Fluxus seeks to shift from traditional utilitarian-based proscriptions to an open-ended, less evaluative participation in the processes themselves." The book is provided with a comprehensive bibliography and index.

Order it now from SDSU Press via Amazon.com.