Emily Books

Apr 12

elanormcinerney:

Adrienne Eisen | Making Scenes | Emily Books

(via worn-smooth)

slaughterhouse90210:

“Whatever. Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation.”
—Renata Adler, Speedboat

Apr 10

What I’ve Learned from Empathy

This essay is from the appendix of Arsenal Pulp Press’s reissue of Empathy, which is our April pick. (Buy)

by Sarah Schulman

The MacDowell Colony, August 15, 2005

I’m trying to remember when I first got interested in juxtaposition, which is the experience at the core of this novel: relations between ideas, word fragments, genres, lovers, and relational existence as a fallback position for people whose reality is not acknowledged. Homosexually, it probably began in my 1962 nursery school class. Our young teacher was getting married, and she organized us into a mass mock wedding. The four-year-olds had to couple up boy/girl, boy/ girl and march down the aisle. I refused. I said I would be the photographer, and ran around with an invisible camera, snapping nonexistent pictures. I existed, in that moment as a lesbian and an artist, relationally. There was no girlfriend and no apparatus, yet I survived as myself, a not-bride.

Empathy by Sarah Schulman

We are overjoyed to announce that Sarah Schulman’s Empathy is our April pick. Sarah is pictured here in a 1988 portrait by Robert Giard, part of a series of portraits of gay and lesbian writers that you can see more of here (they are awesome.)

Empathy is difficult to describe. Here is the email we sent to subscribers:

“In Empathy , Anna O. is a thirtyish New Yorker living in the squalid East Village of 1990. Dead friends and junkies on the sidewalk are a fact of life, and worsening political unrest is threatening to destroy the world as she knows it. Plus, she’s always falling for the wrong women. She needs help, and she finds it — or does she? — in the person of Doc, a street-corner therapist who charges $10 and only sees each of his patients three times because “I get what I need out of it by the third session and you can too.” Doc diagnoses Anna with empathy, but it seems like her problems might be more complicated. Such as: does she exist? Does Doc? Do you?”

Stay tuned for more Empathy in the days ahead.

Mar 29

“

“Is it always the same story, then? Somebody loves and somebody doesn’t, or loves less, or loves someone else.”

“Part of the thing the character’s doing,” Ms. Adler said, “is trying not to live the stereotyped version of that story. There are many stereotyped versions of that story.”

” Miranda Popkey interviewed Renata Adler about the rerelease of Speedboat and Pitch Dark.

Mar 27

Johanna Fateman is a musician (Le Tigre), writer and artist who co-owns Seagull Salon, which I recently described in an email as “like the part in The Wizard of Oz where they get to the Emerald City and get makeovers, except also like being in your own apartment hanging out with your friends.” In addition to her criticism and scholarship, she also maintains the best twitter. We asked her about what she’s working on and what she’s reading (in addition to Speedboat, of course.)