Gathering approaches from the diffuse planetary avant-garde of today, the second series of Hanuman Editions brings together works by McKenzie Wark, Bora Chung, Enrique Vila-Matas, Vivek Narayanan, and the cult duo of Raymond Pettibon and Mike Topp. We also reissue Cookie Mueller’s Fan Mail, Frank Letters, and Crank Calls from the original Hanuman catalogue.
Softcover, 4.125"x2.75", Printed in United Kingdom
“My idols are dead, and my enemies are in power. Domination co-opts language, making it almost unusable, other than by machines. We are to be ruled without even the semblance of style. I speak instead of what I have loved: writing, the city. In the end, after many diversions, this body, this world—and you.”
From acclaimed theorist and trans icon McKenzie Wark, Life Story is a divulsion and revision of the author’s multiple forms. Life Story asks, "how to write not about love, but with love, in love, in form as well as content?" With an offering of lucidity amid disaster; a reinvention in the face of modernity’s unraveling. A tour of her selves, works, and worlds, Life Story is at once elegiac and mutinous, “an arc of history as built on an ontology of love.”
In Life Story, McKenzie Wark plays with her future epitaph, creating a biographical form that eludes captured data-points. But for our purposes, let’s say that this Australian-born writer and scholar is renowned for her work on media theory, critical theory, the avant-gardes, and in recent years, raving and transsexual narratives. She is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School in New York City.
“Hello?”
“Yeah, hi Georgia!”
“This isn’t Georgia. Who’s
calling please?”
“John Huston.”
“From the grave ?”
Following the publication of Cookie Mueller’s Garden of Ashes in our first series, we are thrilled to reissue her first contribution to the Hanuman canon: Fan Mail, Frank Letters, and Crank Calls, an epistolary portrait of the absurdity of human connection. Her book also doubles as a shrine to channels of analogue communication between private and public personas that have since metastasized in our climate of microcelebrity ideation. Sexy and hilarious, Mueller’s text embraces the discomfiting nature of desire with empathy and trademark wit.
Guiding readers across the desiccated landscape of twenty-first century America in The Frontier Index is the cult duo of Raymond Pettibon and Mike Topp, two of contemporary art and literature's wildest provocateurs in pen and ink. As they note, The Frontier Index is loosely based on Kenko’s 1332 Essays In Idleness, comprising a preface and 243 passages that can span a single line or a few pages. Essays In Idleness is similar to Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, from around 1000 AD, in that both books employ zuihitsu, a Japanese literary form that literally means “follow the brush,” where the creation of order depends on disorder. Zuihitsu demands as its starting point juxtapositions, fragments, contradictions, random materials and pieces of varying lengths. Oh yes, and wrestlers.
