Memories That Smell Like Gasoline - by David Wojnarowicz (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Wojnarowicz is a spokesman for the unspeakable." --New York Magazine

David Wojnarowicz, one of the most provocative artists of his generation, explores memory, violence, and the erotism of public space--all under the specter of AIDS.

Here are David Wojnarowicz's most intimate stories and sketches, from the full spectrum of his life as an artist and AIDS activist. Four sections--"Into the Drift and Sway," "Doing Time in a Disposable Body," "Spiral," and "Memories that Smell like Gasoline"--are made of images and indictments of a precocious adolescence, and his later adventures in the streets of New York. Combining text and image, tenderness and rage, Wojnarowicz's Memories that Smell like Gasoline is a disavowal of the world that wanted him dead, and a radical insistence on life.

The new and revised edition features a foreword by Ocean Vuong and a note from the editor, Amy Scholder.

Review Quotes

"Nightboat Books is an extremely important publisher, and it crowdfunded the publication of this book by artist Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992. I can't get enough of his work . . . I'm so glad that independent publishers are here to make sure Wojnarowicz's work, which feels like it could've been written yesterday, is never forgotten."
--Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times

"Some of his most searing and explosive work--sketches, essays and livewire prose poems resulting from an embodied sense of longing and anger."
--Interview Magazine

"The writing is hypnotic, colloquial, and often surprising--the first story, for instance, ends with the obliterative brightness of a policeman's flashlight, the prose dissolving into short line segments, too."
--Lisa Yin Zhang, Hyperallergic

"Instead of giving in to political exhaustion, Wojnarowicz fanned his rage and channeled it into a message of--not hope, exactly, but insistence. I am here."
--Christine Smallwood, New York Times

"Raw and visceral."
--Booklist

"Wojnarowicz's already impressive shadow seems to have grown longer over the past few years . . . It's moving, if maddening, that we keep uncovering new gifts from a visionary whose life was cut short by a callow administration."
--Brittany Allen, Literary Hub

"Across his art and writings, Wojnarowicz touches a world he knows will break, a world he hopes to memorialize in words and images, to break and be broken with others . . [Memories] should be in every travel bag this summer--Wojnarowicz forever and ever."
--Alina Stefanescu, On the Seawall

"Sick, like voiceover for dark version of My Own Private Idaho."--Charlie Fox
"He writes of his experiences of the unification of sex, violence, and pleasure in unflinching candidness . . . truthful and courageous."--Trey Burnette, Kelp Journal

About the Author

David Wojnarowicz was an accomplished artist, writer, and activist, born September 14, 1954. He came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, part of a cohort of East Village artists including Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, and Peter Hujar. His work--from the graffiti that first brought him recognition in his teens to the photography and films produced before his AIDS-related death at the age of thirty-seven--center his experience on the margins of American society. His multi-media artworks and political advocacy were the focus of a Whitney retrospective, which named both as signs of his "radical possibility."