Semiotext(e) is pleased to share AP's global coverage of Abdellah Taïa's haunting, revolutionary novel, Salvation Army:

Acclaimed by Edmund White as "a brilliant young Moroccan," Taïa, as the first "openly gay man in Morocco," has been urged by critics to renounce his citizenship. As AP correspondent Jenny Barchfield writes, "Taia's novels, peppered with sexually explicit passages, have catapulted him to fame in his native country and made him the de-facto poster child of its budding gay rights movement.... Taia has made it his mission to win acceptance for homosexuals throughout the Muslim world.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30960301/

In a follow-up interview with Michael Luongo of Gay City News, Taia states: "More than 50 percent of the Moroccan population is under the age of 25. I feel it is my responsibility to be an example of freedom. That is why, although I am totally aware of the religious and familial condemnation of it, it is very important to me to speak out about my homosexuality, my individuality. It is a signal that something is happening today in Morocco. The government won't admit it, but it exists. I am not the only one who wants to light the torch to revive the Moroccan dream. The Islamist parties' ideas are gaining ground daily in Morocco and in the Arab world. We have to destroy this new fear that they are trying to instill in us. I think my books, aside from their literary aspects, are also very political. Something big can come from Morocco."

Abdellah Taïa was featured on the April 16 episode of KCRW's Bookworm, hosted by Michael Silverblatt. You can listen to it here:

http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw090416abdellah_taia

March 18th – March 28th
Mark von Schlegell tour in California & Pacific Northwest for Mercury Station

von Schlegell first perceived a peculiar fusion of paranormal populism and philosophical enquiry in the writings of Melville and Poe while writing his doctoral thesis on 19th century American literature. These studies led him to unify his own writing in the direction of the pulp science fiction he'd quietly consumed all his life. Venusia (semiotext(e)), is his first novel, Mercury Station is second novel comes out in March.

MARCH 18: BOOK RELEASE PARTY, CHINA ART OBJECTS GALLERIES, LOS ANGELES.

MARCH 21: 3 PM BORDERLANDS, SAN FRANCISCO.

MARCH 26: 7:30 PM ELLIOTT BAY BOOK CO., SEATTLE.

MARCH 28: 7 PM. PULP FICTION, VANCOUVER.

For more information about Mark's tour please visit his website:
http://www.sff.net/people/schlegell/

Thursday, March 19, 7:00 pm
ALOUD: Three Lives from LA: Vanessa Place, Janet Sarbanes, Veronica Gonzalez

Three emerging women writers discuss using nontraditional forms for an unconventional city, writing a polyvocal landscape for a polyvocal world, publishing with an independent press, and why women write LA better than anybody. The event is moderated by Brighde Mullins.

Veronica Gonzalez's fiction has been published or is forthcoming in many literary magazines and anthologies, including Bomb, The Massachusetts Review and Juncture: 25 Very Good Stories and 12 Excellent Drawings, an innovative cross-genre anthology she co-edited for Soft Skull Press. twin time: or, how death befell me, her first novel (Semiotext(e)), received the 2008 Premio Aztlan Literary Award for fiction.

Vanessa Place is a writer and lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is the author of Dies: A Sentence, a 50,000-word, one-sentence novella; the post-conceptual novel La Medusa, and Notes on Conceptualisms, in collaboration with appropriation poet Robert Fitterman. Her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape and Morality will be published in 2010.

Janet Sarbanes is the author of the short story collection Army of One. She has also published articles on the role of aesthetic practice in utopian and subcultural social formations, most recently in Popular Music and Society, Afterall and Utopian Studies. An excerpt from her newly completed novel, Wendy's America: The Adventures of the President's Daughter, appeared in the summer 2008 issue of Black Clock.

Central Public Library
5th & Flower
Mark Taper Auditorium
Los Angeles, CA
http://www.libraryfoundationla.org/aloud/calendar/?month=3&year=2009&day=19

Events in New York January 09

Tuesday, January 13, 7:30 – 9:30 pm
Tisa Bryant hosts Chris Kraus at Dixon Place

Belladonna Celebrates the Elders Readings and events guest-hosted by some of our favorite writers who've invited writers who influence and inspire them Tisa Bryant and Chris Kraus will read from new works, and celebrate the publication of their new book, featuring scenes from CATT: HER KILLER, by Kraus, and from THE CURATOR, by Bryant, published together by Belladonna! $6 at the door.

Tisa Bryant hosts Chris Kraus
Dixon Place
161 Chrystie Street
New York, NY 10002
http://belladonnaseries.org/readingseries.html

Wednesday, January 14, 7 pm
SEMIOTEXT(E) Book Party and Screening at Greene Naftali

Greene Naftali Gallery is pleased to host a semiotext(e) book release event for:

ALL THE KING'S HORSES by Michèle Bernstein, translated by John Kelsey
CORRESPONDENCE: The Foundation of The Situationist International (June 1957-August 1960), by Guy Debord

Eileen Myles and Chris Kraus will read passages from ALL THE KING'S HORSES

"All the King's Horses is absolutely modern: boring as the surface of administered life, Paris paused between Old World and New Wave, between manners and style. Within that infinitely flat moment, a secret adventure lurks almost in plain sight." - Joshua Clover, The Nation

Screening of Guy Debord's On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, 1959 (20 mn)

Greene Naftali Gallery
508 West 26th Street, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10001
(212) 463 -7770
http://semiotexte.com/newReleases.html

Saturday, January 17, 7 pm
Animal Shelter Release Party and reading at Bluestockings:

Please join us in celebrating the publication of a new special project, Animal Shelter, a 148 page journal featuring new writing and artworks by Bruce Benderson, Gary Lee Boas, Rachel Detroit, Jennifer Doyle, Tony Duvert, Hedi El Kholti, Matt Fishbeck, Mark Flores, Paul Gellman, William E. Jones, Alice Könitz, Chris Kraus, Elke Krystufek, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Jonathan Meese, Erik Morse, Theresa Pendlebury, Ariel Pink, JC Rees, Ariana Reines, Rebekah Rutkoff, Abdellah Taïa, Masha Tupitsyn, Sarah Wang, Bobbi Woods and others.

Launch Party Featuring Readings by: Bruce Benderson, Ariana Reines, Rebekah Rutkoff and Masha Tupitsyn.

Screening of Guy Hocquenghem and Lionel Soukaz's, Royal Opera, 1979 (24 mn)

Fleeting, ephemeral, non-digital and non-hierarchical, Animal Shelter is part intellectual journal, part DIY 'zine. Eclectic but highly focused, the journal looks towards non-privatized forms of sexuality as a cultural conduit. Looking back to the underground press sex culture of the 1970s, Animal Shelter is dedicated to visions of real freedom for the present.

Bluestockings
172 Allen St.
New York, NY 10002
(212) 777-6028
http://bluestockings.com/events/

http://www.semiotexte.com/books/animalShelter.html/

Animal Shelter issue 1 out now

Semiotext(e) is pleased to announce Issue 1 of a new special project, Animal Shelter, a 148 page journal featuring new writing and artworks by Bruce Benderson, Gary Lee Boas, Rachel Detroit, Jennifer Doyle, Tony Duvert, Hedi El Kholti, Matt Fishbeck, Mark Flores, Paul Gellman, William E. Jones, Alice Könitz, Chris Kraus, Elke Krystufek, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Jonathan Meese, Erik Morse, Theresa Pendlebury, Ariel Pink, Ariana Reines, Rebekah Rutkoff, Abdellah Taïa, Masha Tupitsyn, Sarah Wang, Bobbi Woods and others.

Fleeting, ephemeral, non-digital and non-hierarchical, Animal Shelter is part intellectual journal, part DIY 'zine. Eclectic but highly focused, the journal looks towards non-privatized forms of sexuality as a cultural conduit. Looking back to the underground press sex culture of the 1970s, Animal Shelter is dedicated to visions of real freedom for the present.

(in)hibition, haven, protection, caginess, neglect, agency, ill-fit, rescue …

order here

News and Events October 08

1) Events.

Pure War Lecture and Screening at the Mandrake Bar on October 16th at 8pm.
Sylvere Lotringer will introduce and screen a 30mn video interview with coauthor Paul Virilio. In Semiotexte's 25th anniversary edition of Pure War, Lotringer and Virilio consider how the omnipresent threat of the accident—both military and economic—has escalated.
http://www.mandrakebar.com/calendar.html

Trajectories of the Catastrophic, a symposium exploring the ideas and arguments put forth in the theoretical works of Paul Virilio, will take place in San Francisco from October 24–5.
Events, including a taped presentation by Sylvere Lotringer, are free to the public.
http://www.trajectoriesofthecatastrophic.net

2) News and Reviews.

Tony Duvert passed away this summer. There is a lovely tribute on Dennis Cooper's blog, with an excerpt from Journal of an Innocent (forthcoming from Semiotext(e), fall 09):
http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2008/09/tony-duvert-day-two-exclusive-excerpts.html

Tony Negri's The Porcelain Workshop was recently reviewed in The Guardian. "Negri sums up his review of contemporary political thought rather thrillingly and attempts to refresh such concepts as 'citizenship,' the 'multitude,' 'resistance,' and 'democracy' itself, ending by adumbrating a 'network' or 'web of cooperation,' and wishing for new 'areas and spaces in which we might intervene.'"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/23/politics.philosophy?gusrc=rss&feed=books

Chris Kraus and Mark von Schlegell both were listed by Josef Strau as top-ten recent novels in the September issue of Artforum.
http://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=200807&id=20917

An essay by Masha Tupitsyn on the movie Jaws (excerpted from her upcoming book) can be read online in Fanzine:
http://www.thefanzine.com/articles/film/285/jaws_revisited/1

An interview and reading Tupitsyn did back in October 2007 about Beauty Talk and Monsters for the LA-Lit series is finally archived online.
http://la-lit.com/writers/la-lit-27-masha-tupitsyn

A terrific piece by Joanne McNeil on the recent Supreme Court child-pornography ruling (in US v. Williams) and Sylvère Lotringer's Overexposed recently appeared online in Tomorrow Museum."Lotringer brings up so many important points on how 'perversions have no grammar of their own,' I'm surprised this book isn't widely read."
http://www.tomorrowmuseum.com/2008/05/27/synthetic-performances-sylvere-lotringer-second-life-and-the-politics-of-perversions/ 

A review of Catherine Breillat's Pornocracy recently appeared online in 3 A.M.  "The translation by Paul Buck and Catherine Petit is viscerally beautiful—poetic prose and detached, almost scientific obversation commingle in a formaldehyde of precision and imagination—like a rose and a kidney sharing the same embalming jar ... The dialogue reads like a conversation between students of Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault."
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/sticky-tunnel-vision

News and Events April 08

Masha Tupitsyn is the featured writer on KQED in San Francisco’s distinguished weekly radio show The Writer's Block:
http://www.kqed.org/arts/writersblock/

Veronica Gonzalez's twin-time: or, how death befell me was recently selected for the Premio Aztlán Literary Award for 2007. The National Latino Writers Conference described Gonzalez's novel as an "enticing, beautifully written, lyrical and poetic" work, whose creative use of narrative uncertainty, séance, and intuition went "beyond technique" in tracing the author's fractured cultural roots to currents in both America as well as her native Mexico. Veronica will accept the award, with a discussion of her novel, on May 23rd in Albuquerque.

News and Events January 08

Veronica Gonzalez will be reading from her critically acclaimed debut novel, twin time: or, how death befell me at the reading series Vermin on the Mount, held at the Mountain bar in Los Angeles’ Chinatown on this Sunday, January 13 at 8pm:
http://www.vermin.blogs.com/

Veronica Gonzalez will be reading at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena on Friday, January 18 at 7:00 PM: http://www.vromansbookstore.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp?s=storeevents&eventId=366185

Veronica was the featured writer on KQED in San Francisco’s distinguished weekly radio show The Writer's Block:
http://www.kqed.org/arts/writersblock/episode.jsp?id=20971

Author of Torpor, I Love Dick, and Video Green, Chris Kraus has been awarded the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism from the College Art Association, one of the highest awards in art criticism.
Chris will also be participating in the traveling Sex Workers Art Show. Tour dates and venues are available online:
http://www.sexworkersartshow.com/tourschedule.html

The European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies and the 16 Beaver Group will be hosting Gerald Raunig to give a presentation of his recent book, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century: Saturday, January 12 at 7:00 PM:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/events/archives/002426.php

Veronica Gonzalez on Bookworm

Veronica Gonzalez's debut novel, twin time: or, how death befell me was featured on the November 1 episode of KCRW's Bookworm, hosted by Michael Silverblatt. You can listen to it here:

http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw071101veronica_gonzalez