Semina Series
SEMINA NO. 2: MAXI KIM
One Break, A Thousand Blows!
Maxi Kim’s first novel was chosen by Book Works’ new Semina series because of its refusal to recognize the differences between fiction and non-fiction, high-brow and low-brow, and art and life. One Break, A Thousand Blows! appears to be a novel about Japan, but the protagonist is a metaphor, aiming to negate Japan by writing falsely about it, and using it as a screen for the author’s innermost hopes and desires. The author cannibalizes every book he references, as he subjects his characters to the occult use of books for divination. Kim, the grandson of illiterate Korean peasant farmers, is a recent graduate of the CalArts MFA Writing Program.
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SEMINA NO. 1: BRIDGET PENNEY
Index
From Book Works new Semina series, dedicated to publishing contemporary artists and writers willing to take risks with their prose, comes British author Bridget Penney’s spellbinding novella. Index spins a web of far-flung places and people in order to explore the themes of revolution, repression, seduction and death. Using uncredited “found” texts and deliberate forgeries to blur the line between what might have happened and what is merely imagined, Penney creates her own versions of characters like Marie Antoinette, the famous magician and forger Cagliostro, and the transvestite spy Chevalier d’Eon. Penney’s innovative prose transcends the conventional narrative closure readers have come to expect.
SEMINA NO. 3: MARK WAUGH
Bubble Entendre
Brazen sadists, high-flying hopheads, invisible strippers, and the destiny of objects are just some of the themes tackled by Mark Waugh in Bubble Entendre-a three-part, literary bender that moves from a pornographic terrorist siege in the luxury London hotel Claridge’s, to the transgressions of a bubblegum-addicted zombie author, and the sex life of a rubber doll who reads too much Derrida. It’s all dirty, dingy, and drug-fuelled, as if Wilhelm Reich wrote it after being force-fed LSD and subjected to a steady diet of dubstep and grime. One of the latest works from the Semina series, which publishes contemporary artists and writers willing to take risks with their prose.
Semina No. 7: Stewart Home
Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie
Using pornographic spam emails, and replacing the generic ‘he’ and ‘she’ with the names of leading feminist artists, this sort-of-novel reveals the un-nameable desires of the art world, projected through the aspirant culture of London’s curatorial elite. With walk-on parts by Martha Rosler, Sam Taylor Wood and Tracey Emin, sensational lost Belle de Jour transcripts, and missives from the underbelly of the blogosphere, artist/filmmaker Stewart Home’s work reads like the SCUM manifesto remixed by The Bomb Squad. When the publisher rushed this to Malcolm McLaren for a deathbed blurb, legend has it his final croak was, “Feminism with balls.” Home’s writings include 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess, Tainted Love, and Memphis Underground. From 2007-10, he was the commissioning editor of Semina, a series of acclaimed experimental novels.
Semina No. 6: Jarett Kobek
HOE #999 Decennial Appreciation and Celebratory Analysis
High on teenage rebellion and Thunderbird wine, the Hogs of Entropy (HOE) released over 1,000 text files – an electronic version of paper zines – and inadvertently proved that the brain capacity of the average American teenager is on par with Neanderthal man. To a soundtrack of Guns ‘n’ Roses, Wu Tang Clan and The Misfits, prime conspirator Jarett Kobek practiced a shamanistic exorcism of American culture. In this book, Kobek attempts a tripped-out transformation of his adolescent texts. Outsourcing all critical meditation to an Asian essay farm and interweaving this work-for-hire meta-text alongside editorial dialogue and excerpts from the original, he reloads and jacks up his anti-authorial intent for a newer, even stupider millennium.
Semina No. 5: Katrina Palmer
The Dark Object
This volume of interrelated yet self-contained short stories is set in an art school in which a paranoid, conceptual ideology has prohibited the making of objects. One student remains: isolated and battling with institutional directives and solitary confinement, Addison Cole writes stories. These narrate a series of explicit encounters with texts, objects and artists, reducing characters to their pornographic effect. Imagine Slavojzizek as an impotent sexual metaphor or Hegel as a skeletal specter. London-based author Katrina Palmer explores the tension between the restraint of narrative form and the explosion of ontic instability. The aim is not to subsume fantasy into the everyday, but rather demonstrate that everything is real and the everyday is fantastical.
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