Up Is Up, but So Is Down New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.Among "The Village Voice"s 25 Favorite Books of 2006Winner of the 2007 AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in the Trade Illustrated Book Design category. Up Is Up itself has a scrapbook feel. It gathers poems, excerpts and short stories as well as handmade magazine covers, pamphlets and posters that capture the collaborative, on-the-fly spirit of the period. . . . What is most arresting about UP IS UP is not its discovery of any individual genius but its invocation of an electrifying social energy that helped blast out an intellectual space for then-'transgressive' female and gay writers. -- "New York Times Book Review""Some of us like our angels with dirty faces; witness the lovingly reproduced artifacts of Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, a comprehensive compendium of below-14th Street literary productions by everyone from Laurie Anderson to Nick Zedd, focusing on the output of small magazines of the era like Koff, Bomb, and Between C and D...[the] stories meld dry satire with heart-churningly desperate transmissions of damaged humanity." -- "Village Voice""Exhilarating. . . . Up Is Up reproduces flyers and pages from lit mags to convey downtowns heady DIY ethos. The writing itself displays sensibilities that are at once fiery and cool. Cookie Mueller, Dennis Cooper, Wojnarowicz and many others merge crackling prose and a matter-of-fact tone to burrow into disturbing corners of sexual desire. AIDS takes a serious toll in the 80s, and becomes the haunting focus in amazing selections by novelist Gary Indiana and poet Tim Dlugos. Even as thescene begins to wind down, the book nails the deep thrills of talk and collaboration, especially in novelist Lynne Tillmans complex rendering of two friends bar-set conversation. That gift for gab lives on in the epilogue, a spirited conversation between Eileen Myles and Cooper, who resist mythologizing but invoke the scenes glory nonetheless." -- "Time Out New York"Up Is Up is a remarkable monument to the vibrancy of the Downtown scene. There are moments of romantic myth-making, dysfunctional beauty and hilarious profundity. It documents a now-gone era when lower Manhattan was an affordable oasis for artists, writers and musicians, when poetry and prose rubbed up against punk and visual art before drunkenly stumbling into an endless pansexual orgy. -- "New York Press"Stosuys anthology commemorates the underground writings and visual culture that proliferated below 14th Street after the Beats and the New York School poets and before the ravages of Aids, rising rent and blogs...Such writings rarely appeared above ground. They were disseminated in graffiti, on the body, in homemade zines posted to friends or in Xeroxed chapbooks. -- "London Review of Books""New York University Press has released the cutting-edge equivalent of a memory book: Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New Yorks Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, Brooklyn writer Brandon Stosuys magisterial anthology-cum-reliquary of downtown writing and literary art. Its oversized, gorgeously decorated and even decorous pages host an impossibly rich variety of prose, poetry and the unidentifiable either/or -- all produced by writers who either lived or worked or once visited or were published on or readin small presses and performance spaces below Manhattans Union Square but north of Mammons Wall Street." -- "Forward""For the hipster: Up is Up, But So is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, edited by Brandon Stousy. Long before Starbucks took over Greenwich Village, and one-bedroom rents hit $3,000, downtown Manhattan was scuzzy, vibrant and alive with arts. Collecting the work of rock-star poets and beat-down bohemians, this book attests to the fact that the life portrayed in Mary Gaitskill's edgy work wasn't a dream." -- "Salt Lake City Weekly""While the major players in New York'sStosuy, Brandon is the author of 'Up Is Up, but So Is Down New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992', published 2006 under ISBN 9780814740118 and ISBN 0814740111.