Fred Halsted‘s L.A. Plays Itself (1972) was gay porn’s first masterpiece: a sexually explicit, autobiographical, experimental film whose New York screening left even Salvador Dalí repeatedly muttering “new information for me.” Halsted, a self-taught filmmaker, shot the film over a period of three years in a now-vanished Los Angeles, a city at once rural and sleazy.

Although his cultural notoriety at one point equaled that of Kenneth Anger or Jack Smith, Halsted’s star waned in the 1980s with the emergence of a more commercial gay-porn industry. After the death from AIDS of his long-time partner, lover, spouse (and tormentor) Joey Yale in 1986, Halsted committed suicide in 1989.

In Halsted Plays Himself, acclaimed artist and filmmaker William E. Jones documents his quest to capture the elusive public and private personas of Halsted–to zero in on an identity riddled with contradictions. Jones assembles a narrative of a long-gone gay lifestyle and an extinct Hollywood underground, when independent films were still possible, and the boundary between experimental and pornographic was not yet established. The book also depicts what sexual liberation looked like at a volatile point in time–and what it looked like when it collapsed.

William E. Jones is an artist and filmmaker who teaches film history at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He has made two feature length experimental films, Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997), several short videos, including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998), the feature length documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004), and many video installations. His films and videos were the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern, London, in 2005, and at Anthology Film Archives, New York, in 2010. He has worked in the adult video industry under the name Hudson Wilcox.

Listen to Stephen Elliott reading “Verne’s Wife” a classic short story by Charles Bukowski, collected in Absence of the Hero.

Absence of the Hero contains much of Charles Bukowski’s earliest fiction, unseen in decades, as well as a number of previously unpublished stories and essays. The classic Bukowskian obsessions are here: sex, booze, and gambling, along with trenchant analysis of what he calls “Playing and Being the Poet.”  Among the book’s highlights are tales of his infamous public readings (“The Big Dope Reading,” “I Just Write Poetry So I Can Go to Bed with Girls”); a review of his own first book; hilarious installments of his newspaper column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, including meditations on neo-Nazis and driving in Los Angeles; and an uncharacteristic tale of getting lost in the Utah woods (“Bukowski Takes a Trip”).  Yet the book also showcases the other Bukowski—an astute if offbeat literary critic. From his own “Manifesto” to his account of poetry in Los Angeles (“A Foreword to These Poets”) to idiosyncratic evaluations of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, LeRoi Jones, and Louis Zukofsky, Absence of the Hero reveals the intellectual hidden beneath the gruff exterior.

Our second volume of his uncollected prose, Absence of the Hero is a major addition to the Bukowski canon, essential for fans yet suitable for new readers as an introduction to the wide range of his work.
“He loads his head full of coal and diamonds shoot out of his finger tips. What a trick. The mole genius has left us with another digest. It’s a full house—read ‘em and weep.”
—Tom Waits

“This second volume of Bukowski’s uncollected stories and essays offers all that Bukowski is known for—wry obscenity, smutty wisdom, seeming ramblings whose hidden smarts catch you unaware—but in addition there are moments here in which he takes off the mask and strips away the bravado to show himself at his most vulnerable and human. A must for Bukowski aficionados.”
—Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and The Open Curtain

Stephen Elliott is the author of seven books including The Adderall Diarieswhich has been described as “genius” by both the San Francisco Chronicleand Vanity Fair. The Adderall Diaries was the best book of the year in Time Out New York, a best of 2009 in Kirkus Reviews, and one of 50 notable books in the San Francisco Chronicle.

His novel, Happy Baby, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lion Award as well as a best book of the year in Salon.com, Newsday, Chicago New City, the Journal News, and the Village Voice.

Elliott’s writing has been featured in Esquire, The New York Times, The Believer, GQ, Best American Non-Required Reading 2005 and 2007, Best American Erotica, and Best Sex Writing 2006. He is the editor of The Rumpus.

On Thursday, December 1, 2011, Nelson George stopped by City Lights Bookstore to read and discuss his new novel, The Plot Against Hip Hop (Akashic Books).

The Plot Against Hip Hop is a noir novel set in the world of hip hop culture. The stabbing murder of esteemed music critic Dwayne Robinson in a Soho office building is dismissed by the NYPD as a gang initiation. But his old friend, bodyguard/security expert D Hunter, suspects there’s much more to his death. An old cassette tape, the theft of a manuscript Robinson was working on, and some veiled threats suggest there are larger forces at work.

D Hunter’s investigation into his mentor’s murder leads into a parallel history of hip hop, a place where renegade government agents, behind-the-scenes power brokers, and paranoid journalists know a truth that only a few hard core fans suspect. This rewrite of hip hop history mixes real-life figures including Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Russell Simmons with characters pulled from the culture’s hidden world, as the Illuminati, FBI agents, and West Coast gangstas roam the hard streets D Hunter walks down.

D Hunter is a tough black clad product of crime-ridden Brownsville, Brooklyn, a man whose family has been devastated by violence and who has dedicated himself to protecting people in an age of insecurity. Hunter has his own secrets, his own vulnerabilities, which he fights to overcome as he becomes a reluctant private eye. After reading The Plot Against Hip Hop, you’ll never hear the music the same way.

Nelson George is one of the first writers to document hip hop culture and is the author of several award-winning books on the subject, including Hip Hop America and The Death of Rhythm & Blues; he also coauthored (with Simmons) Russell Simmons’s autobiography Life and Def. He directed Queen Latifah in the HBO film Life Support, and is an executive producer of VH1′s long-running Hip Hop Honors broadcast.

What has been said about Nelson George’s work:

“One of our coolest cultural critics has written a mystery page-turner about the underbelly of hip hop, and it’s woven with signature whip-smart insights into music. Nelson George’s smooth security-guard-turned-detective, a.k.a. D, scours a demimonde as glamorous as Chandler’s Los Angeles. This plot has more twists and turns than a pole dancer, and D definitely needs an encore–he’s destined to become a classic.”
–Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club

“There are few people who can put the past seventy years of urban reality into the perspective of the most recent hip minute like Nelson George. The Plot Against Hip Hop is no exception. Nelson George braids actual facts and fictional characters flawlessly into a time-tunneled walk along various developments in this now-megabusiness called hip hop. For those that say they love hip hop as well as the total legacy it evolved from, it bodes well for them to keep this very close to their head, heart, and attention.”
–Chuck D, Public Enemy

“Nelson George is one of my greatest influences as a writer… He inspired me in many ways, and he continues to inspire with The Plot Against Hip Hop.”
–Talib Kweli

“The most accomplished black music critic of his generation.”
–Washington Post Book World

“Perhaps one of the seven greatest books ever written. It has the realness of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the warmth of The Color Purple, and the page count of Tuesdays with Morrie. It’s a must read.”
–Chris Rock, on City Kid

“Reads like a hip-hop answer to Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.”
–New York Times, on One Woman Short

The long-anticipated new novel from literary icon Dennis Cooper is a moody and foreboding tale of a son’s unwitting devotion to a possibly insane father. The Marbled Swarm (Harper Perennial) tells the story of a son raised by a charmingly psychopathic father and taught a private language only the two of them know. With its Parisian and French countryside setting; its trappings of high art, old money, and haute cuisine that obscure an unspeakable system of coercion and surrender; and its completely original, lilting voice; The Marbled Swarm may read as a departure from Cooper’s earlier work – a new beginning, of sorts.  But once again – with secret passages, events that may or may not have happened, and a father-son relationship strangely heavy with sexual tension – readers will find themselves enveloped in a world only Dennis Cooper could create.

What is personal, what is public? In our electronic age, can anybody tell the difference? While ending an affair with a Buddhist teacher, Dodie Bellamy wrote about it simultaneously on her blog. In her experiment in writing through states of extremis, she explores nuances of public shame, the vagaries of desire and rage, and her confusion over the authenticity of group and individual spirituality. the buddhist (Allone Editions) becomes a celebration of marginalized subjectivity as enacted in the work of female artists from Bessie Smith to Eva Hesse and Carolee Schneeman, to Bhanu Kapil and Ariana Reines.  This volume contains the essence of the blog, as well as more extended narratives too explicit to post on line.  Like Duras’ The Lover, Bellamy’s writing glorifies the abject and the discarded; it is a passionate evocation of a love lost and a raw depth plumbed.

Dennis Cooper – called a “disquieting genius” by Vanity Fair – is the acclaimed author of the George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels: Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His other works include My Loose Thread; The Sluts, winner of France’s Prix Sade and the Lambda Literary Award; God, Jr.; Wrong; The Dream Police; Ugly Man; and Smothered in Hugs. His plays “Jerk” and “Them” are performed widely across Europe and the United States.

Dodie Bellamy is a novelist, nonfiction author, journalist and editor. She is one of the originators in the New Narrative literary movement, which attempts to use the tools of experimental fiction and critical theory and apply them to narrative storytelling. Dodie is the author of Feminine Hijinx, Broken English, The Letters of Mina Harker, and Pink Steam.