For the last fifteen years, performance artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña has led a series of ongoing conversations with cultural luminaries from both North and South America. These dialogues with theorists, curators, activists, and fellow artists—such as Lisa Wolford Wylam, Tim Miller, Felipe Ehrenberg, Orlando Britoo Jinorio, Silvana Straw, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, among others—explore the terrain between art and theory. In Conversations Across Borders, Gómez-Peña has gathered the most challenging and captivating of these conversations, revealing their significant contribution to key debates within the international art world.

Both bold and humorous, these conversations address issues of timely concern to artists, including border culture, new technologies, urban hipsterism, and globalization gone wrong. Conversations Across Borders explores dialogue as a performative act, as a radical space for initiating and testing the boundaries of critical culture. Together, these texts propose a distinct set of critical practices that are invigorated by the endangered art of conversation.

“Gómez-Peña’s commitment to force North America to adjust to the South, to acknowledge the hemisphere’s cultural imbalance, places him among the most significant of late-20th-century performance artists.”

—Village Voice Literary Supplement

Conversations Across Borders was published by my padrino Richard Schechner and edited by Canadian theorist Laura Levin. It contains an anthology of very bold (and performative) conversations I’ve had in the last 10 years with rebel curators, pioneering artists, cultural anthropologists, art historians, activist writers—in essence a wide variety of intelligent, engaged and fierce contemporary art practitioners and theorists. It also contains gorgeously provocative never before published photos. My Canadian sister Laura Levin and the amazing team of Seagull books made sure that the book functions both as an accessible (and activist) treatise on theory as well as a beautiful art/ifact.

—Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Guillermo Gomez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the US in 1978. His performance work and 10 books have contributed to the debates on cultural diversity, border culture and US-Mexico relations. His art work has been presented at over eight hundred venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, Bessie and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor for newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT). Gómez-Peña is a Senior Fellow of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency.

Laura Levin is Associate Professor of Theatre at York University in Toronto. She is the editor of Theatre and Performance in Toronto (Playwrights Canada Press) as well as a number of collections on performance, art and public space (in Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, and Performance Research). She is Vice President of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research and editor-in-chief of Canadian Theatre Review. A director, dramaturg and performance deviser, she recently has collaborated on several transnational performance projects that investigate the intersections of performance, geography, and digital technologies,

Elaine Katzenberger is the Executive Director of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, an editor, and past friend and collaborator with Pocha Nostra.

On Tuesday, December 13, 2011, celebrated author Percival Everett stopped by the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco to celebrate the release of a tryptych of new books from Graywolf Press: Assumption, Damned If I Do, and Erasure.

About Assumption: “Half zen koan, half Jim Thompson, and 100% Percival Everett, the twined mysteries of Assumption provide all the lively satisfactions of ‘genre’ fiction, while describing yet another arc in the trajectory of Everett’s brilliant and protean career.”—Christopher Sorrentino

About Damned If I Do: A cop, a cowboy, several fly fisherman, and even a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories.

About Erasure: Percival Everett’s blistering satire about race and writing, available again in paperback.

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Percival Everett is a professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of sixteen books, including Wounded, American Desert, Erasure, and Glyph. He lives in L.A. and British Columbia.

In Lipsyte’s novel, The Ask, Milo Burke, a development officer at a third-tier university, has “not been developing”: after a run-in with a well-connected undergrad, he finds himself among the burgeoning class of the newly unemployed. Grasping after odd jobs to support his wife and child, Milo is offered one last chance by his former employer: he must reel in a potential donor—a major “ask”—who, mysteriously, has requested Milo’s involvement. But it turns out that the ask is Milo’s sinister college classmate Purdy Stuart. And the “give” won’t come cheap. Probing many themes— or, perhaps, anxieties—including work, war, sex, class, child rearing, romantic comedies, Benjamin Franklin, cooking shows on death row, and the eroticization of chicken wire, The Ask is a burst of genius by a young American master who has already demonstrated that the truly provocative and important fictions are often the funniest ones.

Renegade performer Penny Arcade makes a rare appearance to celebrate the release of Bad Reputation: Performances, Essays, Interviews, from Semiotext(e)

A runaway at thirteen, a reform-school graduate at sixteen, a performer in the legendary New York City Playhouse of the Ridiculous at seventeen, and an escapee from Andy Warhol’s Factory scene at nineteen, Penny Arcade (born Susanna Ventura) emerged in the 1980s as a primal force on the New York art scene and an originator of what came to be called performance art. Arcade’s brand of high camp and street-smart, punk-rock cabaret showmanship has been winning over international audiences ever since.

Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore!, is Penny Arcade’s raucous, cutting-edge sex and censorship show, (which continues to be a commercial hit around the world), featuring the daily life of a receptionist in a brothel, the upbringing and rearing of a “faghag,” the evolution of the New York gay scene in the 1990s, and a participatory “audience dance break.” The funny and heart-rending title work, Bad Reputation, portrays a young teen runaway’s coming of age in a Catholic reform school (run by nuns who are former fashion models) and her subsequent life on the streets of 1960s New York. La Miseria, a rare depiction of working-class Italian-Americans from a woman’s point of view that portrays the clash between working-class morals and compassion during the 1980s AIDS epidemic, rounds out the trilogy.

Bad Reputation is the first book by and on Penny Arcade. The complete scripts are accompanied by a new interview with Penny Arcade by Chris Kraus, a range of archival photographs of the East Village scene and Arcade’s performances, an introduction by playwright Ken Bernard, and contributions by Sarah Schulman, Steve Zehentner, and Stephen Bottoms.

Yippie co-founder. merry prankster and satirical provocateur Paul Krassner reads from Who’s to Say What’s Obscene?: Politics, Culture and Comedy in America Today, published by City Lights Books, July 15, 2009.

Fans of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Onion will appreciate this timely collection of satirical essays by counterculture icon Paul Krassner. With irreverence and an often X-rated wit, Krassner explores contemporary comedy, and obscenity in politics and culture from “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banners to scenes cut out of recent movies, including Borat.

In his essay “Don Imus Meets Michael Richards” Krassner examines racism in comedy from Lenny Bruce to Dave Chapelle, on The Sarah Silverman Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and in controversial comic strips like The Boondocks.

“These are times of repression,” says Krassner, “and the more repression there is, the more need there is for irreverence toward those in authority.”

Praise for Paul Krassner:

“He is an expert at ferreting out hypocrisy and absurdism from the more solemn crannies of American culture.” — New York Times

“To classify Krassner as a social rebel is far too cute. He’s a nut, a raving, unconfined nut.” — Federal Bureau of Investigation

“The FBI was right. This man is dangerous—and funny; and necessary.” — George Carlin