If You're A Girl (Revised and Expanded Edition) (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents): Selected Stories 1985-2023 - Softcover

Rower, Ann; Heti, Sheila

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1635902029 ISBN 13: 9781635902020

Publisher: Semiotext (E), 2024

Synopsis

The trailblazing book that influenced a generation of writers, and proves that mature reflection needn't be lacking in attitude. <p/>In the beginning when everything was very sexual we talked about our fantasies. She thought about having a guy for some of it. She thought about having a gun. I had gone through a lot to get away from guys so I admit that the thought of going back to them, even for a little adventure, was surprising and disconcerting ... <p/>Ann Rower's first book, If You're a Girl, published by Semiotext(e)'s Native Agents series in 1991 in tandem with Cookie Mueller's Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, cemented her reputation as the Eve Babitz of lower Manhattan. <p/>Rower was fifty-three years old at the time. Her stories--urtexts of female autofiction--had long been circulating within the poetry and postpunk music scenes. They were unlike anyone else's: disarming, embarrassing, psuedoconfessional tales of everyday life dizzily told and laced with dry humor. In If You're a Girl, she recounts her adventures as Timothy Leary's babysitter, her artistic romance with actor Ron Vawter, and her attempts to evade a schizophrenic stalker. <p/>Rower went on to publish two novels: Armed Response (1995) and Lee & Elaine (2002). After the 2002 suicide of her partner, the writer Heather Lewis, Rower stopped writing for almost two decades. And then she picked up where If You're a Girl left off. No longer a girl, she produced dozens of stories from her life in New York as an octogenarian. <p/>This new, expanded edition includes most of the original book, together with selections from both her novels and her recent writings. If You're a Girl is a trailblazing book that manifests Rower's influence on a generation of writers, and proves that mature reflection needn't be lacking in attitude.

About this title

About the Author

Ann Rower is the author of If You're A Girl, Armed Response, and Lee & Elaine. She received a PhD from Columbia University in sixteenth-century English literature in 1974, and has collaborated with the Wooster Group as a writer. Rower taught writing in New York at the School for Visual Arts between 1974 and 2019. <p/>Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, including I Love Dick and Summer of Hate; two books of art and cultural criticism; and most recently, After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography. She received the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism in 2008, and a Warhol Foundation Art Writing grant in 2011. She lives in Los Angeles.

Edition details

• Publisher: Semiotext (E)
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1635902029
• ISBN 13: 9781635902020
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384