If you still want to play the game of American life, then you had better learn to lie. Kneel before false gods. Pretend to care about the ruling class and their illusions. Keep your head down. Pray that no one sees you. Your world is one of endless interruption and constant despair. This is not the future you were promised. What if someone had navigated the chaos of the Twenty-First Century and solved the puzzle of America's blinding and relentless informational assault? And what if they had put that solution into a novel that explained everything? This is Only Americans Burn in Hell, true believer. Rapturously reviewed in the United Kingdom, it's your only guide to 2020 and beyond. Just remember: every suicide needs its note.

Only Americans Burn in Hell

Humor & Entertainment

Kobek, Jarett

Humor

We Heard You Like Books

I Should Have Known Better is a sequel to the sleeper hit I'm Open to Anything (2019), expanding the original's scope and ambition. The new book has been produced entirely with the support of a crowdfunding campaign that reached five figures and 150% funding, an unprecedented accomplishment for a literary novel.I Should Have Known Better's first person narrator, while working at a dead-end job in Los Angeles during the mid-1990s, reconnects with his best friend Moira, recently returned from Central America, and makes a new friend, Bernie, who teaches the history of photography. The two of them convince him to pursue a master's degree as a way of escaping the unrewarding life of a video store clerk. Once the narrator is exposed to an academic environment, he takes a dim view of the education that art school has to offer, but is happy to meet a group of talented fellow students who become close friends. He encounters a number of art world figures, ranging from the brilliant to the abject, who disabuse him of his illusions. The narrator has his most instructive experiences off campus, especially a love affair with the handsome and mercurial Temo, an insolent rich kid who leads a double life. Together they explore their sexual limits in scenes of bracing explicitness.I Should Have Known Better bears witness to the last gasp of Los Angeles bohemia at the end of the twentieth century. The novel paints precise portraits of inspired eccentrics devoted to pursuing their dreams, "shopping artists" who believe in nothing but hedonism, and latter-day leftists who find themselves directionless after the fall of communism. Above all, the book pays tribute to the impulsive experiments and intense friendships of youth.

I Should Have Known Better

Literature & Fiction

Jones, William E.

Erotica

20 years of life. 27,000 tweets. 171 pages of sympathy for the devil.

Do Every Thing Wrong!: XXXTentacion Against the World

Arts & Photography

Music

What if you told the truth and the whole world heard you? What if you lived in a country swamped with Internet outrage? What if you were a woman in a society that hated women? Set in the San Francisco of 2013, I Hate the Internet offers a hilarious and obscene portrayal of life amongst the victims of the digital boom. As billions of tweets fuel the city's gentrification and the human wreckage piles up, a group of friends suffers the consequences of being useless in a new world that despises the pointless and unprofitable. In this, his first full-length novel, Jarett Kobek tackles the pressing questions of our moment. Why do we applaud the enrichment of CEOs at the expense of the weak and the powerless? Why are we giving away our intellectual property? Why is activism in the 21st Century nothing more than a series of morality lectures typed into devices built by slaves? Here, at last, comes an explanation of the Internet in the crudest possible terms.

I Hate the Internet

Computers & Technology

Networking & Cloud Computing

Boyd McDonald (1925-1993) had the makings of a successful career in the 1950s--an education at Harvard, jobs at Time/Life and IBM--but things didn't turn out as planned. After 20 years of resentful conformity and worsening alcoholism, McDonald dried out, pawned all of his suits, and went on welfare. It was then that his life truly began. From a tiny room in a New York SRO hotel, McDonald published Straight to Hell, a series of chapbooks collecting readers' "true homosexual experiences." Following the example of Alfred Kinsey, McDonald obsessively pursued the truth about sex between men just as gay liberation began to tame America's sexual outlaws for the sake of legal recognition. Admired by such figures as Gore Vidal and William S. Burroughs, Straight to Hell combined a vigorous contempt for authority with a keen literary style, and was the precursor of queer 'zines decades later. William E. Jones conducted in-depth interviews with many people from McDonald's life, including friends, colleagues, and most unexpectedly, family members who revealed that he was a loving uncle who doted on his nieces and great-nieces. A complex portrait drawn from a wealth of previously unpublished material, True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell is the first biography devoted to a key figure of the American underground.

True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

For two weeks in 1967, Londonâ€™s Roundhouse hosted The Congress on the Dialectics for the Demystification of Violence, a counterculture happening showcasing R.D. Laing, Gregory Bateson, Emmett Grogan, Stokely Carmichael and Herbert Marcuse. The eventâ€™s acknowledged star was Allen Ginsberg. As he pronounced to radical England, Ginsberg was followed by a young filmmaker with a commission from West German television to produce a documentary on the poet. That filmmakerâ€™s name was Iain Sinclair. Four years later, Sinclair gathered his notes and photographs of the experience and published Kodak Mantra Diaries on his own Albion Village Press. Wrestling with his brush with the poet and 1960s radical politics, Sinclair wrote an astonishing prose debut, setting the template for his later works of non-fiction. We Heard You Like Books is pleased to present the first hardcover edition of this little seen classic, accompanied by new texts which track Sinclair's continuing fascination with the survivors of the Beat Generation, and record random encounters in the years that followed his initial engagement.

Kodak Mantra Diaries and Other Smoke Signals

SINCLAIR, IAIN

History & Criticism

2016 was a pivotal year for Fiona Helmsley, and on the eve of her 40th birthday, an old friend questioned the subject matter of her writing: why, so often, did Fiona reflect back on the questionable choices she made when she was younger―wasn't 40 a good age to "grow up" and move on to more mature subject matter? A few months after her friend's question, a much more monumental, catastrophic event occurred: professional ignoramus Donald J. Trump was elected president; the '80s, the decade Fiona had grown up in, had ascended to the Oval Office, big time. In Girls Gone Old Fiona Helmsley doesn't answer her friend's question so much as she subverts it. With new essays about the confluence of '80s television, art, and sexual fantasy; addiction and illness; school shootings and serial killers; family; Andy Warhol; and the sleazy (yet sexy) misogyny of Axl Rose, Girls Gone Old rebukes the notion of the self as a lesser muse.

Girls Gone Old

Helmsley, Fiona

Essays & Correspondence

To See Your Love Suffer is a reimagining of Julian of Norwichâ€™s Revelations of Divine Love, a recounting of the explicit visions of Christ crucified as Norwich lay dying of an undisclosed illness. But she survived. In this reimagining, the internal territories and machinations of the failing body are distorted into various acts the â€˜narratorâ€™ uses to enter into further visionary statesâ€”dendritic realities, the divergent selves that inhabit them, and the desire that communicates betweenâ€¦ or creates them in relation to each other.

To See Your Love Suffer

Prentice, Tyann

Genre Fiction

No one wants to end up #RIP with 45 likes, your death traded as someone else's fleeting social capital, your last inane status update being the one that defines you for all time, your 'Friends' competitive grieving, and misery tourists perusing your profile. But Facebook has become the channel for broadcasting news of the recently deceased, with the number of "memorialized" Facebook accounts soon to eclipse accounts of the living. Mark Zuckerberg is a merchant of death. Whether it's the demise of another geriatric celebrity, or that your best friend from college took a pill and jumped off a roof, nothing makes your News Feed blow up like someone being dead. There is a rush to tag the deceased in albums of lo-res photos, to share favorite songs as YouTube links, and to post long, dolorous, largely misspelled status updates. Facebook claims the deceased as its own, commodifying misery and entering it into its usual agenda: stalking your online shopping habits, advertising clothes, confused political declarations, and wondering why you haven't had a baby yet. Set in a London where Mick Jagger's kids rule the social scene, Death and Facebook is a true account of a dysfunctional love affair that ends in disaster, posthumously pieced together from threads in Facebook Messenger, archived email, saved SMS, and a Google search history.

Death & Facebook

Baal, Iphgenia

Parenting & Relationships

A perverse and explicit new take on the coming of age novel, William E. Jones’s I’m Open to Anything explores bohemian Southern California of the late 1980s and early 90s, before gentrification ruined everything. The book’s narrator flees a crumbling industrial wasteland in the Midwest and finds himself in sunny Los Angeles without a car, working in a neighborhood video store and spending many hours watching films. He explores his adopted city and befriends a number of men, most of them immigrants, who teach him the finer points of sex. He acquires the skill of fisting, giving his partners intense pleasure, and at the same time hearing the stories of their lives. They too have fled their hometowns: one to escape torture at the hands of a Salvadoran death squad; another to study anthropology after years of wandering and religious questioning. Alternating between explicit scenes of kinky sex and intimate conversations about matters of life and death, I’m Open to Anything is a porno novel of rare ambition and humor. The book recalls Olympia Press’s heyday, when authors made quick money churning out dirty books, but couldn’t hide the intellectual obsessions that made them writers in the first place. William E. Jones’s previous book, True Homosexual Experiences (also published by We Heard You Like Books), a biography of Straight to Hell’s iconoclastic editor Boyd McDonald, celebrates the frank, raunchy language of the first queer ’zine. Jones brings the same unsparing and profane attitude to I’m Open to Anything, his debut novel.

I'm Open to Anything

Humor & Satire

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