A Crack Up At The Race Riots

This reprinting of Korine's first novel presents fragments of a portrait in multimedia: print, photographs, drawings, news clippings, handwriting, a poem, attempted diagrams, clip art; but mostly text, including hard-luck stories, off-and-on-colour jokes, script-scraps, found letters, free rhymes, drug flashbacks and other scenes, exploring the world of show-biz with feet set lightly in the black humours of the real ol' world. This excretion of the danglers of public life would make William Burroughs sigh and turn the page, at least.

Harmony Korine burst onto the scene with his screenplay for Kids - a film so gritty and unsettling in its depiction of teenage sex that it was almost banned in the UK. A Crackup at the Race Riots is similarly controversial. The novel is without plot, linear narrative, character development or scene setting. In other words, it is totally original. The book is a montage that takes literary convention and explodes it in a sequence of half-remembered scenes, suicide notes, dialogue fragments, movie ideas, rumours and jokes. Korine captures the fragmented moments of a life observed through the demented lens of media, tv and teen obsession. Korine's darkly bizarre imaginationhas created the ultimate post-postmodern novel - funny, offensive, depraved and sad.

The original Ritalin kid, Harmony Korine burst on the scene with Kids, a film so gritty and unsettling in its depiction of teen life that it was slapped with an NC-17 rating and banned in some theaters across the country. In some ways, the media frenzy over the rating overshadowed the harrowing portrait of teenagers destroying their lives and the then twenty-one-year-old screenwriter who created them. "Whether you see the movie as a masterpiece or as sensationalism," wrote Lynn Hirshberg, "the movie is relentless and brilliant and extremely disturbing. It's powerful-both steel-eyed and sexy; horrifying and captivating." Now, in this first book of fictional set pieces, Korine captures the fragmented moments of a life observed through the demented lens of media, TV, and teen obsession. Korine reinvents the novel in this highly experimental montage of scenes that seem both real and surreal at the same time. With a filmmaker's eye and a prankster's glee, this bizarre collection of jokes, half-remembered scenes, dialogue fragments, movie ideas, and suicide notes is an episodic, epigrammatic lovesong to the world of images. Korine is the voice of his media-savvy generation and A Crack-Up at the Race Riots is the satiric lovechild of his dark imagination.

"A buried part of history comes to light in this informative account of the Black Wall Street Massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921"--

Long out of print, Harmony Korine's 'zines are comprehensively collected in this new book. Filled with low-concept, laugh-inducing juxapositions of words and images, images and images, lists, monologues, cartoons, free verse, jokes, half-thoughts, fake/real interviews, innuendo and Matt Dillon's phone number. Includes collaboration with Mark Gonzales, the skateboarder and poet. This is a collection of seven fanzines from a time of innocence, exploration, experimentation, discovery, depression and hanging around.

A big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now. As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay -- with officer Nestor Camacho on board -- Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, a wanna-go-muckraking young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; an Anglo sex-addiction psychiatrist and his Latina nurse by day, loin lock by night-until lately, the love of Nestor's life; a refined, and oh-so-light-skinned young woman from Haiti and her Creole-spouting, black-gang-banger-stylin' little brother; a billionaire porn addict, crack dealers in the 'hoods, "de-skilled" conceptual artists at the Miami Art Basel Fair, "spectators" at the annual Biscayne Bay regatta looking only for that night's orgy, yenta-heavy ex-New Yorkers at an "Active Adult" condo, and a nest of shady Russians. Based on the same sort of detailed, on-scene, high-energy reporting that powered Tom Wolfe's previous bestselling novels, Back to Blood is another brilliant, spot-on, scrupulous, and often hilarious reckoning with our times.

When it first appeared in 1971, Larry Clark's groundbreaking book Tulsa sparked immediate controversy across the nation. Its graphic depictions of sex, violence, and drug abuse in the youth culture of Oklahoma were acclaimed by critics for stripping bare the myth that Middle America had been immune to the social convulsions that rocked America in the 1960s. The raw, haunting images taken in 1963, 1968, and 1971 document a youth culture progressively overwhelmed by self-destruction -- and are as moving and disturbing today as when they first appeared. Originally published in a limited paperback version and republished in 1983 as a limited hardcover edition commissioned by the author, rare-book dealers sell copies of this book for more than a thousand dollars. Now in both hardcover and paperback editions from Grove Press, this seminal work of photographic art and social history is once again available to the general public.

Key Zest arises from Harmony Korine's 2019 film The Beach Bum, which follows the misadventures of a poet named Moondog (Matthew McConaughey), a "rebellious burnout who only knows how to live life by his own rules." Set in Key West, Florida, and also starring Snoop Dogg, Isla Fisher, Zac Efron, Jimmy Buffett, Martin Lawrence and Jonah Hill, the movie tracks Moondog's comical mishaps and assignations, culminating in his unlikely fame after the publication of his memoirs, which are universally lauded and win him a Pulitzer Prize. Key Zest is a collection of Moondog's poems. Hilarious, preposterous and ribald, it includes such gems as "Alright, sunrise. / Let's get this party started." and "We can do whatever we want or nothing at all. / Eh, civilization." Harmony Korine writes, "Moondog is the greatest poet in the history of Key West. I read a few of these pages and loved every minute of it."