The cut-up technique is an aleatory narrative technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and popularized in the 1950s and early 1960s, especially by writer William Burroughs. It has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.
Kathy Acker was an American experimental novelist, playwright, essayist, and postmodernist writer, known for her idiosyncratic and transgressive writing that dealt with themes such as childhood trauma, sexuality and rebellion. Her writing incorporates pastiche and the cut-up technique, involving cutting-up and scrambling passages and sentences; she also defined her writing as existing in the post-nouveau roman European tradition. In her texts, she combines biographical elements, power, sex and violence.
Harold Robbins was an American author of popular novels. One of the best-selling writers of all time, he wrote over 25 best-sellers, selling over 750 million copies in 32 languages.
Sons and Lovers is a 1913 novel by the English writer D. H. Lawrence. It traces emotional conflicts through the protagonist, Paul Morel, and his suffocating relationships with a demanding mother and two very different lovers, which exert complex influences on the development of his manhood. The novel was originally published by Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd., London, and Mitchell Kennerley Publishers, New York. While the novel initially received a lukewarm critical reception, along with allegations of obscenity, it is today regarded as a masterpiece by many critics and is often regarded as Lawrence's finest achievement. It tells us more about Lawrence's life and his phases, as his first was when he lost his mother in 1910 to whom he was particularly attached. And it was from then that he met Frieda Richthofen, and around this time that he began conceiving his two other great novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, which had more sexual emphasis and maturity.
Lady Chatterley's Lover is the final novel by English author D. H. Lawrence, which was first published privately in 1928, in Florence, Italy, and in 1929, in Paris, France. An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960, when it was the subject of a watershed obscenity trial against the publisher Penguin Books, which won the case and quickly sold three million copies. The book was also banned for obscenity in the United States, Canada, Australia, India and Japan. The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical relationship between a working-class man and an upper-class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex and its use of then-unprintable profane words. It entered the public domain in the United States in 2024.
Erica Jong is an American novelist, satirist, and poet, known particularly for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying. The book became famously controversial for its attitudes towards female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. According to The Washington Post, it has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, while by 2022, the New York Times claimed that it had sold more than 37 million copies worldwide.
Sei Shōnagon was a Japanese author, poet, and a court lady who served the Empress Teishi (Sadako) around the year 1000 during the middle Heian period. She is the author of The Pillow Book.
Transgressive fiction is a genre of literature which focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual or illicit ways.
Fear of Flying is a 1973 novel by Erica Jong. It became controversial for its portrayal of female sexuality, and figured in the development of second-wave feminism.
Tropic of Cancer is an autobiographical novel by Henry Miller that is best known as "notorious for its candid sexuality", with the resulting social controversy considered responsible for the "free speech that we now take for granted in literature." It was first published in 1934 by the Obelisk Press in Paris, France, but this edition was banned in the United States. Its publication in 1961 in the United States by Grove Press led to obscenity trials that tested American laws on pornography in the early 1960s. In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the book non-obscene. It is regarded as an important work of 20th-century literature.
Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
Haunted is a 2005 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. The plot is a frame story for a series of 23 short stories, most preceded by a free verse poem. Each story is followed by a chapter of the main narrative, as told by a character in main narrative, and ties back into the main story in some way. Typical of Palahniuk's work, the dominant motifs in Haunted are sexual deviance, sexual identity, desperation, social distastefulness, disease, murder, death, and existentialism.
Between C & D (1983–1990) was a Lower East Side quarterly literary magazine, edited by Joel Rose and Catherine Texier. The name of the magazine references the apartment where Rose and Texier lived and produced the magazine, which was located between Avenue C and Avenue D in the East Village. However, it has also been suggested that the title is short for "between coke and dope," giving an indication of the transgressive content and ethos. The tagline of the magazine was "Sex. Drugs. Danger. Violence. Computers."
Laura Parnes is contemporary American artist who creates non-linear narratives that engage strategies of film and video art and blur the lines between storytelling conventions and experimentation. Her work is often episodic, references pop culture, female stereotypes, history and the anxiety of influence. She was the co-director of Momenta Art with Eric Heist and helped relaunch the not-for-profit exhibition space in New York City; at first as a nomadic space and then as a permanent space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She continued to her involvement as a Board Chair until 2011. Parnes received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She currently teaches in MFA departments at MICA, Parsons, and SVA.
Chris Kraus is an American-born writer, critic, editor, filmmaker, performance artist, and educator. Her work includes the novels I Love Dick, Aliens and Anorexia, and Torpor, which form a loose trilogy that navigates between autobiography, fiction, philosophy, and art criticism. She has also written a sequence of novels dealing with American underclass experience, beginning with Summer of Hate. Her approach to writing has been described as ‘performance art within the medium of writing’ and ‘a bright map of presence’. Kraus' work often blends intellectual, political, and sexual concerns with wit, oscillating between esoteric referencing and parody. Her work has drawn controversy for equalizing high and low culture, mixing critical theory with colloquial language, and graphic representations of sex. She has written extensively in the fields of art and cultural criticism.
Cutting for Stone (2009) is a novel written by Ethiopian-born Indian-American medical doctor and author Abraham Verghese. It is a saga of twin brothers, orphaned by their mother's death at their births and forsaken by their father. The book includes both a deep description of medical procedures and an exploration of the human side of medical practices.
Kate Zambreno is an American novelist, essayist, critic, and professor. She teaches writing in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and at Sarah Lawrence College. Zambreno is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction.
Leslie Dick is an American artist, writer, editor, and educator, based in Los Angeles. Her work explores feminist themes, especially in relation to queer theory and Lacanian discourse. Dick has published two novels, a collection of short stories, and several critical essays. She is a member of the editorial board of X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, a Los Angeles–based, internationally distributed journal of art. She has been on the faculty at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) since 1992, and is currently co-director of the CalArts Program in Art. Since 2012, she has also held a position as a critic in the sculpture program at the Yale School of Art.
Reba Maybury, is a British-Pakistani artist, writer, lecturer, and dominatrix, sometimes known as Mistress Rebecca. Maybury's work has garnered international attention for the ways in which it deconstructs the economic-capitalist underpinnings of both sex work and the commercial art world. Maybury has exhibited internationally and describes men as her medium, reflecting that much of her artwork is made by her male submissives through her control and direction.
Crudo is a 2018 novel by Olivia Laing. The book, Laing's first novel, incorporates autobiographical elements and details from the life of American author Kathy Acker. The novel was well-received, winning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
