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Memories That Smell Like Gasoline

David Wojnarowicz author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Nightboat Books

Publishing:17th Jul '25

£14.99

This title is due to be published on 17th July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Memories That Smell Like Gasoline cover

"Wojnarowicz is a spokesman for the unspeakable." —New York

David Wojnarowicz, one of the most provocative artists of his generation, explores memory, violence, and the erotism of public space—all under the specter of AIDS.

Here are David Wojnarowicz’s most intimate stories and sketches, from the full spectrum of his life as an artist and AIDS activist. Four sections—"Into the Drift and Sway," "Doing Time in a Disposable Body," "Spiral," and “Memories that Smell like Gasoline”—are made of images and indictments of a precocious adolescence, and his later adventures in the streets of New York. Combining text and image, tenderness and rage, Wojnarowicz’s Memories that Smell like Gasoline is a disavowal of the world that wanted him dead, and a radical insistence on life.

“Instead of giving in to political exhaustion, Wojnarowicz fanned his rage and channeled it into a message of—not hope, exactly, but insistence. I am here.”
Christine Smallwood, New York Times 

"[H]is rightful place is also among the raging and haunting iconoclastic voices, from Walt Whitman to William S. Burroughs, who explore American myths, their perpetuation, their repercussions, and their violence. Like theirs, his work deals directly with the timeless subjects of sex, spirituality, love, and loss.” 
The Whitney Museum of American Art

"[Wojnarowicz] took his outsider citizenship as a subject and weaponized it." 
New York Times


ISBN: 9781643622712

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

80 pages