Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992

by Brandon Stosuy, Dennis Cooper, Eileen Myles

Among The Village Voices 25 Favorite Books of 2006
Winner of the 2007 AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in the Trade Illustrated Book Design category.
Sometime after Andy Warhol’s heyday but before Soho became a tourist trap, a group of poets, punk rockers, guerilla journalists, graffiti artists, writers, and activists transformed lower Manhattan into an artistic scene so diverse it became known simply as “Downtown.“ Willfully unpolished and subversively intelligent, figures such as Spalding Gray, Kathy Acker, Richard Hell, David Wojnarowicz, Lynne Tillman, Miguel Piñero, and Eric Bogosian broke free from mainstream publishing to produce a flood of fiction, poetry, experimental theater, art, and music that breathed the life of the street.
The first book to capture the spontaneity of the Downtown literary scene, Up Is Up, But So Is Down collects more than 125 images and over 80 texts that encompass the most vital work produced between 1974 and 1992. Reflecting the unconventional genres that marked this period, the book includes flyers, zines, newsprint weeklies, book covers, and photographs of people and the city, many of them here made available to readers outside the scene for the first time. The book's striking and quirky design—complete with 2-color interior—brings each of these unique documents and images to life.
Brandon Stosuy arranges this hugely varied material chronologically to illustrate the dynamic views at play. He takes us from poetry readings in Alphabet City to happenings at Darinka, a Lower East Side apartment and performance space, to the St. Mark's Bookshop, unofficial crossroads of the counterculture, where home-printed copies of the latest zines were sold in Ziploc bags. Often attacking the bourgeois irony epitomized by the New Yorker’s short fiction, Downtown writers played ebulliently with form and content, sex and language, producing work that depicted the underbelly of real life.
With an afterword by Downtown icons Dennis Cooper and Eileen Myles, Up Is Up, But So Is Down gathers almost twenty years of New York City’s smartest and most explosive—as well as hard to find—writing, providing an indispensable archive of one of the most exciting artistic scenes in U.S. history.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, New York, History, Art

500 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2006

Reviews

[C.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

My obsession for, My LOVE for, this generation of NY writers never lets up! This contains the ENTIRE version of poet Tim Dlugos's brilliant poem "G-9," and MANY MANY, other gems! THIS is an anthology full of reading posters and photographs and POEMS and other writings that you don't want to be without!

CAConrad
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com

[Hari · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book! I always return to it. Probably favourite book. Yes. It is my favourite book.

[Wren · Rating 3 out of 5]

7.25/10

[W.B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most amazing document or series of documents....Stosuy has created the best anthology of the last twenty years...or I could say that if it didn't focus only on New York and a particular part of New York...some of the most amazing visual art, poetry, interviews, photographs, everything that have appeared in the last thirty three years! I had to go out and buy this book INSTANTLY when I had to return my copy to the library....I will review this on my blog later....Brandon, Thank You! This is genius...the closing interview between Eileen Myles and Dennis Cooper is worth the price of admission alone...Six stars if I could give it that...

[k · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this wayyyyy more than I did. Maybe it'll grow on me, but right now I've got to say, "edgy" lit is kind of dull after awhile. Just the fact that sex and drugs are in your work doesn't mean it's interesting, even if it was a new thing to do at the time (which is debatable).

[Brian Foley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my introdcution into Dennis Cooper, David Trinidad, and all the other incredible writers who make dirt seem absolutely romantic.
I recommend this for the scumbag in you. Plus, its gorgeously designed. Come over my house and look at it.

[Jen Hsieh]

Named 1 of the 25 best books of the year by the Village Voice

[Kristie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only got to read tidbits of the stories and poems, and also the history of each decade, but just a little is so good, and the pictures are great.