Between C and D: New Writing from the Lower East Side Fiction Magazine

by Joel Rose (Editor), Catherine Texier (Editor)

This anthology of short stories from the new magazine Between C & D presents 25 stories that best represent the spirit of the magazine: gritty, urban, sometimes ironic, sometimes gutsy, erotic, violent, dead-pan, playing with form, but clearly narrative in intention.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

194 pages, Paperback

First published April 5, 1988

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review is a tribute to the twenty-five authors included in this collection whose writing is a rebellion against main stream, conventional American fiction. As Joel Rose and Catherine Texier, editors of Between C & D, the Lower East Side magazine that originally published each of these short stories stated in the book's introduction, their magazine gave writers on the fringe a forum, writers who were inspired by the likes of Genet, Burroughs, Céline, Barthes, Foucault and Henry Miller rather then Updike, Cheever, Carver or Joyce Carol Oats. Their stories are frequently gritty, urban, ironic, sexy, violent, deadpan and sometimes whacky, offbeat and out-and-out strange.

This Penguin edition was published back in 1988. Authors included are David Wojnarowicz, Lisa Blaushild, Rick Henry, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Catherine Texier, Peter Cherches, Susan Daitch, Darius James, Tama Janowitz, Gary Indiana, Lee Eiferman, Reinaldo Povod, Joan Harvey, Don Skiles, Lynne Tillman, Barry Yourgrau, Roberta Allen, Patrick McGrath, Craig Gholson, John Farris, Ron Kolm, Emily Carter, Bruce Benderson and Joel Rose. Chances are nearly all of these names are unfamiliar to anyone reading this review. And for good reason. It has been nearly thirty years and all of these authors have retained their fresh, original vision rather than conforming to any established status quo.

Initially I planned to offer my own critique but, on further reflection, in keeping with each author's singular personality and unique literary voice, I think it more appropriate to include a number of author photos with quotes from their story:


Kathy Acker - "As long as I can remember wanting, I have wanted to slaughter other humans and to watch the emerging of their blood." from Male


Gary Indiana - "That night I fucked Candy Jones for something like three hours. My nuts ached the whole next day and I couldn't get her out of my mind." from I Am Candy Jones


Lynne Tillman - "Sex is important but like anything that's important, it does or causes trouble. Arthur didn't watch television, he watched me. People thought of us like a punchline to a dirty joke." from Dead Talk


Darius James - "The Maid is a monstrous manny-sized cookie jar with doughy animal features and crazed incandescent eyes. Her nappy bleached-blonde Afro is a crown of spiky thorns matted with sweat and splashed with large leaf-like patches of missing melanin." from Negrophobia


Ron Kolm next to one of his avid readers - "Duke and Jill do drugs. They live on the corner of Avenue A and 10th Street, in a mostly burnt-out building. Bad things keep happening to them. Their best friend, a junkie, rents a truck from a company on Lafayette Street, backs it up over the curb, kicks in their apartment door, and takes all their stuff." from Duke & Jill


Peter Cherches -"Your windows are dirty," she said to him. "It's not my windows," he replied. "It's the world outside." from Dirty Windows


Catherine Texier - "Jimmy is standing a few feet away from me, playing with his knife, testing its sharpness with the palm of his hand, He paces back and forth, his tension rising every time he turns around. I'll get them, he says. I'll get the fuckers." from The Fedora


Dennis Cooper - "He stood on the sidewalk and stuck out his thumb. A trucker chose him. The guy seemed friendly enough, but he kept asking personal questions. "Do you have a girlfriend?" he leered at one point. "Look. I'm on acid, so leave me along, all right?" That shut him up. George hallucinated in peace." from George: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Between C & D was an East Village/Lower East Side lit mag that was printed by a dot matrix printer on a large piece of computer paper with the perforated edges still in place, and came inside a plastic ziplock envelope. This collection, dedicated to Celine, provides an interesting cross section of the Downtown writing scene in the 80s, and a number of the writers in here made an impact in the larger world (David Wojnarowicz, Kathy Acker, Catherine Texier, Tama Janowitz, Gary Indiana, Lynn Tillman, Patrick McGrath). I enjoyed a number of these stories, some by the better known and some by the lesser known, and overall I liked the collection quite well, given that I have not always enjoyed the gritty realism or rough and tumble fantasy that emanated from Downtown NYC.

So here are some of the things I liked: Lisa Blaushild's "Witness", a deadpan bit of satire about a city dweller's refusal to acknowledge the violence and terror erupting around her. "Rooftop slaying or children playing? . . . Nobody likes a busybody." Catherine Texier's "Fedora" was a believable, detailed, short piece. It moves the reader through a young woman's life and her relationship with men, or with two men in particular: her musician boyfriend, whom she likes but is not sure she can trust, and a strange man with a fedora whom she sees around town and fears may be following her. Susan Daitch's "Camera Obscura" takes a look at a detached cartoon illustrator who lives across the street from a couple of actors and observes them rehearsing. Darius James's "Negrophobia" is a hilarious, whacked out satire of white folks' fears and stereotypes concerning blacks. Don Skiles tells a good story of artists doing some male bonding against an urban backdrop.

Another fine story was Bruce Benderson's "A Visit From Mom", in which a gay man spends a little time with his typical bourgeois mother and sees her off at the Port Authority bus station. He intercuts between this and the incident which directly follows it: a sleazy encounter with a tough male prostitute, first in a bar, and then in a pay by the hour hotel. Benderson coolly describes the fear, the awkwardness, and the lust of such a liaison. How to get him out of the room first? What if it's a set up? And he does not need to spell out that his mother's visit is guilt inducing and that this roll in the hay with an ex convict is supposed to be an antidote.

Patrick McGrath's "Lush Triumphant" was my favorite in this collection, not so much because of the subject matter (again, alienated artists in a rugged urban milieu), but because of the excellent prose. With vividness and smooth command of the language, McGrath portrays the meat packing district near West 14th Street and comes up with a character that fits perfectly into this shadowy cityscape: one Jack Fin, a lonely, drunken, misanthropic painter, a cold island of a man, and yet very much an artist.

[Tomaso]

some wild stories!

[Debra B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting stories by very talented writers.

[Aidan Slov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three stars solely for the aesthetic of a self published literary magazine. The stories themselves read as trying to fit a gritty vibe and use violence largely as a gimmick.

[Michael Norwitz · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Between C&D" was a small-run literary magazine based in New York in the 1980s, and this book collection comprises a sampling of the prose therein. The terse prose and unsentimental sex and violence felt revelatory at the time but nowadays the tone makes the book feel like more of a period piece. My favorites came towards the end: Barry Yourgrau's "Oak," an absurdist comedy which would honestly feel more appropriate in another sort of book, and Patrick McGrath's "Lush Triumphant," a character study told in the author's typically deft (and anything but terse) prose.

[Anna]

Some of these stories have really shocked and unsettled me . . .