AustLit

'After a successful career, a twenty-year marriage, and raising two kids, McKenzie Wark has a particularly extreme midlife life-change- coming out as a trans woman. Changing both social role and bodily form recast her whole relation to the world and reveal it to her as something strange and different. Her past life becomes a stranger to her, a past she can only reclaim by writing to important figures in her life, about the big themes that haunt us all, of love and money, sex and death.

'Told through a series of letters - to her childhood self, her mother, sister and her past lovers - she grapples with where she has come from and what this change means. She engages with the politics and aesthetics of trans culture and how they impact on her sense of who she is, and who she has been. She confronts difficult memories of her mother's death and her compulsion to write, growing up and her involvement in politics, coming to New York and embracing the counterculture and the realisations and reality of her late transition.

'Combining the deeply personal and political, Love and Money, Sex and Death is a provocative call to arms that recasts the mould for trans memoirs.' (Publication summary)

'What is an art of life for what feels like the end of a world? In Raving McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York's thriving underground queer and trans rave scene. Techno, first and always a Black music, invites fresh sonic and temporal possibilities for this era of diminishing futures. Raving to techno is an art and a technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them. Extending the rave's sensations, situations, fog, lasers, drugs, and pounding sound systems onto the page, Wark invokes a trans practice of raving as a timely aesthetic for dancing in the ruins of this collapsing capital.' (Publication summary)

'The last time I saw Kathy Acker was in London, in July 1997. I wasn’t sure how she felt about me at that point. I had failed to drop everything to be with her in San Francisco the year before, and I had failed to make a job materialise that would have brought her to Sydney, as she wanted. Things had, I felt, ended in a disappointing but amicable dead end. ‘Just be my friend,’ Kathy said, early on, and I had promised I would.'  (Introduction)

“Why am I telling you all this? Partly ‘cause the whole queerness/identity thing for me stretches through everything, absolutely everything. Slipping between straight/gay is child’s play compared to slipping between writer/teacher/influence-peddler whatever. I forget who I am. You reminded me of who I prefer to be.” [M.W.]

'“It’s two in the morning. . . I know what you mean about slipping roles: I love it, going high low, power helpless even captive, male female, all over the place, space totally together and brain-sharp, if it wasn’t for play I’d be bored stiff and I think boredom is the emotion I find most unbearable. . . ” [KA]

—from I’m Very into You

'After Kathy Acker met McKenzie Wark on a trip to Australia in 1995, they had a brief fling and immediately began a heated two-week email correspondence. Their emails shimmer with insight, gossip, sex, and cultural commentary. They write in a frenzy, several times a day; their emails cross somewhere over the International Date Line, and themselves become a site of analysis. What results is an index of how two brilliant and idiosyncratic writers might go about a courtship across 7,500 miles of airspace—by pulling in Alfred Hitchcock, stuffed animals, Georges Bataille, Elvis Presley, phenomenology, Marxism, The X-files, psychoanalysis, and the I Ching.

'Their corresepondence is a Plato’s Symposium for the twenty-first century, but written for queers, transsexuals, nerds, and book geeks. I’m Very Into You is a text of incipience, a text of beginnings, and a set of notes on the short, shared passage of two iconic individuals of our time.'

'Speed Factory is experimental writing at its most inventive - a game of words played with a partner and a set of rules, each player developing a thread, or two, of another's ideas. The result is an exhilarating, playful, and sometimes contradictory reflection on the speed of contemporary life.'(Publication summary)