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Overview
Compiled by the same editors who brought you High Risk, this daring new anthology introduces us to 22 writers who give voice to an array of challenging issues today. The late activist Craig G. Harris fires the opening salvo with an angry lament about living and dying with AIDS that shimmers with rage and energy. In white-hot, fragmented prose that careens across the page, Darryl Pinckney offers snapshots from the life of a drug-addicted pre-op transsexual. Diamanda Galas's librettos are haunting calls to conscience; Sapphire's depictions of urban violence are fierce and chilling. And Leslie Dick's contemplative piece on suicide brings the collection to an eerie and memorable close. With pieces on violence, mortality, sex for money, sex for drugs, sex for revenge, and the disintegration of the body, High Risk 2 offers perverse and profound ways of looking at the world today.An uncompromisingly truthful, unfailingly adventurous companion to the hugely successful High Risk, this daring and provocative collection of short fiction includes pieces on AIDS, urban violence, sex for money, drugs, and revenge, and suicide, among other topics, offering perverse yet profound ways of looking at the world today.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
In 1991, the editors first collection of ``Forbidden Writing'' answered the cultural right's repressive ideology with works about sexual violence and bondage. Now, when fringe writing is under pressure not so much from politics as from conventionalism, High Risk 2 offers stories, essays and poems more remarkable for sadness than for anger. These are mostly about death, real or metaphorical. In Rebecca Brown's lovely ``Grief,'' a woman's death is fantasized as an airplane journey by friends, who dress to meet her at the airport day after day. In ``Best-Seller,'' Michael Blumlein expertly documents the spiritual morbidity of a writer forced to sell his body parts just to survive. The chant-like poems of Diamanda Galas propose ``prayer . . . not for miracles, and not for heaven. Just for silence and for mercy until the end.'' The uneven literary caliber of these selections, ranging from Patrick McGrath's splendid meditation to Stephen Beachy's hyperactive indulgence, is a disappointment, but the collective force lends credence to even the rawest voices. Of special merit are Darryl Pinckney's ``Throwing Shade,'' whose street-talking narrator offers delicate wisdom, and Craig G. Harris's wrenching essay about his own decline from AIDS. Some of these pieces will break readers' hearts, others will patch them with real artistry. (July)Book Details
Published
April 1, 1994
Publisher
New York : Plume, c1994.
Pages
272
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780452270183