SHIPS FEBRUARY 2019
Join Max Fox & Wayne Koestenbaum at McNally Jackson for the launch of The Amphitheater of the Dead on February 18, 2019!
GUILLOTINE SERIES #15 : THE AMPHITHEATER OF THE DEAD : GUY HOCQUENGHEM; TRANSLATED BY MAX FOX
Chapbook/Novella | 112pp. | 4.25” x 6.25” | January 2019
“Anyway, there’s only one way out this time. To denude myself. Not to undertake but to write, in this state of exaltation which rejuvenates me, to recount my earliest unfulfilled promises, my anguishes, to myself who will disappear. Because this time, I know the next infection will take me." A science-fiction memoir by the French thinker Guy Hocquenghem, written in the last months of his life with the intention of prolonging it. From May to the end of June 1988, Hocquenghem worked on this last book, writing in pen from his bed until complications from AIDS developed into paralysis and “his hand no longer responded to commands from his brain,” as his comrade Roland Surzur writes in the preface. He did not get to the end. Set in 2018, the novel dramatizes the task of living with death, imagining a future of chronic deferral remarkable for depictions of AIDS at the time. With the original preface by Roland Surzur and an introduction by the translator.
GUY HOCQUENGHEM was born in 1946 and arrived at the Sorbonne in time to occupy it in 1968, militating over the years with a series of communist and other left formations including the Front homosexuelle d’action revolutionnaire. His first book Le Désir homosexuel appeared in 1972, and he produced journalism, films, magazines, and novels until his death in August 1988. He is considered one of the forebears of queer theory.
MAX FOX is a writer, translator, and a founding editor of Pinko Magazine. He lives in Philadelphia.