Paradoxia: A Predator's Diary

by Lydia Lunch, Jerry Stahl (Introduction), Thurston Moore (Afterword)

Overview

The unspeakable sexual confessions of underground legend Lydia Lunch.

—Included in Flavorwire’s “An Essential Punk Literature Reading List"

“Paradoxia is compelling, exhilarating, and infinitely readable.” —Paper

Paradoxia contains frank and often shocking confessions. Lydia Lunch relays in graphic detail a predator’s diary, revealing the true psychic repercussions of sexual misadventure. From New York to London to New Orleans, Paradoxia is an uncensored, novelized account of one woman’s assault on the male of the species.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781617750656
Publisher:	Akashic Books
Publication date:	10/01/2007
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	166
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

LYDIA LUNCH was the primary instigator of the No Wave Movement, and the focal point of the Cinema of Transgression. A musician, writer, and photographer, she exposes the dark underbelly of passion confronting the lusty demons whose struggle for power and control forever stalk the periphery of our collective obsessions. She is the author of Paradoxia and Will Work For Drugs.
Jerry Stahl is the author of six books, including the memoir Permanent Midnight (made into a movie with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson) and the novels I, Fatty and Pain Killers. Formerly the culture columnist for Details, Stahl's fiction and journalism have appeared in Esquire, the New York Times, and the Believer, among other places. He has worked extensively in film and television and, most recently, wrote Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, for HBO.

Read an Excerpt

From Chapter 1: "I’d stalk bars, clubs, bookstores, public parks and the Emergency Room. Seeking in lost men a place to lose myself. Searching for a pocket of weakness. Looking for the ‘sweet spot’, a small tear in the psychic fabric to feast upon. To hide inside. A place to disappear in, manifesting myself in a multiplicity of personalities which all shared the same goal. To trick the next john into relinquishing his moral, financial, spiritual or physical guard, so that no matter what the outcome, I won. I got what I wanted. Whether it was money, conversation, drama—or sex."

'A tantalising read.' - Express

'It’s extremely rare to read a book so virulent and honest. Do so, and be enlightened.' - (Neon

Editorial Reviews

Hellion's diary of a troubled life as hunter and despiser of men. Lunch, a musician, writer and photographer, was a grimy and dark princess during drug-haunted Manhattan's nihilistic No Wave movement of the early '80s. Here she recounts time spent amidst the artists, scenesters, druggies and occasional murderers who made up acquaintance. Lunch was spurred to sexual aggression by a childhood of abuse in upstate New York, and later into nympho-maniacal behavior and rampant drugging. "New York City did not corrupt me," she writes. "I was drawn to it because I had already been corrupted." She hated men but flung herself at them, the worse the better. Reproducing the pathology of abuse, the cycle of pain received and inflicted, she grabbed and discarded with abandon, making a specialty of deflowering 14-year-old boys. The pell-mell prose gives the book an immediacy that's hard to shake, and Lunch's headlong plunge into manic devastation and corruption at times recalls the better work of William S. Burroughs. No wonder that Hubert Selby Jr., author of Last Exit to Brooklyn, was a mentor of sorts to this evil angel of extremes. As Sonic Youth front-man Thurston Moore (another No Wave vet) puts it in his blank verse afterword, "She can lure fascist beasts to honey with a whiff of her thigh. She can eviscerate them in their own hideous pools of selfish shame."Frantic and overdone, but strangely honest rantings from a modern-day Genet.

Kirkus Reviews

"Hubert Selby, Jr. famously said that he grew up feeling like a scream without a mouth. Lydia Lunch, one of his most celebrated—and most uncompromising—literary progeny, delivered scream, mouth, teeth, blood, hair, sperm, knife, and adrenaline in her purgatorial masterpiece Paradoxia."

Jerry Stahl

"Paradoxia reveals that Lunch is at her best when she’s at her worst . . . and gives voice to her sometimes scary, frequently funny, always canny, never sentimental siren song."

Barbara Kruger