From Semiotext(e) / Native Agents
Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, New Edition
Collected Stories
A new edition of the only story collection compiled by legendary writer, actress, ex-biker, and columnist Cookie Mueller, featuring additional writings.
Distributed for Semiotext(e)
Overview
Author(s)
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Summary
A new edition of the only story collection compiled by legendary writer, actress, ex-biker, and columnist Cookie Mueller, featuring additional writings.
First published in 1991, Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black was the only story collection that the legendary writer, actress, ex-biker, and columnist Cookie Mueller compiled in her lifetime. Featuring a new introduction by Olivia Laing and an afterword by the book's first editor, Chris Kraus, this new edition collects all of Mueller's fiction, together with her Details magazine columns (1982–1989) and other writings.
The additional stories were discovered by Amy Scholder, who edited the anthology Ask Dr. Mueller for High Risk/Serpent's Tail books in 1996. As Scholder writes in her introduction, the new stories were “written around the same time she wrote the stories in Walking Through Clear Water, but for some reason Cookie decided not to include them. They are darker than most of her other stories; they are the quotidian Cookie, and that is why I especially love them.” Mueller's life and work were celebrated in Chloe Griffith's 2014 oral biography Edgewise, bringing her work to a new generation of readers.
Paperback
$17.95 T ISBN: 9781635901665 304 pp. | 5.25 in x 8 inEndorsements
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Cookie Mueller wrote like a lunatic Uncle Remus—spinning little stories from Hell that will make any reader laugh out loud. She was a writer, a mother, an outlaw, an actress, a fashion designer, a go-go dancer, a witch doctor, an art-hag, and above all, a goddess. Boy, do I miss that girl.
John Waters
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People fall in love with Cookie when they read her stories (I loved her first!). As she did, the stories move through different worlds, from heavy drug use to writing a health column (at the same time); from go-go dancing to art criticism to film and theater acting, from boyfriends and girlfriends to S&M and marriage, etc., etc., etc. With Cookie there was no boundary between hersef and her writings. Which isn't to say she didn't work hard on her stories—she did, the same way she worked on her hair. She was a matchless beautician of the word.
Richard Hell
author of I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tram