Among The Village Voice's 25 Favorite Books of 2006

Winner of the 2007 AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in the Trade Illustrated Book Design category.

"Up Is Up itself has a scrapbook feel. It gathers poems, excerpts and short stories as well as handmade magazine covers, pamphlets and posters that capture the collaborative, on-the-fly spirit of the period. . . . What is most arresting about UP IS UP is not its discovery of any individual genius but its invocation of an electrifying social energy that helped blast out an intellectual space for then-'transgressive' female and gay writers."

—New York Times Book Review

"Some of us like our angels with dirty faces; witness the lovingly reproduced artifacts of Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, a comprehensive compendium of below-14th Street literary productions by everyone from Laurie Anderson to Nick Zedd, focusing on the output of small magazines of the era like Koff, Bomb, and Between C and D...[the] stories meld dry satire with heart-churningly desperate transmissions of damaged humanity."

—Village Voice

"Exhilarating. . . . Up Is Up reproduces flyers and pages from lit mags to convey downtown's heady DIY ethos. The writing itself displays sensibilities that are at once fiery and cool. Cookie Mueller, Dennis Cooper, Wojnarowicz and many others merge crackling prose and a matter-of-fact tone to burrow into disturbing corners of sexual desire. AIDS takes a serious toll in the '80s, and becomes the haunting focus in amazing selections by novelist Gary Indiana and poet Tim Dlugos. Even as the scene begins to wind down, the book nails the deep thrills of talk and collaboration, especially in novelist Lynne Tillman's complex rendering of two friends' bar-set conversation. That gift for gab lives on in the epilogue, a spirited conversation between Eileen Myles and Cooper, who resist mythologizing but invoke the scene's glory nonetheless."

—Time Out New York

"Up Is Up is a remarkable monument to the vibrancy of the Downtown scene. There are moments of romantic myth-making, dysfunctional beauty and hilarious profundity. It documents a now-gone era when lower Manhattan was an affordable oasis for artists, writers and musicians, when poetry and prose rubbed up against punk and visual art before drunkenly stumbling into an endless pansexual orgy."

—New York Press

"Stosuy's anthology commemorates the underground writings and visual culture that proliferated below 14th Street after the Beats and the New York School poets and before the ravages of Aids, rising rent and blogs...Such writings rarely appeared above ground. They were disseminated in graffiti, on the body, in homemade zines posted to friends or in Xeroxed chapbooks."

—London Review of Books

"New York University Press has released the cutting-edge equivalent of a memory book: Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, Brooklyn writer Brandon Stosuy's magisterial anthology-cum-reliquary of downtown writing and literary art. Its oversized, gorgeously decorated and even decorous pages host an impossibly rich variety of prose, poetry and the unidentifiable either/or — all produced by writers who either lived or worked or once visited or were published on or read in small presses and performance spaces below Manhattan's Union Square but north of Mammon's Wall Street."

—Forward

"For the hipster: Up is Up, But So is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, edited by Brandon Stousy. Long before Starbucks took over Greenwich Village, and one-bedroom rents hit $3,000, downtown Manhattan was scuzzy, vibrant and alive with arts. Collecting the work of rock-star poets and beat-down bohemians, this book attests to the fact that the life portrayed in Mary Gaitskill's edgy work wasn't a dream."

—Salt Lake City Weekly

"While the major players in New York's punk scene have had their songs anthologized and reissued several times, Stosuy believes the downtown literary culture has not been as well preserved. This vibrant time capsule, presented in a creatively designed oversize volume, aims to fill the gap by compiling poems and short stories and mixing in an assortment of magazine covers, hand-printed flyers and other artworks that demonstrate the performative and collaborative aspects of the scene's poetry readings and small magazines. Stosuy's skills as an archivist and cultural critic help him guide readers through the various subcultures."

—Publishers Weekly

"In lower Manhattan between 1974 and 1992—before Banana Republic and the Gap opened stores on every other street corner, before SoHo became a tourist trap, and long before the events of 9/11 forever changed the city's skyline—a group of poets, fiction writers, journalists, graffiti artists, punk rockers, and activists contributed to a dynamic literary community known simply as 'Downtown.' These images are taken from Up Is Up, but So Is Down, a collection of writing and more than 125 photographs, book covers, and flyers that illustrate the dynamic, subversive work of the period."

—PoetsandWriters

"In the year that New York nightclub CBGBs closed, Brandon Stosuy's Up Is Up, But So Is Down is a tear-inducing, pumped-fist-raising tribute to the downtown literary scene that flourished in the two decades before Giuliani turned Manhattan into a mausoleum."

—The New Statesman

"Up is Up, But So is Down will doubtless be an inspiration to bohemians yet to come. I imagine them keeping it by their bedside, rather than on a coffee table."

—Inside Higher Ed

"What a treasure trove! This is one of those books (I predict) that you wont read straight through, but rather dip into periodically for jolts of arcane energy and inspiring madness."

— The Dizzies, Blog

"This book is inspiring in so many ways: it makes you want to write, to get outside and meet people, and more than anything, to travel back in time. It is proof of a New York that is now very hard to believe ever existed. But beyond all there is this writing, and everything in here is amazing."

—Jonathan Safran Foer

"As Kmart and Subway sandwiches invade NYC, it's crucial to remember that great art, writing and music once flourished downtown. As Patti Smith has said 'We created it, let's take it over.'"

—Kathleen Hanna

"This genuinely important cultural document will undoubtedly be an inspiration to any young artist who feels alienated from the mainstream."

—Bret Easton Ellis

"A sprawling collection of exquisitely made choices, Up Is Up, But So Is Down conveys the reality of one of the great Bohemias, an 'underground' like mid-19th century Paris and Berlin in the 20s. This book made me love the Downtown Scene all over again. The rants are here, the funky glamour, the gloriously dysfunctional idealism, the romantic dystopia, the ambition and the running joke that was made of fame. How great that room was made for the ephemeral with the iconic, the unknown with the mighty, and the losses with the survivors."

—Robert Glück

"A fascinating gallery. Downtown—fact or phantom—haunts me still."

—Wayne Koestenbaum

"The exact right kind of cared-for mess a scrapbook for a messy, half-erased era has to be to carry any real functionality...Its editorial shape lets the work stay alive by attending to its edges, emphasizing subject matter, and largely refusing to create a pantheon of idols."

—Anselm Berrigan

"[T]he brilliantly designed Up is Up:New York's Downtown Literary Scene... is even more full of downtown grunge from 1974 to 1992 but also the remarkable and vibrantly scruffy literature that sprang from it. It therefore makes its case for literary longevity. It's drug-wracked, full of horrors and sometimes magnificent."

—Buffalo News

Sometime after Andy Warhol's heyday but before Soho became a tourist trap, a group of poets, punk rockers, guerilla journalists, graffiti artists, writers, and activists transformed lower Manhattan into an artistic scene so diverse it became known simply as "Downtown." Willfully unpolished and subversively intelligent, figures such as Spalding Gray, Kathy Acker, Richard Hell, David Wojnarowicz, Lynne Tillman, Miguel Piñero, and Eric Bogosian broke free from mainstream publishing to produce a flood of fiction, poetry, experimental theater, art, and music that breathed the life of the street.

The first book to capture the spontaneity of the Downtown literary scene, Up Is Up, But So Is Down collects more than 125 images and over 80 texts that encompass the most vital work produced between 1974 and 1992. Reflecting the unconventional genres that marked this period, the book includes flyers, zines, newsprint weeklies, book covers, and photographs of people and the city, many of them here made available to readers outside the scene for the first time. The book's striking and quirky design—complete with 2-color interior—brings each of these unique documents and images to life.

Brandon Stosuy arranges this hugely varied material chronologically to illustrate the dynamic views at play. He takes us from poetry readings in Alphabet City to happenings at Darinka, a Lower East Side apartment and performance space, to the St. Mark's Bookshop, unofficial crossroads of the counterculture, where home-printed copies of the latest zines were sold in Ziploc bags. Often attacking the bourgeois irony epitomized by the New Yorker's short fiction, Downtown writers played ebulliently with form and content, sex and language, producing work that depicted the underbelly of real life.

With an afterword by Downtown icons Dennis Cooper and Eileen Myles, Up Is Up, But So Is Down gathers almost twenty years of New York City's smartest and most explosive—as well as hard to find—writing, providing an indispensable archive of one of the most exciting artistic scenes in U.S. history.