Synopses & Reviews
Among The Village Voices 25 Favorite Books of 2006Winner of the 2007 AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in the Trade Illustrated Book Design category.
Sometime after Andy Warhols 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 Yorkers 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 Citys 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.
Review
Praise for the first edition:
"Terrific. I loved it."-Carla A. Hills,U.S. Trade Representative
Review
"A highly compelling account of America's trade troubles and what can be done about them . . . As polished and as informative a book as is likely to be written on the subject."-Jay Culbert,The World Economy
Review
". . .the political-economic-historical Bible for [US trade policy]."-J. David Richardson,Syracuse University
Review
Praise for the first edition:
"Terrific. I loved it."
"A highly compelling account of America's trade troubles and what can be done about them . . . As polished and as informative a book as is likely to be written on the subject."
". . .the political-economic-historical Bible for [US trade policy]."
Review
“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,
Review
“This is a kind of three-decade book celebrating the possibilities of a self-sufficient writing community right under the nose of the decaying, increasingly irrelevant, empire of New York publishing.”
-American Book Review,
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,
Review
“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,
Review
“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,
Synopsis
This is a thoroughly revised and updated edition of the most influential and widely read analysis of the US trade policymaking system.
Awarded the American Political Science Association's Glady Kammerer award for the best book on US national policy, American Trade Politics examines how the US policymaking process enabled the United States to reduce its own import barriers and lead the world toward a more open trading regime. Since the 1970s, enormous political changes, compounded by unprecedented US trade deficits, have brought institutional erosion and some backsliding on trade policy.
This second edition summarizes the latest trade policy controversies and congressional activism with fresh material on such matters as the omnibus trade legislation of 1988 and the 1991 debate over fast track authority for negotiations with Mexico toward a North American Free Trade Agreement.
Synopsis
This is a thoroughly revised and updated edition of the most influential and widely read analysis of the US trade policymaking system.
Awarded the American Political Science Association's Glady Kammerer award for the best book on US national policy, American Trade Politics examines how the US policymaking process enabled the United States to reduce its own import barriers and lead the world toward a more open trading regime. Since the 1970s, enormous political changes, compounded by unprecedented US trade deficits, have brought institutional erosion and some backsliding on trade policy.
This second edition summarizes the latest trade policy controversies and congressional activism with fresh material on such matters as the omnibus trade legislation of 1988 and the 1991 debate over fast track authority for negotiations with Mexico toward a North American Free Trade Agreement.
About the Author
I. M. Destler is a Professor at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for International Economics. He was formerly Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1977-83) and the Brookings Institution (1972-77) and Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University (1971-72) and at the International University of Japan (1986). He is the author or coauthor of nine books on American foreign policymaking and US-Japan economic relations, including Dollar Politics: Exchange Rate Policymaking in the United States (1989), Anti-Protection: Changing Forces in United States Trade Policy (1987), Our Own Worst Enemy: the Unmaking of American Foreign Policy (1984), and Coping with US-Japanese Economic Conflicts (1982).