Author: Stewart Home
Series: Success and Failure Series
Catalogue No: PA-023
Price: 15.95 USD
ISBN: 978-0-9785564-7-1
Format: Paperback
Dimensions: 7″ x 4 1/3″
Pages: 304pp
Published: Nov 2016
Availability: Ships immediately
“I really don’t think anyone who is at all interested in literature has any business not knowing the work of Stewart Home.”
—London Review of Books
About
Penny-Ante reissues Stewart Home’s classic political satire, Defiant Pose, newly introduced by McKenzie Wark with an afterword by Home.
Named 1991’s “Book of the Year” by The Face and Gay Times out of the United Kingdom, Defiant Pose: 25th Anniversary Edition ushers an out-of-print “assault on culture” into the 21st century to meet its relevance in today’s torrid times. Employing pastiche and détournement, Richard Allen’s skinhead novels get a perverse makeover, going head to head with Hegel, Hobbes, and the heretical tracts of Abiezer Coppe in wild ride where no subject is taboo. From fashionable pseudo politics, ignorant neo-Nazis, middle-class masculinity, the art world, and literature’s so-called “outlaws,” Home’s targets are mercilessly skewered.
A contemporary of Kathy Acker born from the punk era, Home has worked outside major cultural institutions for much of his career, and is unafraid to call a spade a spade — an impulse sorely lacking in today’s culture.
Praise
"Stewart Home’s praxis is the stuff of London: confrontation, violence, the poetry of the inarticulate."
—Iain Sinclair
"Defiant Pose is a satirical masterpiece, as funny twenty-five years later as when it first appeared. Stewart Home captures the loquacious charm and ideological posturing of the post-political left of the Thatcher-era, pitted against itself and its right-wing nationalist enemies. Meanwhile, everybody’s sucking, fucking, wanking, rimming, reaming in pursuit of their ‘genetic destinies.’ Stewart Home’s proto-porn pageantry is the best rejoinder to Thatcher’s new enterprise culture and the proto-“discourses” of that era. Defiant Pose is a timely, timeless book."
—Chris Kraus
"Defiant Pose is slick and sick. Plumbs depths of literary depravity unseen since de Sade wrote 120 Days of Sodom. I love it!"
—Tom McCarthy
"The stuff of which cults are made."
—Time-Out (1991)
Author
Stewart Home is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, activist, and internationally- acclaimed author. Home’s writings include Pure Mania (Polygon 1989), Slow Death (Serpent’s Tail, 1996), 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess (Canongate, 2002), Tainted Love (Virgin Books, 2005), and Memphis Underground (Snowbooks, 2007). Between 2007 and 2010, Home was the commissioning editor of Semina, a series of acclaimed experimental novels from London art publisher Book Works, to which he contributed, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010). In 2013, Stewart Home released Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane (Penny-Ante Editions), named one of the “Best Paperbacks of the Year” by the Guardian. He was born and resides in London.