David Wojnarowicz: Memories That Smell Like Gasoline — Hardcover Edition

Description

Nightboat Books, hardcover

Publication Date: July 22, 2025

Publisher Marketing:

“Wojnarowicz is a spokesman for the unspeakable.” —New York Magazine

David Wojnarowicz, one of the most provocative artists of his generation, explores memory, violence, and the erotism of public space–all under the specter of AIDS.

Here are David Wojnarowicz’s most intimate stories and sketches, from the full spectrum of his life as an artist and AIDS activist. Four sections–“Into the Drift and Sway,” “Doing Time in a Disposable Body,” “Spiral,” and “Memories that Smell like Gasoline”–are made of images and indictments of a precocious adolescence, and his later adventures in the streets of New York. Combining text and image, tenderness and rage, Wojnarowicz’s Memories that Smell like Gasoline is a disavowal of the world that wanted him dead, and a radical insistence on life.

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