Cool for You: A Novel [Paperback]

A cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant-garde.The New York TimesWhy cant I live right now. Because I am not rich, I am not a saint. But I do know this: not all of us were sent here to work.The first published novel of legendary poet and performer Eileen Myles follows a queer female growing up in working-class Boston, straining against the institutions that hold her: family, Catholic school, jobs at a camp, at a nursing home, at a school for developmentally disabled adult males. Free-ranging and deadpan, tragic and joyful, this is a book about women, gender, class, bodies, escape, and what it means to be inside. Never more relevant, and now with an introduction by Chris Kraus.Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, includingI Love Dick andSummer of Hate, two books of cultural criticism, and, most recently, a critical biography of Kathy Acker. She is a co-editor ofSemiotexteand lives in Los Angeles.“The reissue, after 17 years, creates a strange sort of time vortex, a double-lens of perspective, in which Myles is looking back on the self that wrote the book, who is in turn looking back on the self in the story.” —Helena Fitzgerald,Rolling Stone