Semiotext(e) / Native Agents #: Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black

- Blurb -

The first collected edition of legendary writer, actress, and adventurer Cookie Mueller' s stories, featuring the entire contents of her 1990 book Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, alongside more than two dozen others, some previously unpublished. Legendary as an underground actress, female adventurer, and East Village raconteur, Cookie Mueller' s first calling was to the written word- "I started writing when I was six and have never stopped completely," she once confessed. Muelleris 1990 Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, the first volume of the Semiotext(e) Native Agents series, was the largest collection of stories she compiled during her life. But it presented only a slice of Mueller' s prolific work as a writer. This new, landmark volume collects all of Mueller' s stories- from the original contents of Clear Water, to additional stories discovered by Amy Scholder for the posthumous anthology Ask Dr. Mueller, to selections from Mueller' s art and advice columns for Details and the East Village Eye, to still "new" stories collected and published here for the first time. Olivia Laing' s new introduction situates Mueller' s writing within the context of her life-and our times. Thanks to recent documentaries like Mallory Curley' s A Cookie Mueller Encyclopedia and Chole Griffith' s oral biography Edgewise, Mueller' s life and work have been discovered by a new generation of readers. Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black- Collected Stories returns essential source material to these readers, the archive of Mueller' s writing itself. Mueller' s many mise en sc nes-the Baltimore of John Waters, post-Stonewall Provincetown, avant-garde Italy, 1980s New York, an America enduring Reagan and AIDS-patches together a singular personal history and a primer for others. As Laing writes in her introduction, Collected Stories amounts to "a how-to manual for a life ricocheting joyously off the rails . . . a live corrective to conformity, conservatism, and cruelty. "