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On Hell (Sator Press)
On Hell transcribes a body broken by American empire, that of ex-con Rafael Luis Estrada Requena, hacking itself away from contemporary society. Johanna Hedva, author of Sick Woman Theory, takes the ferocious compulsion to escape (from capitalism, from the limits of the body-machine, from Earth) and channels it into an evisceration of oppression and authority. Equal parts tender and brutal, romantic and furious, On Hell is a novel about myths that trick and resist totalitarianism.
Praise for On Hell
"I mean, fuck. How do we get there, this rooted, brutalized, devastating space where we are forced to experience the capability of language to create a world in which all the noise around you is distortion, escape is a splintered hope, and the performance of life is the performance of bloody meat, existence as persistently crossed and breath an interstitial dream of falling. Fuck, I say, as NIN’s Starfuckers, Inc is playing in the back of my head and the swells of this world become the swells of my own blood pumping through my yet-to-be-corpse. Brilliant. Fervent. Unafraid and unapologetic. This text will consume you."- Janice Lee, author of The Sky Isn't Blue
"It’s fucking brilliant. I’m in love. If there have to be novels, On Hell is what they should do."- Anne Boyer, author of Garments Against Women and A Handbook of Disappointed Fate
There is a paid public parking lot behind Skylight Books, and street parking. There are no stairs whatsoever to the event space and we have a one-person, gender-neutral restroom. Should guests attending the event require any additional disability access such as ASL interpretation during the event, please email events@skylightbooks.com with those needs and we will accommodate them.
Johanna Hedva is a fourth-generation Los Angelena on their mother's side and, on their father's side, the grandchild of a woman who escaped from North Korea. Their works of performance, design, and sound have been shown at Machine Project, Human Resources LA, PAM, High Desert Test Sites, the Getty’s 2013 Pacific Standard Time, the LA Architecture and Design Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon. Their fiction, nonfiction, and poems have appeared in Triple Canopy, The White Review, Black Warrior Review, Entropy, Mask, 3:AM, Orlando, and anthologized in GenderFail, Asian American Literary Review, Which Witch LA, and others.
Asher Hartman is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, director, and intuitive practitioner, whose work at the junction of visual art and theater centers on the exploration of the self in relation to Western histories and ideologies. His theatrical works have been shown at Machine Project, Hauser & Wirth, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Tang Museum, LACMA, the MAK Center for Art & Architecture’s RM Schindler’s Fitzpatrick-Leland House, as part of Machine Project’s engagement in the Getty Museum’s “Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.,” and Southern Exposure. Asher Hartman is also one half of the intuitive duo Krystal Krunch, with Haruko Tanaka.
