High Risk: An Anthology of Forbidden Writings, Serpent’s Tail, London, 1991

ISBN 1-85242-231-9.

Selected contributors: Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, David Wojnarowicz, Dennis Cooper, Mary Gaitskill, Dorothy Allison, Essex Hemphill, Karen Finley, Cookie Mueller, Gary Indiana, Lynne Tillman, Bob Flanagan, Pat Califia, Kate Bornstein, Wanda Coleman and Robert Glück.

Published during the censorship battles and AIDS crisis of the early 1990s, High Risk brought fiction, essays and poetry together around sexuality, illness, gender, violence and political dissent. Scholder and Silverberg conceived the anthology in response to the pressure on artists and writers to censor themselves; its editorial position later developed into the High Risk Books imprint at Serpent’s Tail.

The book’s importance now lies partly in the contributors it placed beside one another. Writers associated with experimental fiction, queer literature, performance and the Downtown New York scene are converted into a single editorial field. Rex Ray’s leather-textured cover gives that field a deliberately commercial surface: forbidden writing formatted and distributed as a paperback. Bibliographic records confirm this London edition as published by Serpent’s Tail in 1991.

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