Description

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1990 book Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, alongside more than two dozen others, some previously unpublished.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. Muellerís 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 Chloé Griffin 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 scènes–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.