Digital List Price:	$17.99
Kindle Price:	$11.99 Save $6.00 (33%)
Sold by:	Amazon.com Services LLC

Promotions apply when you purchase

Add an

audiobook with Audible narration for $7.49

Audiobook Price: $17.46

Save: $9.97 (57%)

Read with our free app

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

Follow the authors

Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration Kindle Edition

by David Wojnarowicz (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.7 272 ratings

See all formats and editions

The “fierce, erotic, haunting, truthful” memoirs of an extraordinary artist, activist, and iconoclast who lit up late-twentieth-century New York (Dennis Cooper).

One of the New York Times’ “50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years”

David Wojnarowicz’s brief but eventful life was not easy. From a suburban adolescence marked by neglect, drugs, prostitution, and abuse to a squalid life on the streets of New York City, to fame—and infamy—as an activist and controversial visual artist whose work was lambasted in the halls of Congress, all before his early death from AIDS at age thirty-seven, Wojnarowicz seemed to be at war with a homophobic “establishment” and the world itself. Yet what emerged from the darkness was a truly extraordinary artist and human being—an angry young man of remarkable poetic sensibilities who was inordinately sympathetic to those who, like him, lived and struggled outside society’s boundaries.

Close to the Knives is his searing yet strangely beautiful account told in a collection of powerful essays. An author whom reviewers have compared to Kerouac and Genet, David Wojnarowicz mesmerizes, horrifies, and delights in equal measure with his unabashed honesty. At once savage and funny, poignant and sexy, compassionate and unforgiving, his words and stories cut like knives, leaving indelible marks on all who read them.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The New York-based visual artist and AIDS activist whose work has been targeted by Jesse Helms and the Rev. Donald Wildmon as obscene debuts here with a collection of writings marked by stunning originality and sharp polemics. The alternation of poetic observations of a desolate, at times dissolute life on the road and in squalid urban settings with indictments of a homophobic "establishment" might at first appear ill-advised; soon, however, it becomes clear that Wojnarowicz's visual and verbal gifts are inextricably bound to his experience as a homosexual in an American underclass. In images, rhythms and verbal textures that often seem like written analogues to his paintings, Wojnarowicz displays an ability to capture the insensate beauty of much of the American landscape, and light it with a burning human hunger: "Down along the service road the prehistoric silhouettes of sixteen-wheel rigs ground their gears in the blackness. . . . As each cab swung by me there was a video blaze of tiny green and red ornamental cab lights framing the darkened windows containing a momentary fractured bare arm or dim face filled with the stony gaze of road life." In the course of this memoir, the author cooly sketches the outlines of a troubled adolescence--parental kidnapping, drug use, prostitution--making survival alone seem miraculous. What Kerouac was to a generation of alienated youth, what Genet was to the gay demimonde in postwar Europe, Wojnarowicz may well be to a new cadre of artists compelled by circumstance to speak out in behalf of personal freedom. This is a book sublime in poetry, fierce in outrage. Author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Wojnarowicz is a controversial contemporary artist who drew national attention when the NEA withdrew a grant for the artist's gallery, Artist's Space, in response to the lacerating essay he wrote about AIDS to accompany the show. He later sued the Reverend Donald Wildmon for copyright infringement and misrepresentation for using excerpts from his works when testifying before Congress. The book deals with subjects that arouse varied responses but rarely indifference. This very angry young man, the product of a lifetime of abuse inflicted by himself as well as others, is a traveler on the road to emotional and physical disintegration. Neither an autobiography nor essays, the work consists of segments, of incidents and images, some outrageous, some moving. It is an attempt to afford the reader a glimpse into outsider society but does so in a way that seems to aim more at alienation than amity. There is great pain here and a plea for compassion, but the rage and fear of which he accuses the establishment seems as much an echo of his own voice as it is of outside reality.
- Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New York
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"David Wojnarowicz is brilliantly attuned to American talk and responsive to the moods and innovations of society's truants. He also has the best conscience of any writer I know. This fierce, erotic, haunting, truthful book should be given to every teenager immediately." -- Dennis Cooper

"Wojnarowicz's writing fairly smokes with acrid ironies. It's passionate and personal." -- New York

"Everyone should read Close to the Knives to understand the overall political agenda behind suffering, whether that suffering occurs because of a dysfunctional family, religion, or government. Wojnarowicz explores all of his painful life experiences as a plea for all of us to become more compassionate and caring human beings. This isn't just David's story, it's our story, our nation's story." -- Karen Finley

From the Publisher

"Wojnarowicz explores all of his painful life experiences as a plea for all of us to become more compassionate and caring human beings. This isn't just David's story, it's our story, our nation's story."--Karen Finley

From the Inside Flap

In Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz gives us an important and timely document: a collection of creative essays -- a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous and honest personal testimony to the "Fear of Diversity in America." From the author's violent childhood in suburbia to eventual homelessness on the streets and piers of New York City, to recognition as one of the most provocative artists of his generation -- Close to the Knives is his powerful and iconoclastic memoir. Street life, drugs, art and nature, family, AIDS, politics, friendship and acceptance: Wojnarowicz challenges us to examine our lives -- politically, socially, emotionally, and aesthetically.

From the Back Cover

'Everyone should read Close To The Knives to understand the overall political agenda behind suffering, whether that suffering occurs because of a dysfunctional family, religion, or government. Wojnarowicz explores all of his painful life experiences as a plea for all of us to become more compassionate and caring human beings. This isn't just David's story, it's our story, our nation's story.'

About the Author

David Wojnarowicz was an American painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and AIDS activist prominent in the New York City art world. He was born on September 14, 1954. He died of AIDS on July 22, 1992.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00KBEBXII
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Open Road Media (June 3, 2014)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 3, 2014
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2994 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 290 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #702,253 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #269 in Biographies of Social Activists
- #426 in Violence in Society (Kindle Store)
- #461 in LGBTQ+ Biographies & Memoirs

Customer Reviews:
4.7 272 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the authors

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

David Wojnarowicz
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
See more on the author's page
Olivia Laing
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She's the author of seven books, including To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring, The Lonely City and Everybody. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times bestseller and won the James Tait Black Prize. Laing writes on art and culture for the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and New York Times, among many other publications. Her collected writing on art, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, was published in 2021. The recipient of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize in nonfiction, she lives in Suffolk, England. Her next book, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, will be published in 2024.
See more on the author's page

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5

272 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Sami A. Fam

powerful, moving experience

Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2018

Verified Purchase

Close to the Knives is an urgent incendiary memoir, grounded mostly in feeling, that mixes forms, calling into question how documentation and archives function in relation to queer memories and experience. Linear heterosexual time, which dictates the expected linear beginning to end narrative form is completely warped by queer time and so the memoir “drifts” across spaces and decades and in and out of surreal dreams. Suicide and death burst unabashedly forward from its pages and made me cry. At moments the memoir is so poetic and abstract I was wandering through a confusing fever dream where time moved like thick hazy wisps of smoke. Other moments are concrete, detailed and specific and time runs out like an apocalypse; sharply clocked by the tick of corpses and the tick tock of dead friends and the ticking ticking tick tock of his own fading health and deteriorating body.

Would recommend listening to the book on audible for a powerful, moving, sonic experience!

11 people found this helpful

Helpful

River

The most genuine thing I've ever read

Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2020

Verified Purchase

This book can be a little dark and a little graphic, but it is written so beautifully, and it is so honest. I found myself underlining a lot because there was so much I related to. And the political things he wrote about are still true and relevant today. He really didn't write about his art and that part of his life, so if that's what you're looking for, you won't find it here.
It's the truest thing I have ever read. I think everyone should read it.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Janet

Conversational

Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2016

Verified Purchase

Autobiographical, starts off very personal then becomes increasingly political. I never met him and he was probably inventing his persona, but the voice he's telling his story in just sounds so natural to me. I loved it. It felt like he was in the room. If you're looking for a life story that reads almost like a novel and tells how the artist got from A to B to C, this is not it. It's much more like you're just meeting someone at a party who likes to talk a lot, and you end up listening all night, and you still only know a little bit about them by morning, but that's okay.

17 people found this helpful

Helpful

David Wineberg

Forever Walking Hallways

Reviewed in the United States on May 23, 2014

David Wojnarowicz had the microscopic observations of a child. His descriptions were extraordinarily finely detailed and nuanced. But they were direct and stark too. His insights were fascinating. His narrative didn’t so much flow, as roll like a boulder. This is sharp, even piercing writing from a totally off kilter perspective. Most of us do not see life this way.

His world was peopled with damaged friends. He said everyone he knew came from a family of abusive parents, not least his own. His friends were all on the edge, leading fringe lives in which they all psychoanalyzed each other and the country at large from painful perspectives. They lived bizarrely. There was a lot of violence, a lot suicide, and a lot of AIDS. There is constant sex, sometimes romantic, usually brutal, often filthy, always craved.

He was never truly happy, but he was happiest outside his nonexistent comfort zone. “Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to be forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.” That’s the best definition he could admit to, and it’s more than most could own up to.

His thoughts and dreams were populated with hallways, often long, often dark. I’ve never seen the word hallway so many times in a book. Uncertainty played an outsized role in his short life.

The second half of the book is less enthralling, because it is transcripts of interviews he taped of his friends. It is their words, not his. The interviews serve to bring them closer, before they die off in rapid succession. The hunger for more of Wajnarowicz’s own writing has to wait to the end, where he intersperses the description of a bullfight in Mexico with thoughts and reminiscences it inspires. And almost every paragraph admonishes us to smell the flowers while we can. He did not.

Unfortunately for all of us, the last years of his life were consumed with caring for friends with AIDS, followed by his own case. His fury at the hypocrisy of the dominating government agencies and officials, and especially at the self contradictory and insufferable Church, enraged and changed him. We can’t even imagine what kind of writer he might have become without that ugly diversion. That is possibly an even greater tragedy.

This will have to be eloquent enough.

David Wineberg

14 people found this helpful

Helpful

Gordon Raphael

Astounding

Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2020

Verified Purchase

Amazing book! A must read for anyone interested in David’s work. Such a great piece of literature, along with all his other books. Yet this stands out as my favorite.

Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2001

Verified Purchase

Enter the young male prostitute, performance artist, author, street monger, and angry prophet. He was all of these things and more until AIDS finally claimed him. But with Close to the Knives, he has left us all a very precious legacy--a frame of reference that begs us to truly witness the politics of suffering in American society and become more compassionate in the process. His omnivorous approach to our culture is dizzying, enraging, mysterious, beautiful, dangerous, heartbreaking, and very very necessary. When I finished reading it, I turned it over and started again. I will never be the same.....I have been galvanized.

20 people found this helpful

Helpful

Ree W.

One of my favorite authors

Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2019

Verified Purchase

Can't say enough his writing is spectacular.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

BJO

Sexual content too graphic

Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2015

Verified Purchase

I liked the writing style but much of the content was too graphic for my taste. It was assigned reading for a memoir writing class. I would not have chosen to read it otherwise.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

F

Highly recommended

Reviewed in Italy on May 23, 2020

Verified Purchase

A memoir that reads like Burroughs and sounds like Iggy Pop. The most politically charged parts can be debatable at times, but the overall effect is that of a heartrending and gutwrenching first-hand witness. Highly recommended.

Andy D

Sainthood in queer worship

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 27, 2019

Verified Purchase

Rimbaud, Genet & Wojnarowich. A trinity in queer politics that most queers will never understand given that most of them will not have heard their voice. Hearing them gave me strength to live in my queer world without having to sleep back into my false heterosexual world of hell.

2 people found this helpful

Client d'Amazon

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on January 17, 2017

Verified Purchase

In really good condition!

Sia Jane

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 29, 2017

Verified Purchase