COOKIE MUELLER / How to Get Rid of Pimples

Cookie Muller
How to Get Rid of Pimples 1984
Softcover, 78 pages
21.5 x 13.5cm
Top Stories, New York

Condition: Excellent

With Warholish tone, Mueller, in all her roles as doctor, satirist, journalist, playwright, credit clerk and so on, has created an un-performable [sic] play with twelve characters and more drama than could ever be, sadly and hilariously patterned by the pimples’ superficial affront to both narcissism and health. This excessive work is also full of happy endings, including death itself. The end of the index reads: “TV sitcoms, upstate, vagina, Valentino, Valium, valuable jewellery, velvet ropes, whales, woe.” - Bernadette Mayer

An oddity and a gem. How to Get Rid of Pimples is pure Cookie Mueller. Cookie populates this book with an array of outsiders and misfits, all of whom suffer from bad skin…..Cookie spins each story masterfully. ….Photographs by David Armstrong, Peter Hujar, and the legendary Nan Goldin, - David Brooks, Toronto

Founded and edited by Anne Turyn, Top Stories was a prose periodical dedicated to the fiction writing of underrepresented women artists and writers in the late seventies and eighties. First printed in 1979, every contributor was designated a full issue to create and shape as their own, sometimes in collaboration with a visual artist. As a result, much of the writing is experimental and ranges completely in style of prose and topic, making for a diverse record of New York writing at the time. The series featured numerous luminaries of the NYC downtown ethos, with issues by Constance DeJong, Cookie Mueller, Jenny Holzer/Peter Nadin, Lynne Tillman/Jane Dickson, Laurie Anderson, Pati Hill, Mary Kelly, Kathy Acker, and others.