Date: November 21st 2008

Big party tomorrow night (Saturday November 22)!

Come out to Death by Audio in Williamsburg: it's the release party for Cristy C. Road's new illustrated book Bad Habits: A Love Story. Here's the link to the book on our site: http://softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-59376-215-1

Where
Death by Audio in Williamsburg
49 South 2nd Street Brooklyn 11211 (between Wythe & Kent)

What
Book release party for Cristy C. Road's illustrated novel Bad Habits: A Love Story.

With Music By:
THE MEASURE (SA) (www.myspace.com/themeasuresa)
CHEEKY (www.myspace.com/cheekyli)
LOVE OR PERISH (www.myspace.com/loveorperishnyc)
EACH OTHER'S MOTHERS (www.myspace.com/eachothersmothers)
HOMEWRECKERS (Pop Punk from NYC. Feat. members of Party Line, The Unlovables, Girlcrush. Oh, and Cristy Road sings.)

Featuring readings by CRISTY ROAD and FLY

Interspersed DJ Sets (For dancing) By Sir Loins and Tommy Hottpants

There will be Booze!

See you there,
Soft Skull




About the Book:

Reincarnating Hubert Selby as a young promiscuous Latina junkie-artist, Cristy C. Road’s debut novel is a gut-punch-beautiful punk paean to finding human connections amidst urban squalor and capitalist decadence.

Michelle Tea has called the work of 25-year-old artist Cristy C. Road, “A party on the page, or a riot, or a revolution.”

Bad Habits: A Love Story is the mostly-autobiographical story of Road’s personal revolution.

Growing up Cuban in West Miami, the protagonist leaves for New York as soon as she’s able. Landing in Brooklyn, she enters an underground scene that few of us ever get to see. In Bad Habits, Road takes us on an uncensored tour of her world; we journey through the city to dive bars, share drugs in dark bathrooms, and spend long nights in strange beds. Her street-psychopharmacology results in experiences that are both revelatory and tragic. In her circle, drugs are cheap, ubiquitous, and they sometimes feel like the only way out.

Writing in a tradition of transgressive authors—mostly male like Genet, Bukowski, Selby, Rechy, but also female like Kathy Acker and Eileen Myles—Road takes us deep inside the damaged soul and psyche of her young protagonist with language violent as the street, and sex as raw as the language. But our heroine learns to leave her bad habits behind and emerge stronger and more independent, clean and open to love. Still punk, but punk by her own rules, she finds that life can be more than mere survival.

About the Author:
In a world seemingly incapable of being shocked, Cristy C. Road is truly transgressive. The heiress to both Hubert Selby and Kathy Acker, Road is an established illustrator for magazines like Bust, Bitch and Jane. She attended the Ringling School of Art and received a bachelor’s degree in illustration. She began writing and drawing fanzines (Greenzine, Androgynous Sanity) in 1994, at which time her art and writing were devoted to the punk rock subculture. She continued to write Greenzine for ten years, toured with punk rock bands, and documented her nomadic existence—analyzing it through political lens. She works as a freelance illustrator as well as a writer, and over the past two years has given readings and showings of her art throughout the country at various events including a national tour with Sister Spit in Spring of ’07.


Praise for Cristy C. Road:
“Cristy Road’s work makes me so happy. Where else can you see drawings of a black genderqueer boy flashing his top surgery scars and grinning, or two girls hitchiking in the desert holding a sign that reads ‘Indigenous Soverrignty or Bust,’ all drawn with love, color, and punk rock grit?” —Bitch Magazine

“Indestructible explores the toxic impact gender bias and proscribed norms have on questioning youth, while encouraging inquiry and protest against social constraints. So powerful is Road’s candid portrayal of growing pains, it provides the perfect comfort for angsty, self-loathing youth and sends older readers back down memory lane.” —CURVE Magazine

“Cristy Road’s burgeoning multi-media empire really speaks to me....I think the universality of Road’s stories is a testament to her writing ability and the proof that the more we think our situation is unique, the more we should realize we have a network of support available.” —Punknews.org

“Road’s narrative has an emotional immediacy, a social relevance that makes you believe her voice, makes you belong to her world. You forget how old you are, you are with her—drinking a 32 ounce of beer (‘because forties were illegal in Florida’), going to punk shows, listening to a two-minute song for empowerment....The artwork has the same level of immediacy. Road’s black and white illustrations are cinematic frames which include vivid action scenes—a sexual encounter, a fist-fight—as well as intimate, candid portraits of Road and her ....Road’s novel is a testimony of survival—a powerful reminder of how we must create (and re-create) our identities—whether the mainstream is with us, or not.” —Feminist Review



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