Description
The biography of an artist who insisted that silence equals death — and refused to be silent. David Wojnarowicz died at 37, but he lived several lifetimes, and Cynthia Carr spent years talking to the people who witnessed them. Published by Bloomsbury in 2012, Fire in the Belly is the definitive biography of an artist who turned rage into one of the most urgent bodies of work of the 1980s.
Wojnarowicz was an abused child and a teen runaway who barely finished high school; he became a painter, photographer, writer, and performance artist at the center of the East Village scene — then one of the fiercest voices of AIDS activism after his own diagnosis. Carr interviewed hundreds of people, reconstructing not just a life but a world: the New York of Basquiat and Haring, of squats and nightclubs, of a plague the government refused to name.
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, this biography is unsparing and deeply humane. For readers of art history, queer history, or AIDS literature, it is essential — unforgettable.
David Wojnarowicz died at 37, but he lived several lifetimes — and Cynthia Carr spent years talking to the people who witnessed them. Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, published by Bloomsbury in 2012, is the definitive biography of an artist who turned rage into one of the most urgent bodies of work of the 1980s.
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Wojnarowicz was an abused child and a teen runaway who barely finished high school; he emerged as a painter, photographer, writer, and performance artist at the center of the East Village scene — and then as one of the fiercest voices of AIDS activism, after his own diagnosis. Carr, a Village Voice columnist and arts reporter for nearly two decades, interviewed hundreds of people and reconstructs not just a life but a world: the New York of Basquiat and Haring, of squats and nightclubs, of a plague the government refused to name.
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Winner of the Lambda Literary Award and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, this 600-plus-page biography is unsparing and deeply humane. For readers of art history, queer history, or the literature of AIDS, Fire in the Belly is essential — the story of an artist who insisted that silence equals death, and who refused to be silent.
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