Join Subculture Lit: Pushing the Boundaries of Literature
Subculture Lit is a boundary-pushing book club for creatives, presented in partnership with Alienated Majesty Books. Each month, we explore experimental literature and small press works by underrepresented authors—books that challenge the limits of narrative and craft.
This literary arts series is for writers, readers, and artists drawn to genre-defying storytelling. It’s a space for bold ideas, deep conversation, and creative risk-taking.
Join us every second Sunday at Alienated Majesty Books for in-person meetups, inspired discussion, and the shared joy of discovery.
Explore Subculture Lit's Latinx, Punk, and Borderland Narrative Book Club
Winter/Spring 2026
Fall/Winter 2025
Guided by Jason S.
Narrative Crossings & Beats is Subculture Lit’s curated 12-month book club series that dives into Latinx literature, punk history, and borderland narratives—stories that challenge cultural boundaries and celebrate creative resistance. Each title is carefully chosen to amplify underrepresented voices and inspire deep, dynamic discussions.
Brother Brontë
Fernando A. Flores
January 2026
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Fiction
Love & Rage - Autonomy in Mexico City's Punk Scene
Kelley Tatro
November 2025
Wesleyan University Press
Non-Fiction
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Ethnographic nonfiction blending cultural history, political theory, and music studies to examine the punk scene in Mexico City as a lived practice of autonomous politics.
This English-language study explores the punk scene in Mexico City through ethnographic nonfiction blending cultural history, political theory, and music studies. In Love & Rage, ethnographer Kelley Tatro connects punk’s sounds and practices to distinct styles of political action, arguing that punk is more than music, it is a lived commitment to experimentation with anarchist politics.
Central to Tatro’s account is autogestión, a term with deep roots in local leftist traditions, loosely translated as self-determination or self-management. Through vivid vignettes and first-person perspectives, she details how punk-scene practices cultivate autogestión via intensely affective experiences that register as love and rage, shaping collective life, organizing, and autonomy.
Drawing on the history of anarchism in Mexico City and social movement scholarship, the book also examines both the pleasures and the contradictions of using music as a tool for building autonomous politics.
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Speculative literary fiction blending dystopian satire, borderlands surrealism, and metafictional adventure to depict a near-future Texas town ruled by censorship, extraction, and authoritarian control.
Set in Three Rivers, Texas, in 2038, Brother Brontë follows two friends, punk rocker Neftalí and her former bandmate Proserpina, as they try to survive under Mayor Pablo Henry Crick’s regime, where reading (and, at times, art more broadly) is criminalized and enforced through “book shredders.”
After Crick’s agents raid Neftalí’s home, she salvages what remains of her library. She sets out with Proserpina on a perilous route toward the state-run Big Tex Fish Cannery, a toxic operation fueled by the forced labor of the town’s mothers, carrying a hydraulics manual for Bettina while protecting a prized novel by renegade author Jazzmin Monelle Rivas.
Flores structures the book as a chaotic, webbed triptych that expands from street-level survival into visions, backstory, and Rivas’s own narrative, layering in a ragtag resistance of revolutionary tías, three scheming triplets, and a wounded Bengal tigress, until the uprising reframes what it means to preserve books, memory, and collective agency in a ruined town.
Pedro Páramo
Juan Rulfo, trans. Douglas J. Weatherford
December 2025
Grove/Atlantic
Fiction
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Literary fiction blending modernist fragmentation, rural social chronicle, and ghost story to portray a haunted Mexican town and the wreckage left by a local strongman.
In this immersive novel, Juan Preciado travels to Comala to fulfill his dying mother’s request: find his father, Pedro Páramo. As he arrives, the town reveals itself through murmured testimonies and shifting voices, blurring the line between memory and haunting and between the living and the dead.
Rulfo uses a nonlinear, choral structure to assemble Pedro Páramo’s rise and Comala’s collapse, tracing how desire, violence, and abandonment radiate through families and through the land itself.
Rulfo’s primary genre is literary fiction, and Douglas Weatherford’s translation brings forward a foundational work of Latin American literature, formally daring, spare, and profoundly influential in its portrayal of power and loss as a landscape of voices.
The Story of My Teeth
Valeria Luiselli, trans. Christina MacSweeney
October 2025
Coffee House Press
Creative Non-Fiction
Chuco Punk - Sonic Insurgency in El Paso
Tara López
August 2025
University of Texas Press
Non-Fiction
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Creative nonfiction blending cultural history, ethnography, and musicology to explore the Chicanx punk scene in El Paso.
In this immersive study, Tara López traces the sonic insurgency of El Paso’s punk community from the late 1970s through the early 2000s, weaving together over seventy interviews, archival flyers, photos, and personal narratives.
She examines how punk music became a vehicle for cultural resistance, identity formation, and community solidarity in a border city shaped by social and political tensions.
López’s primary genre is cultural history and ethnographic nonfiction, and her work offers a vital contribution to understanding local music scenes as sites of social insurgency and creativity.
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Creative nonfiction blending playful fiction, autobiography, and literary critique to explore storytelling, collecting, and family bonds.
In this witty and imaginative novel, Valeria Luiselli follows Highway, a world traveler and auctioneer obsessed with collecting the teeth of famous historical figures, weaving together narratives inspired by literary influences and the industrial suburbs of Mexico City.
She examines the passion behind objects, the nature of storytelling, and the quirky, complex ties that bind families.
Luiselli’s primary genre blends literary fiction and experimental narrative, and her work has earned acclaim for its originality and imaginative scope.
Signs Preceding the End of the World
Yuri Herrera, trans. Lisa Dillman
September 2025
And Other Stories
Fiction
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Fictional border-crossing novella blending mythic quest narrative, social realism, and surreal allegory to trace migration from Mexico into the United States.
In this stark, fable-like story, Makina is sent by her mother to deliver an envelope to her brother, who crossed north three years earlier and has only sent back cryptic messages since. Moving through nine compressed chapters, she navigates a chain of intermediaries—“top dogs” who control passage—while carrying not only her mother’s letter but an additional package demanded as part of the deal.
Herrera stages the journey as a straightforward quest threaded with omnipresent threats: criminals, watchers, and the machinery of the border. Yet the novel’s power lies in its hallucinatory imagery—sinkholes from over-mined land, windowless “obsidian” spaces, and excavated landscapes so emptied they feel like science fiction.
Herrera’s primary genre is literary fiction with a strong allegorical and mythic register, and the book offers a haunting, concentrated meditation on displacement, language, and the psychic transformations demanded by crossing.
Subculture Lit: Bodies, Borders & Becoming Book Club
Spring/Summer 2025
Guided by Angela G.
Bodies, Borders, & Becoming is Subculture Lit’s Spring/Summer book club. This curated 6-month series explores experimental literature centered on radical memory, identity, and outsider art. Each title is curated to highlight small press publishers and challenge traditional literary narratives.
David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side - Sylvère Lotringer
July 2025
Semiotext(e)
Biographical Oral History
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This book is a biographical oral history with a focus on contemporary art and activism.
In 1991, Sylvère Lotringer recorded a conversation with the artist Wojnarowicz while he was in the final stages of AIDS.
In this conversation, Wojnarowicz speaks candidly about his art, politics, and the urgency of the cultural moment he was living through.
After Wojnarowicz’s death, Lotringer revisited the transcript and invited contributions from those who knew and worked with him, Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, Richard Kern, among others, bringing in multiple perspectives on a time and place shaped by collaboration, confrontation, and survival.
The result is not a clean narrative but a fragmented portrait of an artist shaped by community and conflict.
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Samuel R. Delany
May 2025
NYU Press
Creative Non-Fiction
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Creative nonfiction blending autobiography, criticism, and sociology to critique the decline of Times Square’s subcultural fabric.
In these two nonfiction essays, Samuel Delany explores the gentrification of Times Square while reflecting on his own sexual experiences in peep shows, XXX cinemas, and bars as a Black gay man.
He examines why public restrooms, peep shows, and tree-filled parks are essential to a city’s physical and psychological landscape.
Delany’s primary genre is cyberpunk (a subgenre of science fiction), and his work is highly influential. He is one of the first Black writers to become a bestselling sci-fi author.
Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, & Exile
Jane Blocker
June 2025
Duke University Press
Academic Non-Fiction
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An academic non-fiction work exploring performance art, identity, exile, feminism, and postmodern theory.
Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist who lived in exile in the United States, was one of the most provocative and complex personalities of the 1970s art world.In Where Is Ana Mendieta?, art historian Jane Blocker provides an in-depth critical analysis of Mendieta’s diverse body of work.
Although her untimely death in 1985 remains shrouded in controversy, her life and artistic legacy offer a unique vantage point from which to explore the history of performance art, installation, and earthworks, as well as feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism.
Red House Alley
Elise Jerusalem (1909), Stephanie G. Ortega (Trans. 2024)
April 2025
Boiler House Press 2024
Literary Historical Fiction
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A literary historical fiction novel with a strong feminist and social-realist core.
Stephanie G. Ortega, translator of Red House Alley, joined our Subculture Lit on April 13.Originally published in 1909, Else Jerusalem’s novel was a feminist landmark, one of the first to portray sex workers as fully human. Banned by the Nazis for decades, this newly uncensored English edition offers a powerful look at exploitation, survival, and societal hypocrisy.
Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black Cookie Mueller
February 2025
Semiotext(e) 2022 (Reissue)
Literary Memoir
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A collection of short fiction and autofiction. This anthology is a hybrid of memoir-style essays, personal narratives, and imagined vignettes.
John Waters, a filmmaker known for transgressive cult films, describes Cookie as “a writer, a mother, an outlaw, an actress, a fashion designer, a go-go dancer, a witch doctor, an art-hag, and above all, a goddess. Boy, do I miss that girl.”
This collection of short stories offers a raw and intimate glimpse into Cookie’s life and the counterculture of the 1970s and 1980s.
Great Expectations
Kathy Acker
March 2025
Grove Press 2019 (Reissue)
Experimental Post-Modern Fiction
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An experimental postmodern fiction that disrupts narrative form while tackling themes of identity, power, and desire.
Kathy Acker was a rebel and a genre-crossing writer who frequently appropriated, reshaped, interrupted, and modified other texts to explore the intersections of sex, power dynamics, and the intricacies of language.Great Expectations is described as “Acker’s most accomplished experimental work. … As she says in Great Expectations, ‘a narrative is emotionally moving.’ It should be, but she’s one of the few people … who manage to blend that kind of warmth, gutsiness, and skill.”
—Sally O’Driscoll, Village Voice
Angela G.
“In my next life, I hope to be a book.”
Angela co-founded our Subculture Lit Book Club and formed a close-knit relationship with the team at Alienated Majesty Books.
She is an avid reader and emerging writer drawn to small press literature and stories celebrating freedom of identity. Inspired by pre-code Hollywood, post-punk art, and marginalized voices, she creates inclusive spaces where creativity flourishes.
Her eclectic favorites include Kathy Acker, James Baldwin, Basquiat, and The Cure.
Favorite Pens: Kathy Acker, Irvine Welsh, Bret Easton Ellis, Olivia Laing, Cookie Mueller, James Baldwin