Series V

Lost & Found Series V features Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Langston Hughes, and Jean Sénac: four major writers responding to sweeping socio-political shifts around the globe. To what extent they resist, ride, and provoke these shifts is written into their prose, poetry, manifestos, travel notes, diaries, letters, and friendships. While working at a strip club in Times Square in 1972, Kathy Acker writes Homage to Leroi Jones and other “exercises,” as part of an effort to map her “total present consciousness.” In The Travel Agency is on Fire, William S. Burroughs performs cut-ups on authors related to his personal cannon and ranging from William Shakespeare to Anthony Burgess. Across the ocean, Algerian poet Jean Sénac writes Le soleil sous les armes [The Sun Under the Weapons], a revolutionary manifesto urging for nothing short of total cultural transformation, sexual liberation, and political independence. Traveling between Moscow to Tashkent in 1932, Langston Hughes befriends, photographs, and translates the works of young poets writing in Uzbek in his travelogues, excerpted here as part of Langston Hughes: Poems, Photos & Notebooks from Turkestan. Through the publication of these varied texts, Lost & Found Series V connects the liberatory politics and radical writing practices of New York in the 1970s, France and Algiers in the 1960s, and the Soviet Union and Turkestan in the 1930s.