Memories That Smell Like Gasoline

By David Wonjnarowicz

"Memories That Smell like Gasoline is David Wojnarowicz’s hallucinatory account of sexual craving forged from “images and indictments of a precocious adolescence” and “later adventures in the streets of New York.” His diaristic pamphlets of bruised encounters from the margins of American society feel frank and free in their achingly defiant confessional force. The four sections of this new and revised edition are interspersed with fevered black & white watercolors and drawings by the author. Towards the end of the book we read of "blue-ink tattoos or coal-scratched rubbings made in prison cells" and ponder—with the autor—"about the sense of violence carried as a distancing tool to break down the organized world." Thank you, Nightboat Books, for resuscitating these urgent and unguarded texts of radical longing."
–Herbert Pföstl

Here are David Wojnarowicz’s most intimate stories and sketches, from the full spectrum of his life as an artist and AIDS activist. Four sections—"Into the Drift and Sway," "Doing Time in a Disposable Body," "Spiral," and “Memories that Smell like Gasoline”—are made of images and indictments of a precocious adolescence, and his later adventures in the streets of New York. Combining text and image, tenderness and rage, Wojnarowicz’s Memories that Smell like Gasoline is a disavowal of the world that wanted him dead, and a radical insistence on life.

The new and revised edition features a foreword by Ocean Vuong and a note from the editor, Amy Scholder.

2025; paperback; 8" x 5"; 96 pages, b&w watercolors and drawings throughout; ISBN: 9781643622712.