The waterfront journals

"The briefest lives sometimes leave behind the strongest vibrations," the New York Times said of David Wojnarowicz, who, before his death in 1992, was established as a groundbreaking visual artist, writer, AIDS activist, and anticensorship advocate. He left behind a vast and varied - and incredibly moving - body of work. The Waterfront Journals is a collection of his early autobiographical fiction, much of which appears in print here for the first time.

Written as short monologues, each is in the voice of one of the numerous people he encountered in his travels throughout America in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He stumbled across his characters in bus stations, hotels, coffee shops, truck stops, and back alleys, where their interactions are less than epic, but unnervingly intimate.

They are street hustlers, hitchhikers, hoboes, truck drivers, drug addicts, and winos; each inhabited David Wojnarowicz's world at a time when he was living precariously on the streets, a time before AIDS. Wojnarowicz captures the humor and desperation and, perhaps most of all, the spirit of adventure they all shared as outsiders.