Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black (Native Agents)

By Cookie Mueller

Book Overview

The first collected edition of legendary writer, actress, and adventurer Cookie Mueller's stories, featuring the entire contents of her 1990 book Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, alongside more than two dozen others, some previously unpublished.

Legendary as an underground actress, female adventurer, and East Village raconteur, Cookie Mueller's first calling was to the written word: I started writing when I was six and have never stopped completely, she once confessed. Mueller?s 1990 Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, the first volume of the Semiotext(e) Native Agents series, was the largest collection of stories she compiled during her life. But it presented only a slice of Mueller's prolific work as a writer. This new, landmark volume collects all of Mueller's stories: from the original contents of Clear Water, to additional stories discovered by Amy Scholder for the posthumous anthology Ask Dr. Mueller, to selections from Mueller's art and advice columns for Details and the East Village Eye, to still new stories collected and published here for the first time. Olivia Laing's new introduction situates Mueller's writing within the context of her life--and our times.

Thanks to recent documentaries like Mallory Curley's A Cookie Mueller Encyclopedia and Chlo? Griffin's oral biography Edgewise, Mueller's life and work have been discovered by a new generation of readers. Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories returns essential source material to these readers, the archive of Mueller's writing itself. Mueller's many mise en sc?nes--the Baltimore of John Waters, post-Stonewall Provincetown, avant-garde Italy, 1980s New York, an America enduring Reagan and AIDS--patches together a singular personal history and a primer for others. As Laing writes in her introduction, Collected Stories amounts to a how-to manual for a life ricocheting joyously off the rails . . . a live corrective to conformity, conservatism, and cruelty.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1635901669
• ISBN13: 9781635901665
• Release Date: April 2022
• Publisher: Semiotext(e)
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.4" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

One for the top 10 books list

Cookie's book is one of those 20 or so of the many books I have ever read that I really treasure and recommend to my friends unreservedly. By the end of the book you have something of an insight into this fascinating and wonderful person. I just hope it gives each new reader as much pleasure as it did me when I first read it!

THIS BOOK is AMAZING!!

wonderful book!!! every lady needs to read this! cookie mueller rules!

On the Road- Girlstyle!

I found out about this book & jumped at the chance to read it. Cookie tells some of her experiences being an underground Film star & Adventuress. I always loved Cookie in John Water's films, but I never got that chance to read her work, But Now I am a big Fan. She never whitewashes her experiences with Drugs, Sex, hippies, farming, whatever. I hope her other collections are reprinted and well distributed very soon. Meet back up with an old friend, you might not have really known, through this great collective memoir.

Like a Lost Friend

I really identified with Cookie Mueller, the author of "Walking Through Clear Water." We were born a few months apart, lived our lives travelling back and forth between coasts, probably attended events together in 60s era San Francisco, East Village, NY, etc. One thing for sure, after reading this book, I wish I had known her and feel like I did. She comes across as so alive and vibrant on the printed page, that when I learned in the "about the author" page at the end of the book that she had died of AIDS in 1989, I felt as though I had personally lost a friend. Do not let that depressing bit of information in any way dissuade you from reading her story, or to get the impression that this book is at all morbid or maudlin. This is one of the funniest accounts of life on the fringes of American culture I've read in many a moon. She has such an enagingly humorous conversational style, that even when she is describing truly horrifying scenes such as an attempted rape in the backwoods of Maryland, the effect owes more to Rabelais, than to Peckinpah. Mueller reminds me a lot of a female version of Ken Kesey. Her prose moves along with the same sort of wild energy and the incidents she describes never get bogged down in needless detail. She has great writers' instincts. She sees life in the same tragi-comic vein as does Kesey, as well. Perhaps they both had run-ins with the same Cosmic Joker, at one time or other. Whatever the personal histories, they were certainly kindred souls, who had a look at the full spectrum of humanity and were able to get their impressions down on paper in thoroughly memorable ways. This is as easy and enjoyable a read as you are likely to come across. I'm by no means a fast reader, but was able to breeze through it in just a few hours. I can unreservedly say that I couldn't put it down, and I find that rare these days. Spend a few hours with Cookie Mueller. She'll probably make friends with you, too. BEK

Part Nin, Hunter S. Thompson, Billie Holiday, Dr. Seuss

Cookie Mueller was a goddess inflamed. Her stories are hysterical, beautiful, outrageous, and heartwrenching. It's true what they say above; we're lucky she took notes.