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Painted Black alongside more than two dozen others some previously unpublished.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. Muellerís 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 Chloé 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 scènes—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.
