Memories That Smell like Gasoline

Author: David Wojnarowicz

Of specific Gay & Lesbian interest

Published on 22 July 2025 by Nightboat Books in the United States.

Paperback | 96 pages, colour and black & white watercolours
145 x 203 x 12mm | 184g

'Wojnarowicz is a spokesman for the unspeakable.' —New York MagazineDavid Wojnarowicz, one of the most provocative artists of his generation, explores memory, violence, and the erotism of public space—all under the specter of AIDS.

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.