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The River

Harris Bauer

June 2023
Softcover, 44 pages, 8.5 x 5.5 inches
Artwork by Parker Hatley
Printed on Risograph 
Edition of 250
12 USD

About the book

The River tells the story of a newly visible stream running through a city. The insistence of the body of water becomes of extreme fascination to the narrator, who lives suspended between restlessness and routine. As the river grows, filling lakes, ponds, and cracking parking lots, both scientists and community wonder at the current’s arrival. In turn, the narrator asks no questions at all. She reverts to hypotheses and desire, her attention absorbed by the river. 

About the author

Harris Bauer is a writer and editor living between Los Angeles and Brooklyn. She has worked on editorial projects and initiatives with Wendy’s Subway, Ugly Duckling Presse, and the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, and is the editor of the monthly wine zine, Visions. Her work has appeared in American Chordata, Ginger, and Sentiments: Expressions of Cultural Passage (Press Press). With Rachel Zaretzky, she co-runs Hosting Projects, a currently dormant curatorial initiative. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts with a BFA in Visual and Critical Studies, and is currently studying archival methods around historical memory and personal collections through the MA/MLIS dual-degree program at New York University and Long Island University.

Praise

It’s not enough to tell an apocalyptic story anymore (they’re all apocalyptic). The language in which we speak the future has become part of the landscape, gone natural. And so of course, the first thing we witness the narrator of Harris Bauer’s The River doing is scrolling. But as this speculative fiction unfolds, her consciousness seeps and deepens and floods along with Alpheus, the River. By turns curious, deadpan, anxious, knowing, erotic, and elegaic, these pages are willing to admit that it will be simpler to react to the catastrophe than to wait, or pretend we’re still waiting, for its arrival. “It was all so different. But then it was the same so quickly. Then, again, different. And then, impatiently, familiar.” Bauer’s uncanny fable—it’s that, as well—loves to forget to have a moral. It’s interested, instead, in the spellbound way we go under.
—Matt Longabucco

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