Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991), signed

• Published: Vintage Books, New York, 1991
• Edition: First edition (paperback original)
• Binding: Publisher's wrappers
• Pages: 288 pp.
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0-679-73227-6
• Signature: Signed in red ink on the title page in the year of publication.
• Condition: Near fine; pages toned, slight spine crease.

Wojnarowicz's memoir and manifesto, published by Vintage in 1991 as a paperback original, a year before he died of AIDS at thirty-seven. It moves between childhood violence, hustling in Times Square, the abandoned West Side piers, the death of Peter Hujar, his own diagnosis and the government's indifference to the epidemic, in sentences that refuse any line between private grief and politics.

At its centre is "Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell", written for the 1989 exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, whose attacks on Cardinal O'Connor and Senator Jesse Helms led the National Endowment for the Arts to withdraw its grant. It is one of the defining texts of the AIDS years and the culture wars, and it has stayed in print as a primer for each new generation of artists and activists.

Signed in red ink in the year of publication.