[Beginning 14 July in seven weekly instalments, Temporary Culture will make available the entire text of Wendy Walker’s beautiful and dangerous book, SEXUAL STEALING (2021), a work whose timeliness is only emphasized by recent developments in the world.]
WENDY WALKER writes [13 July 2025] :
When ICE raids in Brooklyn began to appear on video, I realized I was watching “sexual stealing” in real time. “Sexual stealing” has been a constant in American history and has held center stage in our literature since the moment of its inception. Last week, as I watched people being snatched in the neighborhood called Little Haiti, while their neighbors poured into the streets to surround the ICE agents and beat them back, it suddenly became clear to me that it might help people understand these abominations better if I made my most recent book more widely available. My publisher agreed.
All I will say by way of introduction is that I adapted Michelangelo’s idea of making a sculpture as my method for composing this book. Michelangelo believed that every block of marble contains a statue hidden inside it, which only waits for the sculptor’s chisel to set it free. Certain books are like blocks of marble; they hold secret messages which sometimes cohere into shadow books. Such books resemble the shadow selves that every living person contains. They can be recovered by a writing practice that I call “reading-listening.”
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SEXUAL STEALING is an interrogation of the Gothic, slavery, and sexual exploitation. Where the authors of the first Gothic novels set their tales in worlds safely distant in time and space from the conventions of late eighteenth-century England, Wendy Walker probes the obsessions and anxieties underlying these works, and dramatizes a tale of forcible taking, the brutal exercise of wealth and power, and the revolution that follows.
SEXUAL STEALING is formally innovative, written using a simple constraint to extract a secondary, heretofore hidden text from Anne Radcliffe’s 1794 novel The Mysteries of Udolpho. Walker has also arranged selected quotations and images, chiefly from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sources, to comment upon and illuminate the newly elicited text.
As Daniel Levin Becker writes in his preface, “join it as you would an insurgency”.
SEXUAL STEALING was published on 1 September 2021 in an edition of 125 copies signed by the author. ISBN13 978-0-9961359-5-5.
Book design by Jerry Kelly. With color and black and white illustrations throughout, pictorial endsheets after a watercolor by J. B. C. Maurice. 192 pages, 7 x 10 inches, bound in red brillianta cloth with letterpress spine label. ISBN 09961359-5-2 ISBN13 978-0-9961359-5-5.
Price $200.00 (overseas add $40.00 for postage).
https://temporary-culture.com/books/sexual-stealing/#310750
PAPERBACK: ISBN13 978-0-9961359-7-9. Book design by Jerry Kelly. Color and black & white illustrations throughout. 192 pages, 7 x 10 inches. Retail price $50.00.
SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY PRICE $40 with coupon : WENDY
Distributed by LEVELLERS PRESS / OFF THE COMMON BOOKS, Amherst, Mass.
E-BOOK (pdf format): ISBN13 978-0-9961359-9-3.
Book design by Jerry Kelly. With color and black and white illustrations throughout, 192 pages. Price $15.00. Distributed by WEIGHTLESS BOOKS.
Order here: https://weightlessbooks.com/sexual-stealing/
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