Claudia La Rocco / Drive By / December 1, 2022 / 5½ x 7 inches, 48 pages
Printed by machine and bound by hand in San Francisco, California

Cushion Works is pleased to celebrate the release of Drive By, Claudia La Rocco’s new novella and Smooth Friend’s debut publication. Drive By is a homecoming story told in tumbling fragments of science fiction, art criticism, and strange encounters, anchored by La Rocco’s irreverent, humane cast of characters and resonant sense of place.

“Drive By is hot throbbing noir twisted into a mobius strip of flashing lights, unreliable narration, and polyphonic intertext. Through sea and storm, our pizzeria diva Clarice goes along with what comes along, all the while shielding a secret in her nagging past—of which, “already the details were slipping beyond her grasp.” In this distilled, unsettling novella, Claudia La Rocco writes into the mythologies of women’s lives, disentangling the violent shock of awakening. Drive By‘s glancing critique of storytelling bends memory into a wondrous bouquet of reckonings. What just happened? The last page sent me right back to the first, ready to read it all over again.”

– Maxe Crandall

Claudia La Rocco is the author of Certain Things, Quartet, The Best Most Useless Dress, petit cadeau, and Drive By. With musician/composer Phillip Greenlief and a growing cast of guest collaborators she is animals & giraffes, an experiment in interdisciplinary improvisation. La Rocco edits The Back Room, a new publishing project at Small Press Traffic.

Maxe Crandall is the author of The Nancy Reagan Collection (New York Public Library’s Best 10 Poetry Books of 2020) and founder of the poets theater company Beautiful Moments in Popular Culture. He is Associate Director of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University.

Anne Walsh is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and performer. In 2019, Cushion Works celebrated her book Hello Leonora, Soy Anne Walsh (no place press/MIT Press), a visual and written “adaptation” of Leonora Carrington’s 1950 fantastical feminist novella The Hearing Trumpet. Anne is Professor of time-based media in Art Practice at UC Berkeley.