Harmony Korine’s talent as a writer and filmmaker has earned the approval of a wide range of audiences. His first major monograph gathers together many of his most significant projects, spanning film, writing, and art.
Korine rose to prominence after penning Larry Clark’s infamous Kids (1995) at the age of nineteen. In the years since, he has created critically acclaimed cult classics, including Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy, Mister Lonely, Trash Humpers, and Spring Breakers, as well as the lauded street-art documentary Beautiful Losers. Korine’s creative practice extends to photography, drawing, and figurative and abstract painting.
This book is the first to reflect on Korine’s career to date, and will mark his massive influence on indie culture over the past twenty years. This project aims to explore the importance of process and experimentation as well as the artist’s wide variety of creative tools such as collage and editing that help shape his ever-changing practice. An interview by film critic Emmanuel Burdeau and an essay by curator Alicia Knock trace common themes through his films and art works, exploring Korine’s interests in the surreal quality of contemporary life.

The original Ritalin kid, Harmony Korine burst on the scene with Kids, a film so gritty and unsettling in its depiction of teen life that it was slapped with an NC-17 rating and banned in some theaters across the country. In some ways, the media frenzy over the rating overshadowed the harrowing portrait of teenagers destroying their lives and the then twenty-one-year-old screenwriter who created them. "Whether you see the movie as a masterpiece or as sensationalism," wrote Lynn Hirshberg, "the movie is relentless and brilliant and extremely disturbing. It's powerful-both steel-eyed and sexy; horrifying and captivating."

Now, in this first book of fictional set pieces, Korine captures the fragmented moments of a life observed through the demented lens of media, TV, and teen obsession. Korine reinvents the novel in this highly experimental montage of scenes that seem both real and surreal at the same time. With a filmmaker's eye and a prankster's glee, this bizarre collection of jokes, half-remembered scenes, dialogue fragments, movie ideas, and suicide notes is an episodic, epigrammatic lovesong to the world of images. Korine is the voice of his media-savvy generation and A Crack-Up at the Race Riots is the satiric lovechild of his dark imagination.