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WestWays
ECU Press
Edited by Rita McBride.
Co-published by ECU Press, Potter Press, and JRP|Ringier in the
Christoph Keller Series.
WestWays is the fifth in Rita McBride’s continuing Ways series of collaborative novels, this time with writer and climber Matthew Licht. We follow Mae West from her childhood in 19th-century Brooklyn through her adventures with W.C. Fields at the 1931 Oktoberfest to a Sapphic encounter with Leni Riefenstahl on a safari in the 1970s, picking up a fighter pilot, Salvador Dalí, and Billy Wilder for the ride. Published to coincide with the completion of McBride’s 52-meter-high Mae West public commission at Munich’s Effnerplatz, the artist’s Mae West is an actress, inflatable vest, sculpture, exhibition, and now finally a book.
Biographies
Rita McBride is a prominent American artist based in Düsseldorf, whose sculptures and installations deal with fiction and public space and often provide a set for performances and lectures. She has edited a series of books for which she invited other artists and writers to write short stories involving constraints and a relationship to the art world. Each of the books corresponds to a sub literary genre (crime novels, science fiction, romance, and self-help).