Between C & D was started in 1983 by co-editors Joel Rose and Catherine Texier. Taking its name from the location of Rose and Texier's apartment where it was produced--on East Seventh Street between Avenues C and D on Manhattan's Lower East Side--the magazine provided one of the major downtown venues for new fiction of both established and emerging writers like Patrick McGrath, Dennis Cooper, Gary Indiana, Kathy Acker, Lynne Tillman, and David Wojnarowicz, to name only a few. Rose and Texier are themselves important writers of the downtown scene. Rose has written two novels: Kill the Poor and Kill Kill Faster Faster; Texier is author of the novels, Chloe l'Atlantique, in her native French, and Love Me Tender, in English. As the cover of Between C & D lists, sex, drugs, violence, danger and computers were recurring motifs throughout the life of the magazine. Rose and Texier utilized the computer technology available to them in the production of the magazine. Not only was the layout done on an Epson computer, but each issue was individually printed in their apartment on dot-matrix printers. Each issue was then individually packed into a Ziploc bag reminiscent of those used to sell drugs in the neighborhood. Rose and Texier's vision for Between C & D was to support writing that deviated from conventional norms and questioned accepted standards of literature. Thus, much of the writing featured in Between C & D focuses on the gritty underside of urban living; often shock value is employed, and the safety of middle-class standards are attacked for their underlying hypocrisy. In 1988, Penguin published an anthology of Between C & D for its Contemporary American Fiction series that included twenty-five writers chosen by Rose and Texier to represent the magazine's scope and content. The magazine stopped publication in 1990.
From the guide to the Between C & D Archive, [ca. 1983-1990], (© 2012 Fales Library and Special Collections)
