Sensitive Skin features art, writing and music, without rules or boundaries, by both famous and emerging artists, writers, and musicians from around the globe.
The junkie as iconic anti-hero is a vein that runs through the body of mid-to-late 20th-century American literature, from The Man with the Golden Arm to Naked Lunch to The Basketball Diaries. Written and set in the demimonde of Downtown Manhattan in the pre-gentrified late ‘70s to mid-80s, Dime Bag is the latest installment in that tradition. The work is a series of interconnected short stories that chronicle its god-forsaken narrator’s manic exploits: rising and falling, crashing—but never really quite burning.
“If the streets of New York could talk, they would want Vincent Zangrillo to be their voice. The smell of the match under the spoon, the voices shouting two apartments down, a sigh lost in the rush of 10 million people hustling to get through their day, these are the things Zangrillo knows, cherishes and tells. We are blessed to have his unblighted vision of the damned.”
—Tom Graves, author of Pullers and Crossroads:
The Life and Afterlife of Bluesman Robert Johnson.
“Written with unflinching vision in vivid language, Vincent Zangrillo’s Dime Bag shows us life on the streets in all its strange and radiant beauty.”
—Richard Modiano, Executive Director Beyond Baroque Literary /Arts Center
Sensitive Skin began as a print venture from New York’s Lower East Side in the 1990s, and published such literary luminaries as Richard Hell, Steve Cannon, Jack Micheline, Penny Arcade, John Farris, Eileen Myles, Lynne Tillman, Patrick McGrath, Bob Holman, Maggie Estep, Emily XYZ, Herbert Huncke and Joel Rose, with art by Andres Serrano, Ari Marcopolis, Andrew Castrucci and James Romberger, to name but a few….
Sensitive Skin was reborn in the summer of 2010, and has since presented original work by such esteemed writers, artists and musicians as Samuel R. Delaney, John Lurie, Gary Indiana, Sharon Mesmer, Charles Gatewood, Gretchen Faust, Alex Katz, Peter Blauner, Hal Sirowitz, Arthur Nersesian, Maggie Estep, Fred Frith, Evelyn Bencicova, Thurston Moore, Iggy Pop, Winston Smith, Sue Rynski, Steve Dalachinsky, Marty Thau, Justine Frischmann, Craig Clevenger, Darius James, Stewart Home, Michael A. Gonzales, Drew Hubner, Jonathan Shaw, Melissa Febos, Stephen Lack, Max Blagg, Patricia Eakins, Díre McCain, Rob Roberge, Kurt Wolf, Erika Schickel, John S. Hall, Kevin Rafferty, Elliott Sharp, Mike Hudson, James Greer, Ruby Ray, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.