World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 288 Pages, 21.59 x 14.61 cm
Published by
Grove Press / New York
$49.00 - Out of stock
From "one of the essential voices in American poetry" (New York Times) comes a rich new collection of expansive, light-footed, and cheerfully foreboding poems oddly in tune with our strange and evolving present
The first new collection since Evolution from the prolific poet, activist, and writer Eileen Myles, a "Working Life" unerringly captures the measure of life. Whether alone or in relationship, on city sidewalks or in the country, their lyrics always engage with permanence and mortality, danger and safety, fear and wonder.
a "Working Life" is a book transfixed by the everyday: the "sweet accumulation" of birds outside a window, a cup of coffee and a slice of pizza, a lover's foot on the bed. These poems arise in the close quarters of air travel, the flashing of a landscape through a train window, or simply in a truck tooling around town, or on foot with a dog in all the places that held us during the pandemic lockdowns. Myles's lines unabashedly sing the happy contradictions of love and sex, spill over with warnings about the not-so future world threatened by climate change and capitalism, and also find transcendent wonder in the landscapes and animals around us, and in the solitary and collective act of caring for one another and our world.
With intelligence, heart, and singular vision, a "Working Life" shows Eileen Myles working at a thrilling new pitch of their poetic and philosophical powers.
2023, English
Softcover, 224 Pages, 23.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$39.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Robert Leonard
Foreword by Chris Kraus
Artist, gallerist, and writer Giovanni Intra's inventive approach to art writing provides a guide to the New Zealand and Los Angeles art scenes of his era.
Everything you read about Los Angeles is true. The city adapts to its own mythology. It's such a ludicrously discussed place that I always feel slightly idiotic in my attempts to produce a serious discourse about it. Raves in the desert, however, are superb. And ecstasy is a great drug. Also, if you hadn't heard, music sounds better when you're high. And the desert surrounding LA is wondrous.—Giovanni Intra, "LA Politics"
Before his early death in 2002, Giovanni Intra enjoyed a rollercoaster ride through the art world. He was an artist and gallerist-cofounding two legendary galleries, the artist-run space Teststrip in Auckland and China Art Objects Galleries in Los Angeles-as well as a writer. Clinic of Phantasms provides a guide to the New Zealand and Los Angeles art scenes of the day, including texts on key artists from New Zealand (John Hurrell, Fiona Pardington, Denise Kum, Ava Seymour, Ann Shelton, Gavin Hipkins, Daniel Malone, and Slave Pianos) and Los Angeles (Charles Ray, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Dave Muller, Evan Holloway, John McCracken, and Julia Scher).
What makes Intra's work of enduring significance is his inventive approach to art writing, which was informed by his interest in punk, surrealism, and Daniel Paul Schreber, the famous case study in paranoia and hallucination. This volume features writing on Intra from Chris Kraus and Mark von Schlegell, Andrew Berardini, Roberta Smith, Tessa Laird, Will Bradley, Joel Mesler, and Robert Leonard.
"He emerged the radically elegant punk, whip-crack smart and charming as hell . . . The hilarious honesty and sharp intelligence of Giovanni was to me a breeze, a knife, a wonder."—Andrew Berardini, "Everything You Read About Giovanni Intra is True"
Published by Bouncy Castle and Semiotext(e).
1990, English
Softcover, 400 pages, 22.5cm x 15 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$65.00 - Out of stock
1990 English language edition of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's mighty Anti-Oedipus, published by University of Minnesota Press. With introduction by Michel Foucault.
When it first appeared in France in 1972, Anti-Oedipus was hailed as a masterpiece by some and "a work of heretical madness" by others. Anti-Oedipus was the opening explosion to the post-1968 reaction to the structuralist movement; it remains a primary text of post-structuralism. In his preface, Michel Foucault calls Anti-Oedipus an Introduction to Non-Fascist Living. He refers not just to political fascism but to the fascism that is within us, that causes us to desire our own domination. In the book, philosopher Gilles Deleuze and clinical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari set forth the following theory: Western society's innate herd instinct has allowed the government, the media, and even the principles of economics to take advantage of each person's unwillingness to be cut off from the group. What's more, those who suffer from mental disorders may not be insane, but could be individuals in the purest sense, because they are by nature isolated from society. More than twenty-five years after its original publication, Anti-Oedipus still stands as a controversial contribution to a much-needed dialogue on the nature of free thinking.
Very Good copy of this scarce earlier English edition.
1969, English
Softcover, 226 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
A. S. Barnes / USA
$20.00 - Out of stock
First 1969 edition of The Cinema of Fritz Lang by Paul M. Jensen, written in 1969, whilst Lang was still alive, although no longer making films, this gives a detailed insight into the Director's work and an indication of his influence. Illustrated throughout with black and white photographs and a full chronology of works.
Good copy.
Softcover, 112 pages, Engish
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Lorrimer / London
$25.00 - In stock -
First 1973 edition of M by Fritz Lang, of the now scarce and collectible Lorrimer Classical Film Scripts series. Illustrated throughout with film stills, with complete film script and credits of M, the classic German thriller, in which Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), a serial killer who preys on children, becomes the focus of a massive Berlin police manhunt. Beckert's heinous crimes are so repellant and disruptive to city life that he is even targeted by others in the seedy underworld network. With both cops and criminals in pursuit, the murderer soon realizes that people are on his trail, sending him into a tense, panicked attempt to escape justice.
Good copy.
1973, English
Softcover, 132 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Lorrimer / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
First 1973 edition of Metropolis by Fritz Lang (and Thea von Harbou), of the now scarce and collectible Lorrimer Classical Film Scripts series. Illustrated throughout with film stills, with complete film script and credits of Metropolis, the 1927 German expressionist science-fiction film directed by Fritz Lang and written by Thea von Harbou in collaboration with Lang, adapted from von Harbou's 1925 novel of the same name (which was intentionally written as a treatment). This influential German science-fiction film presents a highly stylized futuristic city where a beautiful and cultured utopia exists above a bleak underworld populated by mistreated workers. When the privileged youth Freder (Gustav Fröhlich) discovers the grim scene under the city, he becomes intent on helping the workers. He befriends the rebellious teacher Maria (Brigitte Helm), but this puts him at odds with his authoritative father, leading to greater conflict.
Good copy.
1984, English
Softcover, 232 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Johns Hopkins University Press / Baltimore
$25.00 - In stock -
First published in 1982. Aside from Jacques Derrida's own references to the "possible articulation" between deconstruction and Marxism, the relationship between the two has remained largely unexplored. In Marxism and Deconstruction, Michael Ryan examines that multifaceted relationship but not through a mere comparison of two distinct and inviolable entities. Instead, he looks at both with an eye to identifying their common elements and reweaving them into a new theory of political practice. To accomplish his task, Ryan undertakes a detailed comparison of deconstruction and Marxism, relating deconstruction to the dialectical tradition in philosophy and demonstrating how deconstruction can be used in the critique of ideology. He is a forceful critic of both the politics of deconstruction and the metaphysical aspect of Marxism (as seen from a deconstructionist perspective). Besides offering the first book-length study of Derrida in this context, Ryan makes the first methodic attempt by an American scholar to apply deconstruction to domains beyond literature. He proposes a deconstructive Marxism, one lacking the metaphysical underpinnings of conservative "scientific" Marxist theory and employing deconstructive analysis both for Marxist political criticism and to further current anti-metaphysical developments within Marxism. Marxism and Deconstruction is an innovative and controversial contribution to the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, and political science.
"A powerful riposte, both to Marxists who revile deconstructionism for its supposed liberal-bourgeois quietism, and to those among the current deconstructors who seem to invite that charge."—Christopher Norris, Times Literary Supplement.
G—VG copy.
1972, English
Softcover, 686 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
W W Norton & Co / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
This first 1972 edition of the leading anthology provides the essential writings of Marx and Engels -- those works necessary for an introduction to Marxist thought and ideology. The volume is arranged to show both the chronological and the thematic development of the two great thinkers. Selections range in coverage from history, society, and economics, to politics, philosophy, and the strategy and tactics of social revolution.
Friedrich Engels was born in 1820, in the German city of Barmen. He died in London in 1895 while editing the fourth volume of Capital.
Karl Marx studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, completing his doctorate in 1841. Expelled from Prussia in 1844, he took up residence first in Paris and then in London where, in 1867, he published his magnum opus Capital. A co-founder of the International Workingmen's Association in 1864, Marx died in London in 1883.
Robert C. Tucker is professor of politics emeritus at Princeton University and past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.
G—VG copy. General wear from age, light creases.
1983, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket),
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Columbia University Press / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
If Catherine Clément took to writing the Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, it was not only to reconnect with her lost youth. It was an act of fidelity. She set out to portray her own private Lacan, the figure she kept behind other people's gloss and commentary.
Catherine Clément is a French philosopher, novelist, feminist, and literary critic, born in Boulogne-Billancourt. She received a degree in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure, and studied under its faculty Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, working in the fields of anthropology and psychoanalysis.
First hc edition, 1983.
1996, English
Softcover, 400 pages, 22.89 x 15.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of California / Berkeley
$25.00 - Out of stock
Mimesis, the notion that art imitates reality, has long been recognized as one of the central ideas of Western aesthetics and has been most frequently associated with Aristotle. Less well documented is the great importance of mimetic theories of literature, theater, and the visual arts during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In this book, the most comprehensive overview of the theory of mimesis since Auerbach's monumental study, Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf provide a thorough introduction to the complex and shifting meanings of the term. Beginning with the Platonic doctrine of imitation, they chart the concept's appropriation and significance in the aesthetic theories of Aristotle, Molière, Shakespeare, Racine, Diderot, Lessing, and Rousseau. They examine the status of mimesis in the nineteenth-century novel and its reworking by such modern thinkers as Benjamin, Adorno, and Derrida. Widening the traditional understanding of mimesis to encompass the body and cultural practices of everyday life, their work suggests the continuing value of mimetic theory and will prove essential reading for scholars and students of literature, theater, and the visual arts.
Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf are Professors in the Center for Historical Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin and the authors of several works of literary and cultural criticism. Don Reneau is a translator and writer in Berkeley, California.
Very Good copy.
2023, English
Softcover, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$69.00 - In stock -
The classic, intimate memoir of the artist by Guston's daughter, with a new afterword by Mayer
Philip Guston (1913-80) is one of the outstanding figures in 20th-century American art. Beginning as a muralist in the 1930s, Guston embraced the lyrical vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism in his paintings and drawings after his move to the East Coast. Following an artistic crisis in the mid-1960s, his return to figuration—focusing first on simple things of ordinary life, later evolving to the enigmatic and iconic cartoonlike forms for which he is now best known—shook the art world.
Night Studio is a deeply personal account of growing up in the shadow of a great artist, a daughter's quest to better understand her father, based on letters and notes by the artist and interviews with those who knew him. First published to critical acclaim in 1988, this richly illustrated new edition includes a new afterword by Mayer.
Musa Mayer's first book about her father, the memoir Night Studio, was published in 1988 by Alfred A. Knopf. A lavishly illustrated new edition was published in 2016 after Hauser & Wirth took over the representation of the estate of Philip Guston from the McKee Gallery. Since her retirement from a 25-year career as a research and patient advocate for people living with breast cancer, she has curated Guston exhibitions in New York, London, Hong Kong and Los Angeles. Her second book with Hauser & Wirth Publishers, Philip Guston: Nixon Drawings 1971 and 1975, coauthored with Debra Bricker Balken, was awarded the FILAF d'Or international prize as the best international art book of 2017. Besides managing the estate of Philip Guston, Mayer is president of the Guston Foundation, whose projects include the website PhilipGuston.org, which is built around a chronology of Guston's career and exhibition history as well as catalogues raisonn s of his paintings, drawings and archives. Mayer lives in New York City with her husband, Tom.
2023, English
Softcover, 82 pages, 13.3 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Dfl Lit / Philadelphia
$24.00 - Out of stock
The Glass Abattoir is a neo-gothic novella inspired by Ingmar Bergman's 1972 film Cries and Whispers and follows the haunted trajectories of its four lead characters. Lost in a mansion of blood, three sisters and their maidservant wander through crimson rooms beneath glass clocks ticking on the walls. Both ethereal and macabre, hallucinatory and terrifyingly real, The Glass Abattoir provides a guided tour into the depths of the human soul.
2022, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 12.9 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$32.00 - In stock -
What if we could do better than the family?
We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family.
Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. It could be otherwise: in this urgent, incisive polemic, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case for family abolition.
Abolish the Family traces the history of family abolitionist demands, beginning with nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and early-twentieth century Russian family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai. Turning her attention to the 1960s, Lewis reminds us of the anti-family politics of radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and the gay liberationists, a tradition she traces to the queer marxists bringing family abolition to the twenty-first century. This exhilarating essay looks at historic rightwing panic about Black families and the violent imposition of the family on indigenous communities, and insists: only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine what might come after.
2022, English
Softcover, 140 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$40.00 - Out of stock
"Maggie understands that splatter for splatter's sake is boring. Psychopathy is boring. Coldness is boring. She's interested in feeling, and when her stories turn violent (as they frequently do), it's with a surreal emotional barbarity that distorts the entire world. You can mop up blood with any fabric. Maggie's concern is with the wound left behind, because the wound never leaves-it haunts. As a result, each of these stories leaves a wound of its own. Some weep, watching as you try (and fail) to recover. Others laugh. But never without feeling."
-B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space
2021, English
Softcover, 242 pages, 10.9 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Short Flight—Long Drive / USA
$38.00 - Out of stock
Beginning with a story of an ex sex-worker drifting through a small rural town in the south, and ending with a young woman’s wedding night, who learns from her new husband what it takes to kill a man, Nash writes across the complications of working class women, rendering their desires with visceral prose and psychologically dissecting the fundamental root that threads her work: craving and the conflicts within.
2018, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 13.72 x 21.34 cm
Published by
Dzanc Books / Ann Arbor
$33.00 - Out of stock
"Nash writes with psychological precision, capturing Lilith’s volatile shifts between directionless frustration, self-destructiveness, ambivalence, and vulnerable need. A complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
In this stunning and powerful debut, a girl with no name embarks on a fraught three-way relationship with Matt, a Satanist and a tattoo artist, and his girlfriend Frances, a new mom. The liaison is caged by strict rules and rigid emotional distance. Nonetheless, it’s all too easy to surrender to an attraction so powerful she finds herself erased, abandoning even her own name in favor of a new one: Lilith.
As Lilith grows closer to Matt, she begins to recognize the dark undertow of obsession and jealousy that her presence has created between Matt and Frances, and finds herself balancing on a knife’s edge between pain and pleasure, the promise of the future and the crushing isolation of the present. With stripped-down prose and unflinching clarity, Nash examines madness in the wreckage of love, and the loss of self that accompanies it.
"Elle Nash's Animals East Each Other is a desire map, a cartography of eros. Two women and a man weave their contradictions and obsessions and aches into one another until names, bodies, and selves dissolve and reconstitute in ways they could not have imagined. Mirrorings, doublings, triplings, and reproductions bring the right questions to the surface: who are we when we enter into love stories? Does anyone know? A heartbomb."—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan
2023, English
Softcover, 266 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$42.00 - In stock -
"Abnormal Statistics takes us on a desolate walking tour of the everyday American nightmare. Come see what’s happening behind the closed doors and shuttered windows of your neighbors, your best friends, the people you trust most. Bleak and bloody horror that’s as raw and immediate as a pile of yellowed teeth, roots and all."
—Trevor Henderson, creator of Siren Head
"A tightly written and devastating collection. Abnormal Statistics grabs the reader by the throat with each tale, from the stellar opener 'Indiana Death Song' to the harrowing 'Video Nasties.' Throughout the collection, Booth performs a sort of emotional autopsy that's impossible to look away from, even as we're handed our own viscera to hold. Horror, sorrow, fury and dark humor are woven throughout with an expert hand, and by the end, it hurt more of my feelings than I ever knew I possessed."
—Laurel Hightower, author of Crossroads and Below
Suburban decay, familial horror, bleak lullabies. Abnormal Statistics is the debut story collection from Max Booth III.
Bad times are waiting for you.
Featuring 10 reprints and 3 stories original to this collection (including a brand-new novella called "Indiana Death Song").
2021, English
Softcover, 244 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$40.00 - In stock -
"Meghan Lamb's debut novel is a marvel. It's an indelible portrait of a nearly forgotten place, full of stunted lives and desperate hopes, decaying homes and fading memories, ghostly presences brought vividly to life. It's a timely exploration of the failures that seep into our lives like slow leaks and the systems that intensify them. It's a haunted landscape made luminous by Lamb's exquisite prose."—Jeff Jackson, author of Destroy All Monsters
“Failure to Thrive captures slow collapse like nothing else I've read. It is packed with heartbreakingly acute observation, and yet it is uncrowded and spacious, with a gauzy, hallucinatory quality. Both expansive and economical, it does more with the form of the novel than most books will ever attempt. It's a gem glittering in the dark.”—Lindsay Lerman, author of I'm From Nowhere
“Meghan Lamb is such an exquisite, comprehensively intelligent, dreamy writer. Failure to Thrive exudes utmost pleasure and a defying ache from every dot of its ink, like the sun.” —Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm
Failure to Thrive follows the interconnected stories of three families as they navigate issues of disability, illness, and substance abuse in a former coal town: a landscape that is itself sick. A married couple argues over how to raise their neuroatypical child. A former nurse cares for her aging father, processing guilt over her addiction. A young man returns home after experiencing a traumatic brain injury, rediscovering a space where the past and present bleed uncannily together. Meanwhile, a two hundred-year mine fire burns beneath the town, a whispering dread that pervades the atmosphere.
Meghan Lamb is the author of Failure to Thrive (Apocalypse Party, 2021), All of Your Most Private Places (Spork Press, 2020), and Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, 2017). She recently served as the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, and has led workshops at Eötvös Loránd University, Interlochen Center for the Arts, and Washington University in St. Louis. Her work has appeared in Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, Redivider, Passages North, and The Rumpus, among other publications. She currently serves as the nonfiction editor Nat. Brut, a Whiting Award-winning journal of art and literature dedicated to advancing inclusivity in all creative fields.
2022, English
Softcover, 312 pages, 11.20 x 19 cm
First edition, 2022 Edition of 666,
Published by
Knowledge Editions / Brighton
$40.00 - In stock -
HELL'S GATES is back: HELL'S GATES REDUX. Like Francis Ford Coppola did with his untouchable 1979 masterpiece Apocalypse Now, in 2001 he added an extra 49 minutes of footage that included entire sequences cut from the original film to show even more insanity of war. HELL'S GATE REDUX collects the first two volumes of the Hell's Gates series: Hell's Gates (2018) and Hell's Gates: Notre Damned, an act of God (2019). This edition publishes both volumes together for the first time, also extra content documenting the decimation of these fraudulent unholy places of depravity and sin.
Published on the occasion to celebrate ten years of Knowledge Editions publishing and Printed Matter's New York Art Book Fair 2022 at 548 W 22nd St.
Knowledge Editions Book 36, designed by Tim Coghlan.
First edition, 2022 Edition of 666
2022, English
Softcover (w. stickers), 36 pages, 27.5 x 21 cm
First Edition of 50,
Published by
Knowledge Editions / Brighton
$30.00 - Out of stock
H.R. Giger: Heavy Metal Index, an anthology and fanzine in the truest sense, published in an edition of 50 copies by Tim Coghlan's Knowledge Editions in Brighton, Melbourne, it meticulously documents, edits and re-produces the published history of Swiss fantastic artist Hans Ruedi Giger's appearances in the pages of the popular Heavy Metal magazine, an American science fiction and fantasy comics magazine, published beginning in 1977, after the French magazine Métal Hurlant (est. 1974). All Giger's artworks are located and re-produced here from the pages of many lost issues of Heavy Metal, along with all accompanying articles and interviews re-typeset along with newly presented reference imagery throughout, all painstakingly indexed. H.R. Giger: Heavy Metal Index comes with exclusive bootleg stickers.
Published on the occasion of Printed Matter's New York Book Fair 2022 at 548 West 22nd St.
Dedicated to the loving memory of Hans Ruedi Giger.
Knowledge Editions Bootleg 11.
"A fanzine (blend of fan and magazine or -zine) is a non-professional and non-official publication produced by enthusiasts of a particular cultural phenomenon (such as a literary or musical genre) for the pleasure of others who share their interest. The term was coined in an October 1940 science fiction fanzine by Russ Chauvenet and first popularized within science fiction fandom, and from there the term was adopted by other communities."—wikipedia
2017, English
Softcover, 300 pages, 12.8 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Repeater Books / London
$30.00 - In stock -
What exactly are the Weird and the Eerie? In this new essay, Mark Fisher argues that some of the most haunting and anomalous fiction of the 20th century belongs to these two modes. The Weird and the Eerie are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties. Both have often been associated with Horror, yet this emphasis overlooks the aching fascination that such texts can exercise. The Weird and the Eerie both fundamentally concern the outside and the unknown, which are not intrinsically horrifying, even if they are always unsettling. Perhaps a proper understanding of the human condition requires examination of liminal concepts such as the weird and the eerie. These two modes will be analysed with reference to the work of authors such as H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Wells, M.R. James, Christopher Priest, Joan Lindsay, Nigel Kneale, Daphne Du Maurier, Alan Garner and Margaret Atwood, and films by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer and Christoper Nolan."
2007, English
Softcover, 576 pages, 12.9 x 19.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Continuum / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
"Being and Event" is the centrepiece of Alain Badiou's oeuvre; it is the work that grounds his reputation as one of France's most original philosophers. Long-awaited in translation, "Being and Event" makes available to an English-speaking readership Badiou's groundbreaking work on set theory - the cornerstone of his whole philosophy. This book makes the scope and aim of Badiou's whole philosophical project clear, enabling full comprehension of Badiou's significance for contemporary philosophy. In "Being and Event", Badiou anchors this project by recasting the European philosophical tradition from Plato onwards, via a series of analyses of such key figures as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Rousseau, and Lacan. He thus develops the basis for a history of philosophy rivalling those of Heidegger and Deleuze in its depth. This wide-ranging book is organised in a precise and novel manner, reflecting the philosophical rigour of Badiou's thought. Unlike many contemporary Continental philosophers, Badiou - who is also a novelist and dramatist - writes lucidly and cogently, making his work accessible and engaging.
This English language edition includes a new preface, written especially for this translation. "Being and Event" is essential reading for Badiou's considerable following and anyone interested in contemporary Continental philosophy.
Fine copy.
2014, English
Softcover, 536 pages, 11.5 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Merve Verlag / Berlin
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$69.00 - Out of stock
Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.
The term was coined to designate a certain nihilistic alignment of theory with the excess and abandon of capitalist culture, and the associated performative aesthetic of texts that seek to become immanent to the very process of alienation. Developing at the dawn of contemporary neoliberal consensus, the uneasy status of this impulse, between subversion and acquiescence, between theoretical purchase and aesthetic enjoyment, constitutes the core problematic of accelerationism.
Since the 2013 publication of Williams's and Srnicek's #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, the term has been adopted to name a set of new theoretical enterprises that aim to conceptualise non-capitalist futures outside of traditional marxist critiques and regressive, decelerative or restorative solutions.
#Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and anonymous units like CCRU and SWITCH, across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, Terminator and Bladerunner) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike.
On either side of this largely unexplored central sequence, the book includes texts by Marx that call attention to his own 'Prometheanism' and key works from recent years document the recent extraordinary emergence of new accelerationisms steeled against the onslaughts of neoliberal capitalist realism, and retooled for the twenty-first century.
At the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this disputed, problematic term, #ACCELERATE activates a historical conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment and Kapital. This is a legacy shot through with contradictions, yet urgently galvanized today by the poverty of 'reasonable' contemporary political alternatives.
Contents
ANTICIPATIONS
Karl Marx - Fragment on Machines
Samuel Butler - The Book of The Machines
Nikolai Fyodorov - The Common Task
Thorstein Veblen - The Machine Process and the Natural Decay of the Business Enterprise
FERMENT
Shulamith Firestone - On the Two Modes of Cultural History
Jacques Camatte - Decline of the Capitalist Mode of Production or Decline of Humanity?
Gilles Deleuze + Félix Guattari - The Civilized Capitalist Machine
Jean-François Lyotard - Energumen Capitalism
Gilles Lipovetsky - Power of Repetition
JG Ballard - Fictions of All Kinds
CYBERCULTURE
Nick Land - Circuitries
Nick Land + Sadie Plant - Cyberpositive
Iain Hamilton Grant - LA 2019: Demopathy and Xenogenesis
CCRU - Cybernetic Culture
CCRU - Swarmachines
ACCELERATION
Mark Fisher - Terminator vs Avatar
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams - #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics
Antonio Negri - Reflections on the Manifesto
Tiziana Terranova - Red Stack Attack!
Luciana Parisi - Automated Architecture
Patricia Reed - Seven Prescriptions for Accelerationism
Reza Negarestani - The Labour of the Inhuman (Extended Mix)
Benedict Singleton - Maximum Jailbreak (Extended Mix)
Ray Brassier - Prometheanism and its Critics
Nick Land - Teloplexy: Notes on Acceleration
Diann Bauer - 4xAccelerationisms
2022, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 14 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Zero Books / UK
$42.00 - In stock -
This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carre, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others. THIS BRAND NEW EDITION FEATURES A NEW INTRODUCTION BY MATT COLQUHOUN AND NEW AFTERWORD BY SIMON REYNOLDS.