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Robert Gober
Sculptures and Installations 1979-2007


2007, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 544 pages, 30.5 x 25.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good

$380.00 - In stock -

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The monumental, and very rare catalogue raisonné of American artist Robert Gober's (b. 1954) sculptures and installations, published on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition "Robert Gober. Work 1976-2007" at Schaulager, Basel by the great Steidl publishing house with Schaulager. At 544 pages, this incredible, handsomely designed hardcover book catalogues Gober's work as he developed an iconography once beautifully described as 'The Poetics of the Drain'. It charts his journey through his heart breaking reaction to the emergence of AIDs in the New York community, whilst grappling with issues around childhood, domesticity, sexuality, victimization and religion, relative to the disenfranchised and spurned, melding the human body with the drain. The book firmly places him in the forefront of his generation of artists.

Lavishly illustrated with approximately 250 works, all of which are reproduced in large format along with behind the scenes production/studio photography and comprehensive descriptions complemented by the artist's own commentary on individual works, as well as technical information on their manufacture. With an introductory essay by Elisabeth Sussman, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, this volume remains the most exhaustive and revealing volume on Gober's oeuvre.

A highly sought after book, especially in the more collectible English edition.
Near Fine copy in VG dust jacket, light traces of wear to extremities.

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One Hundred and Fifty Years of Tragedy: Nietzsche, Art, Philosophy
Edited by Paris Lettau & Vincent Le


2026, English
Softcover, 190 pages, 20 x 12 cm

$30.00 - In stock -

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For some, Nietzsche is the prophet of hierarchy and heroism, a rallying cry against the modern herd. For others, he is the forefather of AI-driven transcendence, an oracle of posthuman futures. His thought has been twisted, worshipped, and weaponised across generations—from avant-garde artists to political extremists, from revolutionary philosophers to Silicon Valley disruptors.

In this book of essays, leading scholars dive into Nietzsche’s early vision, following the tangled, often contradictory paths of his influence: the poets he scorned, the radicals who claimed him, the scholars who tried (and failed) to pin him down. From Australian modernism to French poststructuralism, from political battlegrounds to the shifting tensions between art and philosophy, this book captures Nietzsche’s restless afterlife—revealing how, more than 150 years after the publication of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche’s thought still provokes, unsettles, and refuses to be tamed.

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Francis Bacon
Paintings


2025, English
Hardcover, 568 pages, 30 x 24.5 cm

$110.00 - In stock -

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Francis Bacon: Paintings is a collection of the complete paintings of Irish-born British figurative painter Francis Bacon. 745 illustrations. Accompanied by a curated selection of compelling quotes — from figures such as Lucian Freud, Roald Dahl and Damien Hirst — the book guides the reader through the evolution of Bacon’s distinctive aesthetic.

A master of the grotesque, Bacon created art that is both unsettling and hypnotic, repulsive and irresistible. Emerging from a turbulent inner life and the devastation of World War II, his images retain a quality of urgency that continues to resonate with contemporary audiences.

Over a career spanning more than five decades, Bacon produced almost 500 paintings, including his signature diptychs and triptychs. From his early Surrealist experiments of the 1920s to the stark, elegiac works completed just before his death, this book charts a lifetime of radical and groundbreaking artistry.

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Waystations of the Deep Night
by Marcel Brion


2020, English
Softcover, 256 pages, ‎20.6 x 13.72 cm

$36.00 - In stock -

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A canonical gem of the nocturnal fantastic, in the tradition of German Romantics such as E.T.A. Hoffmann and Novalis.

Translated by George MacLennan and Edward Gauvin, with an introduction by George MacLennan.

First published in France in the dark year of 1942, the story collection Waystations of the Deep Night remains the best-known of Marcel Brion's numerous novels and stories in the vein of the strange and the fantastic. The journeys in this volume carry the reader through the surreal vistas of an underground city that appears aboveground as a bizarre theater of facades and a fire-ravaged landscape where souls turn to ash. A young castrato sings his heart out in a lost baroque garden; a child falls under the fateful spell of an enchanted painting; a traveler in a burned-out landscape encounters the Prince of Death; and dancing cats engage in mortal combat in the cellars of an abandoned port city.

A self-declared heir of Achim von Arnim and E.T.A. Hoffmann, Brion was also an admirer of the German Romantic writer Novalis and his sequence of Hymns to the Night, but his own imaginative homages to the night are more troublingly ambiguous, possibly an indirect reflection of the dark times in which they were written.

Born in Marseille in 1895, Marcel Brion was a freelance writer and critic. In 1964 he was elected to the Académie française in recognition of both his critical and creative writing, Over the course of a long and productive career he published 20 novels, four volumes of short stories and some 68 nonfiction books covering music, art, literature, history and travel. He died in Paris in 1984.

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Furor & Mystery and Other Writings
by René Char


2011, English / French
Softcover, 558 pages, 23 x 15 cm

$52.00 - In stock -

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René Char (1907-1988) was one of France's most respected 20th century poets. Part of the Surrealist group in the late 1920's-1930's, he gradually drifted away from the group. During WWII he joined the resistance and wrote his forceful prose poems describing what he saw and experienced. This large, bilingual anthology, includes all of his well known books Feuillets d'Hypnos and Fureur et Mystere as well as a sampling of other poems and prose poems. Insightful essays are provided by Sandra Bermann, Mary Ann Caws, and Nancy Kline.

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The Complete C Comics
by Joe Brainard


2025, English
Hardcover, 200 pages, 36.2 x 22 cm

$78.00 - In stock -

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In the mid-1960s, legendary artist and writer Joe Brainard (I Remember) teamed with poets such as John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, Kenneth Koch, Ted Berrigan, and many more for these pioneering collaborative comic strips-unavailable for decades and collected here for the first time.

"PEOPLE OF THE WORLD... RELAX!"

In the creative hotbed of 1960s New York, Joe Brainard was a whirlwind. He was a maker of paintings, assemblages, collages, book covers, poetry-reading flyers, and more. But some of his most exciting work was done with his friends. In 1964, the twenty-two-year-old Brainard turned his talents to rewiring the lowly comic book form into something new and surprising. He invited his friends Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Peter Schjeldahl, Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, and others-all of them New York School poets-to collaborate with him on comics that they would write and he would draw.

The results were unlike any comics seen before. Previously available only on the rare-book market (at very high prices) but available here under one cover for the first time, the two issues of C Comics still feel as fresh as when the first page rolled off the mimeograph machine more than sixty years ago. Brainard's energetic line and joyful humor charge across every page, illustrating O'Hara's recasting of a cowboy as a mash-note-writing lover, Padgett's experiments with traditional cartoon sound effects (ROAR! GRRR! SKREE!), cameos by Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy, and heaps of Dadaesque delights.

This edition includes a foreword from Padgett and an essay by comics historian Bill Kartalopolous, who details the creation (and creators) of C Comics. A masterpiece of collaboration and spontaneity, C Comics is a testament to the vastness of Brainard's creativity and his ability to push any artistic form in a new and powerful direction.

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I Remember
by Joe Brainard


2001, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 17.3 x 11.2 cm

$30.00 - In stock -

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The American artist's much-imitated memoir, described by Paul Auster as "one of the few totally original books I have ever read."

Edited by Ron Padgett.

Joe Brainard's I Remember is a literary and artistic cult classic, praised and admired by writers from Paul Auster to John Ashery and Edmund White. As autobiography, Brainard's method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each prefaced by the refrain "I remember"

"I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad, policemen would put you in jail."

Brainard's enduring gem of a book has been issued in various forms over the past thirty years. In 1970, Angel Hair books published the first edition of I Remember, which quickly sold out; he wrote two subsequent volumes for Angel Hair, More I Remember (1972) and More I Remember More (1973), both of which proved as popular as the original. In 1973, the Museum of Modern Art in New York published Brainard's I Remember Christmas, a new text for which he also contributed a cover design and four drawings. Excerpts from the Angel Hair editions appeared in Interview, Gay Sunshine, The World and the New York Herald. Then in 1975, Full Court Press issued a revised version collecting all three of the Angel Hair volumes and added new material, using the original title I Remember.

This complete edition is prefaced by poet and translator Ron Padgett.

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The Melancholy of Resistance
by László Krasznahorkai


2002, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 19.7 x 13.4 cm

$36.00 - In stock -

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The Hungarian master’s first work to appear in English, and still one of the best. Translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes.

"This is a book about a world into which the Leviathan has returned. The universality of its vision rivals that of Gogol's Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing."—W. G. Sebald

"Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance are irresistible, unforgettable and required reading."—Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumors. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find —music, cosmology, fascism. The novel's characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender center of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found.

Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, "is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type." And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of The Guardian, "lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds."

László Krasznahorkai lives in the hills of Szentlászló. He has written five novels and won numerous prizes. New Directions also publishes his novels War and War and Satantango; another novel, Seiobo There Below, is forthcoming.

George Szirtes is a poet who was born in Budapest in 1948 and is now living in London.
His translations have won the European Translation Prize and the Gold Star Award for the Republic of Hungary.

Cover painting: James Ensor, "The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889" (detail)

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Satantango
by László Krasznahorkai


2013, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 20 x 14 cm

$36.00 - In stock -

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Now in paperback, Satantango, the novel that inspired Bela Tarr's classic film, is proof that the devil has all the good times. Set in an isolated hamlet, the novel unfolds over the course of a few rain-soaked days. Only a dozen inhabitants remain in the bleak village, rank with the stench of failed schemes, betrayals, failure, infidelity, sudden hopes, and aborted dreams. "Their world," in the words of the renowned translator George Szirtes is "rough and ready, lost somewhere between the cosmic and tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death." Into this world comes, it seems, a messiah...

"He offers us stories that are relentlessly generative and defiantly irresolvable. They are haunting, pleasantly weird, and, ultimately, bigger than the worlds they inhabit."—The New York Times Book Review

"The excitement of Krasznahorkai's writing is that he has come up with his own original forms - and one of the most haunting is his first, Satantango. There is nothing else like it in contemporary literature."—Adam Thirwell, The New York Review of Books

"Satantango is a monster of a novel: compact, cleverly constructed, often exhilarating, and possessed of a distinctive, compelling vision - but a monster nonetheless...The grandeur is clearly palpable."—The Guardian

"Krasznahorkai is alone among European novelists now in his intensity and originality. One of the most mysterious artists now at work."—Colm Toibin

"Profoundly unsettling."—James Wood, The New Yorker

"His inexhaustible yet claustrophobic prose, with its long, tight, weaving sentences, each like a tantalising tightrope between banality and apocalypse, places the author in a European tradition of Beckett, Bernhard, and Kafka."—James Hopkin, The Independent

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The World Goes On
by László Krasznahorkai


2024, English
Softcover, 311 pages, 20.4 x 13.5 cm

$36.00 - In stock -

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Winner of The Nobel Prize in Literature 2025

In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, then narrates a number of unforgettable stories, and then bids farewell (“here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me”).

As László Krasznahorkai himself explains: “Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative…”

A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveler, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, India, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on and on about the nature of a single drop of water. A child laborer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils.

“The excitement of his writing is that he has come up with his own original forms—there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature.”

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Lee Lozano
In The Studio


2026, English
Hardcover (clothbound flexi), 160 pages, 17.5 x 12.5 cm

$38.00 - Out of stock

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Focusing on the artist's daring and provocative paintings, this new publication offers a fascinating introduction to Lee Lozano's pioneering practice.

During her short but prolific career, Lee Lozano produced a body of work of striking formal breadth and complexity, ranging from expressionist figurative drawings and paintings to minimalist abstract canvases and, finally, the late conceptual works for which she become well-known. An illuminating text by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti-co-curator of 'Lee Lozano: Strike', a major survey exhibition that travelled from Turin's Pinacoteca Agnelli to Paris's Bourse de Commerce - is accompanied by a meticulous exhibition history that features a wealth of ephemera and archival material.

Remembered for her withdrawal and ultimate rejection of the art world, Lozano produced an oeuvre united by her determination to expose the ruthless division of the world into categories such as gender and to reject capitalism's demand for constant production. Capturing the unapologetic confidence and striking complexity that defined the artist's singular practice, In the Studio: Lee Lozano is an excellent resource for both newcomers and longtime admirers of Lozano's radical work.

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Stroke by Stroke
by Henri Michaux


2006, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 15.24 x 1.91 x 16.51 cm

$40.00 - In stock -

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Stroke by Stroke is a pairing of two of Henri Michaux's most suggestive texts, Stroke by Stroke (Par des traits, 1984) and Grasp (Saisir, 1979), written towards the end of his life. Michaux's ideogrammic ink drawings accompany his poetic explorations of animals, humans, and the origins of language. This series of verbal and pictorial gestures is at once explosive and contemplative. Michaux emerges at his most Zen.

"I first encountered Michaux's astonishing work in Stroke By Stroke, a physically and conceptually beautiful little book . . . Reading Stroke By Stroke, I felt invited to travel "toward greater ungraspability"—and in our uncertain times, Michaux's ease with that is deeply reassuring."—Martha Cooley, The Common

Henri Michaux (1899-1994) was born in Namur, Belgium. His travels throughout the Americas, Asia, and Africa inspired his first two books, Ecuador and A Barbarian in Asia. In 1948, after the death of his wife, he devoted himself increasingly to his distinctive calligraphic ink drawings. Averse to publicity of any sort, in 1965 he refused the French Grand Prix National des Lettres. Michaux's other works in English translation include Emergences-Resurgences (Skira, 2001), Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology (California, 1997), Tent Posts (Sun and Moon, 1997), and A Barbarian in Asia (New Directions, 1986).

Richard Sieburth's translations include Georg Büchner's Lenz, Friedrich Holderlin's Hymns and Fragments, Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary, Gérard de Nerval's Selected Writings, Henri Michaux's Emergences/Resurgences, Michel Leiris' Nights as Day, Days as Night, and Gershom Scholem's The Fullness of Time. His English edition of the Nerval won the 2000 PEN/ Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize. His recent translation of Maurice Sceve's Délie was a finalist for the PENTranslation Prize and the Weidenfeld Prize.

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June No. 1
October 1978 (Magazine)


1978, Japanese
Softcover, 25.5 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good

$80.00 - In stock -

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Rare premiere issue (October 1978) of June (magazine), the first yaoi (boys love or "BL") magazine in Japan, founded in 1978, named after the French author Jean Genet, with "june" being a play on the Japanese pronunciation of his name. An underground cult hit, June became synonymous with the BL genre, publishing male/male tanbi ("aesthetic") romances — stories written for and about the worship of idealised beauty, tragedy, and homoerotic romance between androgynous men and beautiful male youths, narratives that emphasise homosociality and de-emphasize socio-cultural homophobia, rich in decadence through the use of flowery language, baroque sexual fantasies and unusual kanji. The yaoi genre was coined by the female manga artists Yasuko Sakata and Akiko Hatsu and originated in the 1970s as a subgenre of shōjo manga, or comics for girls, influenced by the rising popularity of depictions of bishōnen ("beautiful boys"), a term for androgynous or effeminate male characters. June ushered in a new wave of — primarily female — manga artists and writers, including Keiko Takemiya, Tomomi Kobayashi, Kaoru Kurimoto, and Akimi Yoshida, and male artists such as Sadao Hasegawa, Gekko Hayashi, and Ben Kimura, publishing unsolicited manuscripts and homoerotic artworks alongside critical writings, reviews, and historical pieces, all centred around boys. Although it began typically as a genre by and for women, distinct from bara (gay manga created by men), June increasingly appealed to a gay audience, and played a significant role in the construction of a collective gay identity in Japan, alongside pioneering gay manga magazines such Barazoku, which featured many of the same artists. The June imprint ran various editions of the magazine, including the "large format" with many photos of youths and colour artworks, the popular Roman June ("Romantic June") which contained a mix of stories and manga, and Shousetsu June, and the original manga magazine.

The yaoi genre of June (also referred to as shōnen-ai "boy love") was heavily inspired by European decadent literature, philosophy, the homoerotic writings of Japanese authors Taruho Inagaki, Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, and the Bildungsroman (coming-of-age) literary genre as much as it was by pop culture and the androgyny of musicians such as David Bowie, Marc Bolan and David Sylvian, or actor Björn Andrésen's portrayal of Thaddeus in Visconti's 1971 film adaptation of Death in Venice. Early issues are be filled to the brim with lavish illustrations and comic stories, erotic fantasy fiction, photographs of "beautiful boys" (young film stars, catholic choir boys, musicians...), reviews, interviews, and essays, all rich with romantic connotations to the age of Decadence, Symbolism, and the aesthetics of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, as well as Japanese folklore.

Good—Very Good copy of this scarce early issue of June, published by Sun Publishing, Tokyo.

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June No. 2
December 1978 (Magazine)


1978, Japanese
Softcover, 25.5 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good

$80.00 - In stock -

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Issue No 2 (December 1978) of June (magazine), the first yaoi (boys love or "BL") magazine in Japan, founded in 1978, named after the French author Jean Genet, with "june" being a play on the Japanese pronunciation of his name. An underground cult hit, June became synonymous with the BL genre, publishing male/male tanbi ("aesthetic") romances — stories written for and about the worship of idealised beauty, tragedy, and homoerotic romance between androgynous men and beautiful male youths, narratives that emphasise homosociality and de-emphasize socio-cultural homophobia, rich in decadence through the use of flowery language, baroque sexual fantasies and unusual kanji. The yaoi genre was coined by the female manga artists Yasuko Sakata and Akiko Hatsu and originated in the 1970s as a subgenre of shōjo manga, or comics for girls, influenced by the rising popularity of depictions of bishōnen ("beautiful boys"), a term for androgynous or effeminate male characters. June ushered in a new wave of — primarily female — manga artists and writers, including Keiko Takemiya, Tomomi Kobayashi, Kaoru Kurimoto, and Akimi Yoshida, and male artists such as Sadao Hasegawa, Gekko Hayashi, and Ben Kimura, publishing unsolicited manuscripts and homoerotic artworks alongside critical writings, reviews, and historical pieces, all centred around boys. Although it began typically as a genre by and for women, distinct from bara (gay manga created by men), June increasingly appealed to a gay audience, and played a significant role in the construction of a collective gay identity in Japan, alongside pioneering gay manga magazines such Barazoku, which featured many of the same artists. The June imprint ran various editions of the magazine, including the "large format" with many photos of youths and colour artworks, the popular Roman June ("Romantic June") which contained a mix of stories and manga, and Shousetsu June, and the original manga magazine.

The yaoi genre of June (also referred to as shōnen-ai "boy love") was heavily inspired by European decadent literature, philosophy, the homoerotic writings of Japanese authors Taruho Inagaki, Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, and the Bildungsroman (coming-of-age) literary genre as much as it was by pop culture and the androgyny of musicians such as David Bowie, Marc Bolan and David Sylvian, or actor Björn Andrésen's portrayal of Thaddeus in Visconti's 1971 film adaptation of Death in Venice.

These early issues are filled to the brim with lavish illustrations and comic stories, erotic fantasy fiction, photographs of "beautiful boys" (young film stars, catholic choir boys, musicians...), reviews, interviews, and essays, all rich with romantic connotations to the age of Decadence, Symbolism, and the aesthetics of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, as well as Japanese folklore.

Good—Very Good copy of this scarce early issue of June, published by Sun Publishing, Tokyo.

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The Screwball Asses and Other Texts
by Christian Maurel


2025, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 17.7 x 11.4 cm

$35.00 - In stock -

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A foundational work of queer theory.

First published anonymously in the notorious "Three Billion Perverts" issue of Félix Guattari's journal Recherches—banned by French authorities upon its release in 1973—The Screwball Asses was erroneously attributed to Guy Hocquenghem when it was first published in English in 2009. This second edition of that translation, with a new preface by Hocquenghem biographer Antoine Idier that clarifies the different theoretical positions within France's Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionaire, returns the text to its true author: writer, journalist, and activist Christian Maurel.

In this dramatic treatise on erotic desire, Maurel takes on the militant delusions and internal contradictions of the gay-liberation movement. He vivisects not only the stifled mores of bourgeois capitalism, but also the phallocratic concessions of so-called homophiles and, ultimately, the very act of speaking desire. Rejecting any “pure theory” of homosexuality that would figure its “otherness” as revolutionary, Maurel contends that the ruling classes have invented homosexuality as a sexual ghetto, splitting and mutilating desire in the process. It is only when nondesire and the desire of desire are enacted simultaneously through speech and body that homosexuality can finally be sublimated under the true act of “making love.” There are thousands of sexes on earth, according to Maurel, but only one sexual desire. The Screwball Asses is a revelatory disquisition.

Introduction by Antoine Idier
Translated by Noura Wedell

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Jack the Modernist
by Robert Glück


2025, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 12.7 x 20.2 cm

$36.00 - Out of stock

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A cult classic now back in print, this novel about sex, obsession, and art is one of the defining works of 1980s gay fiction.

A classic of postmodern fiction, Robert Glück’s Jack the Modernist portrays the slow disintegration of a love affair set in the early 1980s. Bob is excited and lonely. He meets and pursues the elusive Jack, a director who is able to transform others without altering himself. Bob goes to the baths, gossips on the phone, goes to a bar, thinks about werewolves, has an orgasm, and discovers a number of truths about Jack. Out of print for decades, Glück’s paean to desire and obsession explores the everyday in an idiom both intimate and lush. Sensual as well as sensational, self-conscious, but never self-serious, Jack the Modernist is a candid and heartfelt lover’s discourse unlike any other.

“Jack the Modernist is the novel with the most information and most beauty. Glück is an extraordinary philosopher of ethics, aesthetics, and the English sentence—a thinker of the originality of William James, with the formal range of his brother Henry. This republication is cause for celebration not only because Jack the Modernist is an utter joy to read but because it calls our attention to an era-defining artist and public intellectual in our midst.”
—LUCY IVES

“In Jack the Modernist we find a testing and perfecting of language so skillful it appears to merge completely with the author’s intelligence and feelings.”
—DENNIS COOPER

“In Jack the Modernist self-exploration is so precise as to become impersonal. And some real sex at last. One is reminded of Genet and the transmutation of sex into something beyond sex. Glück even makes the disappointments, impasses, and blind alleys of love moving and interesting. He seems to say everything in a fresh way. Not since Genet have we seen such pure love of the human body and soul . . . seen as one flesh palpable as a haze.”
—WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

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Roman Poems
By Pier Paolo Pasolini


1986 / 2005, English / Italian
Softcover, 96 pages, 12.2 x 16.1 cm

$34.00 - In stock -

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The Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini was first and always a poet—the most important civil poet, according to Alberto Moravia, in Italy in the second half of this century. His poems were at once deeply personal and passionately engaged in the political turmoil of his country. In 1949, after his homosexuality led the Italian Communist Party to expel him on charges of "moral and political unworthiness," Pasolini fled to Rome. This selection of poems from his early impoverished days on the outskirts of Rome to his last (with a backward longing glance at his native Friuli) is at the center of his poetic and filmic vision of modern Italian life as an Inferno.

"From all these refusals, we know what Pasolini stood against—political ideologies of all kinds, the complacency inherent in the established social order, the corruption of the institutions of church and state. If Pasolini could be said to have stood for anything it was for the struggles of Italy's working class—both the rural peasants and those barracked in the urban slums at the edges of Italian cities—whose humanity he evoked with great eloquence and nuance. But it is his refusals that animate his legacy with an incandescent rage, a passionate and profound fury that did not, as Zigaina suggests, cry out for death—but for just the opposite." —Nathaniel Rich, The New York Review of Books

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St. Paul
by Pier Paolo Pasolini


2025, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 20 x 13 cm

$46.00 - In stock -

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Presented here for the first time in English is a remarkable screenplay about the apostle Paul by Pier Paolo Pasolini, legendary filmmaker, novelist, poet, and radical intellectual activist. Written between the appearance of his renowned film Teorema and the shocking, controversial Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, St Paul was deemed too risky for investors. At once a political intervention and cinematic breakthrough, the script forces a revolutionary transformation on the contemporary legacy of Paul. In Pasolini's kaleidoscope, we encounter fascistic movements, resistance fighters, and faltering revolutions, each of which reflects on aspects of the Pauline teachings. From Jerusalem to Wall Street and Greenwich Village, from the rise of SS troops to the death of Martin Luther King, Jr, here— as Alain Badiou writes in the foreword—"Paul's text crosses all these circumstances intact, as if it had foreseen them all."

This is a key addition to the growing debate around St Paul and to the proliferation of literature centred on the current turn to religion in philosophy and critical theory, which embraces contemporary figures such as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben.

Translated by Elizabeth A. Castelli
Preface by Alain Badiou
Introduction by Ward Blanton

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PIN–UP MAGAZINE ISSUE 6
S/S 2009


2009, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 128 pages, 28.5 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good

$150.00 - In stock -

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Rare and collectible early issue of the acclaimed 'Magazine for Architectural Entretainment', PIN–UP. Issue 6, S/S 2009, back when the print-run was surprisingly small and magazines were still fantastic.

"PIN–UP 6, Spring Summer 2009. A mid-recession tour de force. Hot fluorescent pink, green, purple, and orange. A potent mix of Meier, Wines, and Ishigami. Plus: flowers, Sylvia Lavin, and Dynasty. The last PIN–UP to be staple-bound. A must-have in any PIN–UP collection."—from PIN-UP website

Featuring:
RICHARD MEIER
The authority on all things white is one colorful character
Interview by Horacio Silva
Photography by Katja Rahlwes

DAVID KOHN
The cunning fox behind London’s new eclecticism
Interview by Caroline Roux
Photography by Devin Blair

ROY MCMAKIN
Forever blurring the makers of art, architecture, and design
Interview by Michael Ned Holte
Photography by Julika Rudelius

JUNYA ISHIGAMI
The minimalist’s darling is a nature lover at heart
Interview by Beatrice Galilee
Photography by Takashi Homma

JAMES WINES
The perpetual nonconformist has the last laugh
Interview by Michael Bullock
Photography by Miguel Villalobos

Also:
Floor plans from Dark Rooms Atlas examine the ideal architecture of gay cruising spots in Barcelona. Andreas Angelidakis tinkers with the intersection between technology and physicality, using programs like Second Life to create his playfully geometric structures. Brooklyn-based design studio labDORA fuses computer-coded design with waxy blobs. A look into Eric Lloyd Wright’s unfinished house, a sparse concrete structure perched on the summit of California’s Malibu hills. Art by Thomas Ravens juxtapose the whimsy of watercolors with images of failed utopia. PIN–UP pays homage to Dan Friedman via collage, mixing the artist’s wacky furniture with found objects. Sketches for chairs by various designers reveal the complicated and raw psychology behind creating one of the most fundamental entities of design. PIN–UP reconsiders the basic shapes of architecture via bouquets and topiary arrangements. Screenshots from Dynasty pay tribute to set designer Brock Broughton. Suleman Anaya examines the logic behind architecture’s emotional impact, both in films and in his life. Maia Morgensztern writes about the economic and cultural impact of opening a Louvre museum on the island of Saadiyat, located off the coast of Abu Dhabi. Sylvia Lavin on the impact that Richard Neutra’s windows had on reshaping postwar buildings. Paul Elliman remembers Dan Friedman and the interplay between design and contemporary art. And a look at the interactive, anamorphosis paintings of Felice Varini, who uses light projectors to paint shapes that seemingly levitate within the space.

Very Good copy, light wear.

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PIN–UP MAGAZINE ISSUE 3
F/W 2007-2008


2007, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 108 pages, 28.5 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good

$150.00 - In stock -

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Rare and collectible early issue of the acclaimed 'Magazine for Architectural Entretainment', PIN–UP. Issue 3, F/W 2007-2008, back when the print-run was surprisingly small and magazines were still fantastic.

"The power of three. PIN–UP’s third issue combines theory with architectural fun and games. An inescapable document of the late 2000s New York scene and beyond. One of PIN–UP’s few staple-bound issues. VERY RARE."—from PIN-UP website

Featuring:
JULIUS SHULMAN
The photography legend shares his love for gardening with a young Los Angeles architect
Interview by Fritz Haeg
Photography by Todd Cole

ROBERT WILSON
The artist and director reflects on the objects of his affection
Text by Horacio Silva
Photography by Todd Eberle

K/R ARCHITECTS
Straight talk with two mellowed New York modernists
Interview by Aric Chen
Photography by Disco Meisch

BALL-NOGUES & GANDALF GAVAN
East and West Coast meet on the threshold of art and architecture
Interview by Pierre Alexandre de Looz
Photography by Gandalf Gavan
Drawings by Ball-Nogues

Also:
A Thierry Mugler fashion shoot from May 1980 conjures up the irresistible dynamic of Gotham’s darker, bolder days. One last visit to Robert Wilson’s former TriBeCa loft for a glimpse at his cargo cult of collectibles. Photographer Chris Mottalini captures the “beautiful ruins” of one Paul Rudolph house in Westport Connecticut, moments before it is demolished. A look back at the work of Tony Duquette, the designer who evoked the exotic strangeness of the natural world. A two-part meditation on the “folly of ruins” — in photographs and text. Lorenz Cugini and Richard Petit provide two distinct studies of the usually veiled dialogue between chairs and bodies. Ben Widdicome examines the position of the architect in popular cinema and, by extension, society-at-large. Ted Trussel Porter investigates the influence of David Whitney on his paramour Philip Johnson’s interiors. A letter sent across the Iron Curtain by German architect Hans Scharoun to his Czechoslovakian student and collaborator Lubomir Šlapeta. Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy stage a critical conversation between avant-garde and kitsch with their installation Heidi at the Krizinger Gallery in Vienna. Some notes on play and architecture in the 1950s and 1960s by Dirk van den Heuvel. PIN–UP takes a fresh look at the aging beauty of Hong Kong’s Cultural Centre. A peek inside the VIP Suites Caracas —a n iconic landmark made over as a boutique hotel by New York architects Ashe+Leandro. Photographs by Marcelo Krasilcic invite you to imagine a scenario of your own in Steve McQueen’s recently restored Palm Springs residence. Simon Fujiwara turns the Documenta town’s ’80s civic architecture into an effervescent intervention. And photographer Adrian Gaut time-travels to Prague to recapture the creativity and forward-thinking work of 20th Century Czech theatre designers.

Very Good copy, light wear.

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James Ensor
Wildest Dreams, Beyond Impressionism


2025, English
Hardcover, 272 pages, 28 x 23 cm

$99.00 - In stock -

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English edition of this wonderful tribute to one of the fathers of international modernism, James Ensor.

James Ensor’s visionary spirit takes us on a journey through his manifold universe of still lifes, self-portraits, savage visions, carnival and satire. In the course of his career, Ensor grew into an unruly gamechanger who personally reset the rules of art. As he did so, he resolutely distanced himself from the classical European ideal of beauty and from the Impressionism that had initially fascinated him.

Ensor did not limit himself to painting – he also unleashed his passion for experiment in detailed drawings, huge collages and potent etchings. His love for the fanciful resulted in characteristically grotesque representations of countless wild dreams.

The pulse of a thrilling late nineteenth century beats through the more than two hundred works reproduced in this book. Ensor constantly surprises us with his contrasts between the comical and the macabre, the refined and the wanton, atmospheric bourgeois interiors and morbid skeletons.

Drawing on their wide-ranging expertise, fifteen authors each highlight specific facets of the Ostend artist’s developing practice to paint a fresh and comprehensive picture of Ensor’s life and work.

This publication accompanies the exhibition In Your Wildest Dreams – Ensor Beyond Impressionism from 28 September 2024 until 19 January 2025 at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA).

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HANS BELLMER
PHOTOGRAPHE


1983, Japanese
Hardcover (clothbound w. dustjacket), 152 pages, 20.5 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good

$150.00 - In stock -

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Exquisitely designed and produced book dedicated entirely to the photography of the German artist Hans Bellmer (1902—1975). Produced in French by Editions Filipacchi, Centre Georges Pompidou, and Musee National D'art Moderne in Paris in 1983, this scarce Japanese hardcover printing (produced and printed in Japan that same year) features a different cover, with translations to the Japanese language of the introductory essay and texts. A beautiful photo book densely illustrated with colour and black and white reproductions of Bellmer's infamous doll photography, his many studies of the female nude (including those of his wife, artist Unica Zürn), and rare photography of his objects and sculptural assemblages, his studio, and more, this volume captures an important Surrealist visionary and one of the most daring artists of the 20th century through his stunning photography. Features the wonderful "La Poupee" — Hans Bellmer's articulated, anatomically amorphous Surrealist doll, reconfigured and captured through Bellmer's intimate hand-painted photographic images. "La Poupee" acquired iconic status as perhaps the purest exemplification of the Surrealist ideal of "convulsive beauty." Bellmer constructed his first doll in the early 1930s. André Breton and Paul Eluard described it as "the first and only Surrealist object with a universal, provocative power".

German artist Hans Bellmer (1902—1975) was one of the most subversive artists associated with Surrealism, famous—notorious, even—for his erotic engravings, objects and photographs. Many of Bellmer's works were inspired by the literary works of Comte de Lautréamont, Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille, amongst others.

Very Good copy in VG dust jacket with light wear/light foxing.

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Mike Kelley
Timeless Painting


2020, English
Hardcover, 200 pages, 26.7 x 33 cm

$120.00 - In stock -

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Featuring paintings from series that span from 1994 through 2009, this volume traces Mike Kelley's (1954–2012) engagement with the medium through bodies of work including The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter), a series of oval-shaped paintings on wood; Timeless Painting, which marked Kelley's distinct return to painting in colour, and which he described as "mannerist take-offs on Hans Hofmann's compositional theory of ‘push and pull'"; and the Horizontal Tracking Shots series.

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Unica Zürn
Alben: Books & Sketchbooks


2009, English / German
Hardcover, 336 pages, 23 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good

$300.00 - In stock -

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First limited hardcover edition of this wonderful Unica Zürn (1916-1970) collection of artworks. Beautifully produced, profusely illustrated, and long out-of-print, this rare volume is still one of the most cherished and comprehensive collections of Zürn's artwork ever published. This lovely limited-edition survey collects together her drawings done between 1954 and 1967, 300 drawings almost all unpublished, facsimiles of her sketch-books, and reproductions of her highly-collectible artist books produced throughout her life (Hexentexte, Oracles et Spectacles, etc.), all accompanied by bibliographic information, making it a invaluable reference. Illustrated introduction by publisher Erich Brinkmann. Texts in bi-lingual German and English.

The German artist and writer Unica Zurn (1916-1970) joined the ranks of Surrealism in the 1950s, after moving to Paris and taking up residence with the German-born Surrealist Hans Bellmer. Drawn to the movement's espousal of automatic drawing and writing, Zurn pursued Henri Michaux's declaration that "the hand dreams," making a vocation of these techniques with drawings and paintings that are labyrinthine in detail, as one form sprouts out of another. Zurn has left us an account of the sensation of automatic drawing: "After an initial moment when the pen 'swims' hesitantly on the paper, she discovers the place assigned to the first eye. It is only when she is being watched from the depths of the paper that she begins to get her bearings and, effortlessly, one motif is added to another." This lovely limited-edition survey reproduces drawings done between 1954 and 1967.

The German artist and writer Unica Zürn (1916-1970) joined the ranks of Surrealism in the 1950s, after moving to Paris and taking up residence with fellow German-born Surrealist Hans Bellmer. Already an accomplished author, Zürn was drawn to the Surrealist movement's espousal of automatic drawing and writing, Zürn pursued Henri Michaux's declaration that "the hand dreams," making a vocation of these techniques with her dense, otherworldly drawings and paintings that are labyrinthine in detail, as one form sprouts out of another. Also with her experimental anagrams, natural extensions of her established interest in hidden meanings and coincidences. Zürn produced most of her oeuvre during this intensive period in the 1950s and 60s, though one marked by her deteriorating mental health. Many of her works were made during periods of hospitalisation. In 1970, Zürn leapt to her death from the balcony of the Paris apartment she had shared with Bellmer. Upon his death in 1975, Bellmer was buried, at his request, next to Zürn in Paris’s Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Their grave is marked with the words Bellmer wrote for Zürn’s funeral wreath nearly five years before: “My love will follow you into Eternity.”

Zürn has left us an account of the sensation of automatic drawing: "After an initial moment when the pen 'swims' hesitantly on the paper, she discovers the place assigned to the first eye. It is only when she is being watched from the depths of the paper that she begins to get her bearings and, effortlessly, one motif is added to another."

Very Good copy, light wear.

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