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:
BOOKSHOP CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10.
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED AND WILL BE PROCESSED AFTER NOV 10.
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.
2022, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 21 x 28 cm
$33.00 - Out of stock
Issue 4 of new literary journal from New York City, Forever Magazine, with contributions by Aaron Jupin, Alex Lee Moyer, Andrew Ross, Anna Delvey, Anna Dorn, Barry Hazard, Benjamin Lederach Styer, Brett3333333, Cakesforsport, Canyon Castator, Clara Debray, Dagmar Stap, Dave Singley, Dayton Castleman, Dragon Fleye, Eileen Myles, Erli Grünzweil, Gabriel Smith, Garielle Lutz, Hanah Lilith Assadi, Harris Rosenblum, Hayden Williams, Hiroshi Sato, Ida Newgarden, Izzy Lawrence, Jason Sebastian Russo, Jake Hanrahan, Jasmine Johnson, Johnny Dean Mann, Jordan Castro, Julian Glander, Kate Zambreno, Keegan Swenson, Line Hachem, Maggie Dunlap, Mariam Wo Ching, Matthew Davis, Matthew Gasda, Matthew Palladino, Max Tullio, Nate Sloan, Nichole Shinn, Noa Ironic, nomemene, Paul Dalla Rosa, Petra Cortright, Sean Thor Conroe, Sierra Armor, Sophie Vickers, Sheila Heti, Stephanie H Shih, Steve Anwyll, Taylor Carpenter, Tom Allen, Tom Keelan, Wenjing Yang, Zoe Stone-Molloy...
Edited by Madeline Cash, Anika Levy
Design by Nat Ruiz
2023, English
Softcover, 560 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Inventory Press / New York
$62.00 - Out of stock
“This invaluable research tool will hugely expand, update, and perhaps even revolutionize the feminist discourse. It might even be considered a work of conceptual art in itself."—Lucy R. Lippard, author of Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972
The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor and researcher Mindy Seu, it includes more than 1000 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art.
When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.
“You can use it as a reference, follow a thread, or just access it at random and it delivers wit and wisdom from over three decades of one of the most politically and intellectually challenging movements of our era. What happens between sexed flesh and gendered tech? More than ever we all need to know."—McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto
Contributors include: Skawennati, Charlotte Web, Melanie Hoff, Constanza Pina, Melissa Aguilar, Cornelia Sollfrank, Paola Ricaurte Quijano, Mary Maggic, Neema Githere, Helen Hester, Annie Goh, VNS Matrix, Klau Chinche / Klau Kinky and Irina Aristarkhova.
1971, English
Softcover, 52 pages, 18 x 12 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Olympia Press / Paris
$280.00 - In stock -
Rare 1st Olympia Press UK edition of S.C.U.M by Valerie Solanas.
SCUM Manifesto is a legendary radical feminist manifesto by Valerie Solanas, first published in 1967 as a mimeographed edition of 2,000 copies. It argues that men have ruined the world, and that it is up to women to fix it. To achieve this goal, it suggests the formation of SCUM, an organization dedicated to overthrowing society and eliminating the male sex. The Manifesto was little-known until Solanas attempted to murder Andy Warhol by shooting him at The Factory in 1968. This event brought significant public attention to the Manifesto and Solanas herself.
This edition was published when legendary French publisher Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press briefly relocated to Britain and came out the year Solanas’ left prison for attempted murder.
With a foreword by publisher Maurice Girodias and an introduction by radical feminist critic and essayist, Vivian Gornick.
VG copy with some splitting to spine (not to binding), cover wear, light creasing to back cover. Internally crisp copy.
2015, English
Softcover (letterpress boards), 93 pages, 11.1 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Univocal Publishing / Minneapolis
$52.00 - In stock -
Limited letterpress edition.
In Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, Quentin Meillassoux addresses the problem of chaos and of the constancy of natural laws in the context of literature. With his usual argumentative rigor, he elucidates the distinction between science fiction, a genre in which science remains possible in spite of all the upheavals that may attend the world in which the tale takes place, and fiction outside-science, the literary concept he fashions in this book, a fiction in which science becomes impossible. With its investigations of the philosophies of Hume, Kant, and Popper, Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction broadens the inquiry that Meillassoux began in After Finitude, thinking through the concrete possibilities and consequences of a chaotic world in which human beings can no longer resort to science to ground their existence. It is a significant milestone in the work of an emerging philosopher, which will appeal to readers of both philosophy and literature.
Translated by Alyosha Edlebi.
The text is followed by Isaac Asimov's essay "The Billiard Ball."
2015, English
Softcover (letterpress boards), 214 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Univocal Publishing / Minneapolis
$55.00 - In stock -
Limited letterpress edition.
Those who are mad like Antonin Artaud, are they just as mad as he was? Madness, like the plague, is contagious, and everyone, from his psychiatrists to his disciples, family, and critics, everyone who gets close to Artaud, seems to participate in his delirium. Sylvere Lotringer explores various embodiments of this shared delirium through what Artaud called "mental dramas"-a series of confrontations with his witnesses or "persecutors" where we uncover the raw delirium at work, even in Lotringer himself. Mad Like Artaud does not intend to add one more layer of commentary to the bitter controversies that have been surrounding the cursed poet's work since his death in 1948, nor does it take sides among the different camps who are still haggling over his corpse. This book speaks of the site where "madness" itself is simmering.
Translated by Joanna Spinks.
2021, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
Published by
Cabinet Gallery / London
Plea / UK
$26.00 - Out of stock
Anti-ligature rooms are designed to protect the inhabitants from themselves. Cells that work to prevent us from any agency in the biggest, grandest sense. A room full of paintings that won't let you kill yourself. ANTI-LIGATURE ROOMS by Contemporary Art Writing Daily is an attempt to retexturize a world – a world streamlining a smoother digestion of us, of our resources and our art. Fear for an art that is affective palliative to an experience that's just generally bad.
Contemporary Art Writing Daily (www.artwritingdaily.com) is an author project. It has been described as “a black eye in the face of contemporary criticism.” Since 2014, it has contributed texts to numerous exhibitions and publications, including the Venice Biennale, CCS Bard, Isabella Bortolozzi, SPIKE, and Provence Magazine. Contemporary Art Writing Daily is represented by Cabinet, London.
ANTI-LIGATURE ROOMS is a co-publication by Plea and Cabinet, London. Plea is an occasional press based in Copenhagen specialising in poetry, commentary and fiction. Plea is run by Ed Atkins and Pablo Larios.
"My colleagues tell me I should start calling collectors on the phone to talk sales. Should I just read them passages from this book? Because otherwise what am I saying about art they’re not looking at?"–––Bridget Donahue
"For some years, Contemporary Art Writing Daily has been publishing some of the best art criticism — the only arts writing worth reading? – on their eponymous website. With this book, they frame their feelings in a way that approximates literature, but only to the degree that the site approximates journalism. It’s just as biting and prickly, longing and melancholic, fragmented, confusing, and ambiguous."–––Seth Price
"How might aesthetics be rethought at the level of the plastic and gastric forces that swamp human experience from all sides? In the human mouth with its 600 bacterial strains, in the fecal ooze of suburban asphalt, in the controlled hallucination of screen- space...a splenetic, spellbound sort of treatise-fable announces the posthuman destiny of art."–––John Kelsey
"This is a work of hostile inventiveness, a book of gleeful anxiety, of immanence. It is itself a product of the rubbled tautology of culture’s symbolist milkshake, a maniacal light shone down into semiotics’ intestinal dungeon. We insatiable readers bark at it, gulp into it, taking our places on the giddy train of consumed content and excreted meaning – fantastical, murderous, pharmaceutical. Anti-Ligature Rooms punches the mouth, then kisses it better, electrifying a taste for systems at their point of collapse. This is a sequence of writing that knits the mad particles of material information into theory that both wounds and is a piercing act of precision. In our world where image is a meta-event, Contemporary Art Writing Daily is a critical cauldron, with bile and dust its grinning gastric avatars."–––Helen Marten
"I have no idea what an Anti-Ligature Room might be, but the greatest advances in culture, or at least the most thrilling ones to me, are those that basically ask: If I learn the language of whatever this thing is, what will it reveal that at present I’m completely unaware of? Knock, knock. Open up, I’m coming in."–––Mark Leckey
2020, English
Softcover, 310 pages, 13.8 x 21 cm
Published by
Black Cat / New York
$33.00 - Out of stock
"Scarified sensibility, subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like no other I know."—New York Times Book Review
The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, Kathy Acker's debut and the first in this three-novel collection, began as an episodic handmade pamphlet that Acker mailed out to influential writers and artists whose addresses she managed to get her hands on. In the novel, Acker steps into the biography of a Mississippi murderess who falls in love with a famous lawyer, and mixes in fragments from porn, historical romance, pulp fictions, and The Story of O. Collect with her second novel, the dreamy exploration of desire I Dreamt I was a Nymphomaniac, and her third, The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, Portrait of an Eye is dive into the frenzy of sexual wanting, the search for identity, and the invention of a new literary language.
"Now with an introduction by Kate Zambreno contextualizing the resurrection of these three early Acker novels, this new edition of Portrait of an Eye reminds us of all there is still to learn from Kathy Acker, a writer and artist whose work remains radical and uncanny, entirely inimitable, a smash and grab on the history of literature"—Guardian
2023, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 12.7 x 21.6 cm
Published by
McNally Editions / US
$36.00 - Out of stock
A noir tour-de-force set in the world of hustlers from "one of America's darkest and funniest chroniclers."—The Guardian
It's New York City, 1981, and everyone wants to be at the Emerson Club, from Cindy Crawford to Cindy Adams; from Famous Roger, one-time lion of the talk shows, to Sandy Miller, the “downtown” writer with the tattoos and the leather; from Lauren Hutton to the art star who does the thing with the broken plates. Everyone, that is, except Danny. Danny just works there, waiting tables to put himself through architecture school, turning tricks on the side. And when he’s not on the clock, he’s recording the sexual, aesthetic, and financial transactions that make up his life, in gruesome detail. But even a clever boy like Danny can wind up on the menu. Blinded by love for his fellow rent boy, Chip—as gorgeous as he is reckless—Danny is about to learn that there’s more than one way to turn your body into cash, and that cynicism is no defense when the real scalpels come out. A gimlet-eyed crime novel with an inventively filthy mind, Rent Boy is Gary Indiana at his most outrageous—and his best.
Gary Indiana is the author of the novels Horse Crazy, Gone Tomorrow, Do Everything in the Dark, and the acclaimed “true crime” trilogy made up of Resentment, Three-Month Fever, and Depraved Indifference. He has also published a memoir, I Can Give You Anything but Love; a collection of art criticism, Vile Days; and Fire Season: Selected Essays.
1995, English
Softcover, 312 pages, 11.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$34.00 - In stock -
Borrowing its name from the notorious ’60s Ed Sanders magazine, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, the editors have figured a way to rehone its countercultural and frictional stance with style and aplomb. A unique and provocative anthology of lesbian writing, guaranteed to soothe the soulful and savage the soulless.
Edited by Eileen Myles and Liz Kotz.
Contributors:
Tanya Barfield, Dodie Bellamy, Adele Bertei, Lisa Beskin, Rebecca Brown, Kelly Cogswell, Dominique Dibbell, Shannon Ebner, Laura Flanders, Eliza Galaher, Marilyn Hacker, Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Joan Larkin, Myra Mniewski, Honor Moore, Cynthia Nelson, Madeline Olnek, Nancy Redwine, Julie Regan, Annie Reid, Danine Ricereto, Camille Roy, Sapphire Joan Schenkar, Kathy Lou Schultz, Lucy Sexton, Linda Smukler, Pamela Sneed, Christina Sunley, Carmelita Tropicana, Laurie Weeks, Debra Weinstein, Joe Westmoreland, Millie Wilson, Linda Yablonsky.
Eileen Myles, named by BUST magazine “the rock star of modern poetry,” is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including Chelsea Girls, Cool for You, Sorry, Tree, and Not Me (Semiotext(e), 1991), and is the coeditor of The New Fuck You (Semiotext(e), 1995). Myles was head of the writing program at University of California, San Diego, from 2002 to 2007, and she has written extensively on art and writing and the cultural scene. Most recently, she received a fellowship from the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Foundation.
Liz Kotz teaches in the Art History Department at the University of California, Riverside.
2022, English
limited-edition 3-part zine, 29 x 38 cm
Published by
Red3licte / UK
$65.00 - In stock -
Red3licte is a creative collective whose first project, Collage Couture for a Good Cause, turns existing garments into new ones to benefit Hope for the Young, a London based charity which provides financial support, mentoring and advocacy to young refugees arriving in the UK.
Accompanying a 150-piece fashion collection made from upcycled pieces, is this limited-edition 3-part zine. Featuring contributions from Paloma Elsesser, Sharna Osbourne, Matty Bovan, Thistle Brown, Raine Trainor, Nell Kalonji and Emma Wyman, it is an optimistic look at fashion recontextualising previously loved items through a surreal and fun lens. A soup, a swirl and a true salade of ideas.
All of the purchase price of ReD3licte’s magazine and clothing will go to Hope for the Young.
2017, English
Softcover, 299 pages, 13.5 x 19.5 cm
Published by
Twisted Spoon Press / Prague
$40.00 - In stock -
I Burn Paris has remained one of Poland's most uncomfortable masterstrokes of literature since its initial and controversial serialization by Henri Barbusse in 1928 in L'Humanité (for which Jasieński was deported for disseminating subversive literature). It tells the story of a disgruntled factory worker who, finding himself on the streets, takes the opportunity to poison Paris's water supply. With the deaths piling up, we encounter Chinese communists, rabbis, disillusioned scientists, embittered Russian émigrés, French communards and royalists, American millionaires and a host of others as the city sections off into ethnic enclaves and everyone plots their route of escape. At the heart of the cosmopolitan city is a deep-rooted xenophobia and hatred — the one thread that binds all these groups together. As Paris is brought to ruin, Jasienski issues a rallying cry to the downtrodden of the world, mixing strains of "The Internationale" with a broadcast of popular music.
With its montage strategies reminiscent of early avant-garde cinema and fist-to-the-gut metaphors, I Burn Paris has lost none of its vitality and vigor. Ruthlessly dissecting various utopian fantasies, Jasienski is out to disorient, and he has a seemingly limitless ability to transform the Parisian landscape into the product of disease-addled minds. An exquisite example of literary Futurism and Catastrophism, the novel presents a filthy, degenerated world where factories and machines have replaced the human and economic relationships have turned just about everyone into a prostitute. Yet rather than cliché and simplistic propaganda, there is an immediacy to the writing, and the modern metropolis is starkly depicted as only superficially cosmopolitan, as hostile and animalistic at its core.
This English translation of I Burn Paris fills a major gap in the availability of works from the interwar Polish avant-garde, an artistic phenomenon receiving growing attention with recent publications such as Caviar and Ashes.
Translated from the Polish by Soren A. Gauger & Marcin Piekoszewski
Artwork by Cristian Opriș
"In Soren Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski’s translation, Jasieński’s description of a contagion infecting, paralyzing, and eviscerating a large metropolis is vivid, and now feels darkly prophetic."—Pasha Malla, The New Yorker
1990, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 128 pages, 24 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Magazine House / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of stock
Published in 1990, To Winter — Tokyo: A City Heading For Death is a beautiful, sentimental book of photographs taken in 1989 by Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki — a "homage to all living and perishing things taken while staring at the shadow of death approaching Mrs. Yōko". Yōko Araki was Nobuyoshi's wife who was hospitalised during the period these photos were taken in 1989 and died of ovarian cancer in January 1990. Araki captures the deep emotions and unconsciousness of the ever-changing city of Tokyo, through its public and most private lives. Also, at this time, buildings are being built in rapid succession and the landscape of Tokyo known to Araki, who grew up in the downtown area, was being lost. "This is a sentimental photo book that shows the death of my wife and the death of the city." From the afterword by Japanese author Toshiharu Itō, "To Winter and its sensuous undulations remind us that we all must join the procession of the dead, that we all are on the train heading for death. The flow of the photographs makes us recall the life of the dead in the landscape of the living. The father raged, the mother laughed, the wife wept.... Here, there, everywhere the dead are coming down. All kinds of thoughts pass through the mind in a frenzied dance. Those moments of life burst into the memory like stars. And all of us, every one, become shadows. Where else but photographs could tell us this? To Winter is perhaps a reminder of this very fact."
Text in English and Japanese.
Very Good copy.
2022, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 12.4 x 17.3 cm
Published by
Transit Books / Oakland
$35.00 - Out of stock
"It is rare to find a writer who can take such candid pleasure in beauty—the beauty of faces, figures, clothing, and cities—while also querying its injustices. To watch Godard's films through Joanna Walsh's eyes is to see envy and appreciation, longing and disavowal, walking hand in hand. This book is a gorgeous complex gesture of criticism."—Merve Emre, author of The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway
As Joanna Walsh watches the films of Jean-Luc Godard, she considers beauty and desire in life and art. “There’s a resistance, in Godard’s women,” writes Walsh, “that is at the heart of his work (and theirs).” She is captivated by the Paris of his films and the often porous border between the city presented on screen and the one she inhabited herself. With cool precision, and in language that shines with aphoristic wit, Walsh has crafted an exquisitely intimate portrait of the way attention to works of art becomes attention to changes in ourselves. Taut and gem-like, My Life as a Godard Movie is a probing meditation by one of our most observant writers.
Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer, artist and arts activist. The author of eleven books, including Hotel, Vertigo, Worlds from the Word's End Break*up, and Girl Online, she also writes for performance, visual art and digital narrative, often working with programming and AI. She is a UK Arts Foundation fellow, and the recipient of the Markievicz Award in the Republic of Ireland. She founded and ran #readwomen (2014-18), described by the New York Times as “a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers” and currently runs @noentry_arts.
My Life as a Godard Movie is part of the Undelivered Lectures series.
“Joanna Walsh is fast becoming one of our most important writers.”—Deborah Levy, author of Real Estate
Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of seven books, including Hotel, Vertigo, Worlds from the Word's End and Break*up, she has two new projects with Verso, Girl Online and On Screens (coming 2023). She also works as a critic, editor, teacher and arts activist.
1992, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 14 x 20.6 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
“Truly this is the best How To book I’ve read in years. Bernadette Mayer makes a various world of real people in real times and places, a fact of love and loving use. She has impeccable insight and humor. She is a consummate poet no matter what’s for supper or who eats it. Would that all genius were as generous.” – Robert Creeley
Be strong Bernadette
Nobody will ever know
I came here for a reason
Perhaps there is a life here
Of not being afraid of your own heart beating
Do not be afraid of your own heart beating
Look at very small things with your eyes
& stay warm
Bernadette Mayer (born May 12, 1945) is an American poet, writer, and visual artist associated with both the Language poets and the New York School. Mayer's record-keeping and use of stream-of-consciousness narrative are two trademarks of her writing. In addition to the influence of her textual-visual art and journal-keeping, Mayer's poetry is widely acknowledged as some of the first to speak accurately and honestly about the experience of motherhood. Mayer edited the journal 0 TO 9 with Vito Acconci and published 6 issues full of content by artists including Robert Barry, Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, John Giorno, Dan Graham, Michael Heizer, Kenneth Koch, Sol LeWitt, Jackson Mac Low, Harry Mathews, Adrian Piper, Bern Porter, Yvonne Rainer, Jerome Rothenberg, Aram Saroyan, Robert Smithson, Alan Sondheim, Hannah Weiner, and Emmett Williams. From 1978 to 1984 Mayer co-edited United Artists books and magazine with her then-partner Lewis Warsh. United Artists published some of the most significant books of Mayer's peers, in addition to several of her own volumes. Mayer taught at the New School for Social Research, where she earned her degree in 1967, and, during the 1970s, she led a number of workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York. Writers who attended or sat in on her workshops included Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, John Giorno, and Anne Waldman. From 1980 to 1984, Mayer served as director of the Poetry Project. Her influence in the contemporary avant-garde is felt widely. In 2016, her career was summarized as an instruction in "how to reject any model of poetry that requires perfection and uptight isolation."
2014 / 2015, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 13 x 13 cm
Published by
kiddiepunk / Paris
$35.00 - Out of stock
After a couple of years out of print, Thomas Moore's stone-cold classic "Skeleton Costumes" returns with a new printing.
Thomas Moore's stunning 2014 book "Skeleton Costumes" saw the writer's work stripped down to its most raw and effecting form yet. Now "Skeleton Costumes" returns with a new printing of its 2015 expanded edition which includes an additional 30 poems in the form of a haunting new section titled "No One Will Ever Find You". Skinned of any extraneous flesh, the simplicity of these pieces bely their emotional impact and visceral depth. These short stabs and sharp explosions of verse accumulate to create an unconventional and, at times, harrowing narrative that investigates fear, lust and an abandonment of moral codes.
"In his latest poetry collection, 'Skeleton Costumes', Thomas Moore takes the hideously beautiful and stretches it out into a pockmarked skin that enfolds his reflections on death, loneliness, fear and alienation. Like his lapidary 2011 novella, 'Graves', this new work is mostly populated by desperate youths who find themselves violently exploited by predatory adults or who are determined to end their own lives in grisly and courageous ways. 'Skeleton Costumes' is slighter and much more intense than the earlier work however, comprising 151 evocative haikus — tiny, delicate, and evanescent as eyelashes that appear unannounced on bright white pages."—Diarmuid Hester
2018 / 2021, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
Published by
kiddiepunk / Paris
$35.00 - Out of stock
In his first book of poems in four years, “When People Die” finds Thomas Moore sharpening his distinctive voice to present a piercing collection of damaged and hyperemotional texts. Structured into three distinct sections, the reader is able to see the shape of the poems change as the form is pulled, tightened and then released into new shapes, with sex, death, paranoia and confusion warped into increasingly sparse and fragile sculptures.
Second printing, larger format on white paper.
2013, English
Softcover, 166 pages, 14 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Queer Mojo / US
$33.00 - Out of stock
Told through the eyes of a nameless teenage boy, A Certain Kind of Light sees the narrator attempt to find some kind of cohesion in a life from which he feels increasingly disconnected. As his family, friendships, sexuality and even his taste in music and pornography begin to feel distant from him, his alienation expands. The things that once meant everything to him are stripped of an essence he begins to doubt they ever had. He fixates on a profile of a boy that he finds on the Internet, projecting illusory ideas upon a person that he has never met but feels a profound intimacy with. Feeling more and more lost, he attempts to work out the connection between a disparate set of coincidences, objects and events: a dead, mangled bird, the funeral of his best friend’s father, a horrific experience with LSD, obsessive sexual fantasies and the disintegrating suburban life in which he was raised. Intensely emotional and disorientating, A Certain Kind of Light focuses on the intricacies of confusion.
“Thomas Moore is one of my very favorite contemporary fiction writers. His first novel A Certain Kind of Light is easily the most extraordinary, momentous work yet by this singular and sublime wordsmith.” —Dennis Cooper
2016, English
Softcover, 86 pages, 14 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Queer Mojo / US
$29.00 - Out of stock
Taking place across a mutating set of darkrooms, art galleries, blank apartments and bedrooms; In Their Arms is an acute inspection of loneliness, desire and confusion.
The narrator attempts to simultaneously find himself and become lost completely in a world of sex, internet hook-ups, drugs and pleasure.
Within the arms of nameless and unknown lovers, a strange, often conflicted spirituality is hinted at. In Thomas Moore’s second novel, he uses a deft and purposely layered prose to create a grey area of illusions and smokescreens, where needs and fears entwine, often becoming the same thing.
In Their Arms is a disturbingly seductive assault from one of the most exciting new voices in experimental fiction.
2017, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 21 x 14.85 cm
Published by
kiddiepunk / Paris
$59.00 - Out of stock
A reprint of Kiddiepunk's first-ever anthology, "Kiddiepunk Collected 2011-2015" presents ten out-of-print and sought-after Kiddiepunk publications in one 288-page volume. Included are works by Peter Sotos, Dennis Cooper, Thomas Moore, O.B. De Alessi, Scott Treleaven, Michael Salerno, Ken Baumann and Steven Purtill.
Once again out-of-print, limited stock!
1999, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 24 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
The Tears Corporation / London
$45.00 - In stock -
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) remains the most inspirational, provocative and challenging figure in world-wide contemporary culture. His trajectory extends from the Surrealist movement, to the Theatre of Cruelty, to the lunatic asylums of France, and finally back to Paris and the most astonishing period of his work.
For the first time, the book gives a full and authoritative account of Artaud's film projects, and his conception of Surrealist cinema. It examines his unique series of drawings of the fragmented human body, begun in the ward of a lunatic asylum and finished in a state of furious liberation. Finally, the book captures Artaud's ultimate experiment with the screaming body in the form of his censored recording To Have Done With The Judgement Of God - an experiment which is unprecedented in the history of art, and which ultimately decimates that history.
The Screaming Body is an essential resource and inspiration for those engaged in creating the definitive culture of our time, in film, art, music and writing.
Very Good copy, light wear.
2013, English
Softcover (staple-bound, die-cut cover), 32 pages, 23 x 20 cm
Ed. of 1000,
Published by
Cabinet Gallery / London
$55.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition John Knight, Quiet Quality, which took place in two sites, Cabinet Gallery, London, 10 October - 17 November, 2012 and the Frieze Art Fair, London, 11 - 14 October, 2012. Illustrated with texts by Ray McKenzie and Paedro de Llano, plus bibliography.
John Knight (b. 1945) is a conceptual artist in Los Angeles, California who works in situ. Since the 1960s, Knight has made pioneering works grounded in site-specificity and institutional critique, works that interrogate underlying economic systems.
2018, English
Softcover (staple-bound, die-cut cover), 32 pages, 23 x 20 cm
Ed. of 1000,
Published by
Cabinet Gallery / London
Galerie Neu / Berlin
$55.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition John Knight, Bohemian Grove, Galerie Neu / MD 72, Berlin 2013. Illustrated with text by Marta Fontolan and Isabelle Graw, plus bibliography.
John Knight (b. 1945) is a conceptual artist in Los Angeles, California who works in situ. Since the 1960s, Knight has made pioneering works grounded in site-specificity and institutional critique, works that interrogate underlying economic systems.
2016, English
Softcover (staple-bound, die-cut cover), 32 pages, 20 x 22.8 cm
Ed. of 1000,
Published by
Cabinet Gallery / London
$45.00 - In stock -
Artist's book / catalogue by John Knight and Robert Snowden, published on the occasion of John Knight's Vacant Possession exhibition at Cabinet London in 2016.
"It was an exhibition at Cabinet Gallery in 2016, a formerly unrealized proposal, which caused John Knight and I to descend into his filing cabinets, where not in haste we brought a number of unmade ideas, brilliant and uncirculated as they say of certain coins, nearly all out on the table".—RS
The catalogue text becomes an enquiry into the unrealised projects in the archive of the artist, and a reflection on the nature of the unmade, of memory and material evidence.
John Knight (b. 1945) is a conceptual artist in Los Angeles, California who works in situ. Since the 1960s, Knight has made pioneering works grounded in site-specificity and institutional critique, works that interrogate underlying economic systems.
2022, English
Softcover, 242 pages, 20.3 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Rab-Rab Press / Helsinki
$49.00 - Out of stock
Rab-Rab Press announces the third, expanded edition of the publication of Free Jazz Communism, an outstanding book (first published in 2019 by Rab-Rab) actualising Archie Shepp–Bill Dixon Quartet at the 8th World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki 1962. Including archive material and documents, commissioned theoretical and historical texts, and interviews, the book edited by Sezgin Boynik and Taneli Viitahuhta contextualizes politics of free jazz music in light of global decolonisation movements, anti-war activism, structures of racial capitalism, and forms of avant-garde music.
By focusing on concerts of Shepp–Dixon Quartet, leading avant-garde jazz musicians from the US, in the socialist anti-colonial festival in Helsinki, the book is introducing complexities in the usual Cold War stories about the sixties, and pictures politics of jazz as something transcending boundaries of nation-state and capitalist market regulations.
Apart from the theoretical and historical overview by its editors, the book includes testimonies of the collective and international spirit of the 1962 Youth Festival, translated documents from Finnish press, a new interview with Archie Shepp, commissioned text by Jeff Schwartz on the historical context of political engagement of free jazz musicians, and reproduction of three hard-to-find texts by Shepp.
The book is designed by Ott Kagovere.
3rd Edition.