World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2001, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 23 x 15.6 cm
Published by
Northwestern University Press / Evanston
$52.00 - Out of stock
"Trakl's poetry is for me a thing of sublime existence."—Rainer Maria Rilke
A comprehensive English-language edition of verse by the Austrian poet.
An undeniable aura surrounds the name of Georg Trakl, a poet of intense inner vision and originality whose work stands alongside that of Yeats, Valéry, and T. S. Eliot. Besides Rilke, his more famous admirers include Karl Kraus and Martin Heidegger. The distinctive tone of Trakl's work-especially admired by his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein-is autumnal and melancholy. Trakl was writing at a time of spiritual and social disintegration on the eve of the First World War, when personal values and perceptions tended to be subsumed in a more generalized anguish and exaltation. Neo-romantic, early modernist, his rich, vitally sensuous poetry can be seen to mark the transition from impressionism to expressionism, but at the same time transcends such categories. Trakl's poetry has previously only been available in English in short selections or in anthologies. This bilingual edition, the most comprehensive to date, gives readers the chance to get to know Trakl's work more fully than ever before.
Georg Trakl (1887–1914) was born into a middle-class family in Salzburg, Austria. He trained as a pharmacist at the University of Vienna where he started to experiment with drugs and began writing. The patronage of a periodical publisher and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein enabled Trakl to concentrate on his poetry and he brought out his first volume in 1913. The following year he enlisted as a lieutenant in the army medical corps, however, he became very distraught after witnessing the agony of the seriously wounded soldiers. He was sent for observation to a military hospital, where he died of an overdose of cocaine, possibly inadvertently.
Alexander Stillmark is Emeritus Reader in German at University College London. He is the author of numerous comparative studies and articles, especially on Austrian nineteenth and twentieth century literature. Stillmark was awarded the translation prize by the Austrian Federal Chancellors office for Trakl's Poems and Prose.
1993 / 2022, English
Softcover, 115 pages, 14 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Post Apollo Press / US
$44.00 - Out of stock
Etel Adnan's novel PARIS, WHEN IT'S NAKED amazes our retinas, ears, lips, fingertips, and noses with sensing, talking, and envisioning the city of Baudelaire and Delacroix, Mallarme and Picasso, Sartre and Djuna Barnes, Miller and Nin, Vietnamese and African refugees, revolutions and Bohemia. This tale of the Creative Now is told through the fine-tuned sensibility of Etel Adnan, the expatriate poet-painter who knows the French Capital as wholly as she does Beirut and San Francisco, her other homes. She is also the author of SITT MARIE-ROSE, an underground novel of the Lebanese Civil War, and many books of poetry. Her new work is a philosophically charged lyric in prose. The elan vital of every word evokes the eternal present of this wise woman. A highly personal, life-enhancing masterpiece in a deathly age of impersonality.
An indespensable book by an indispensable writer — Morgan Gibson.
2007, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 27 x 21.5 cm
Published by
Litmus Press / Brooklyn
$49.00 - Out of stock
Reprinted with a new foreword by Jalal Toufic and artwork by Etel Adnan.
Translated from the French by the author. “From time to time, there occurs what suspends time, revelation—at least for certain people, martyrs. But then the apocalypse, revelation, is withdrawn, occulted by the ‘apocalypse,’ the surpassing disaster, so that symptomatically apocalypse’s primary sense (from Greek apokalypsis, from apokalyptein to uncover, from apo- + kalyptein to cover) is occulted by its secondary meaning, and martyr’s primary sense, witness, is occulted by its secondary, vulgar meaning: ‘a person who suffers greatly or is killed because of their politcal or religious beliefs’… While the Arab ‘apocalypse’ as surpassing disaster leads to a withdrawal of Arabic tradition, the apocalypse as revelation leads to Arabic tradition’s vertiginous extension.”—from the Foreword by Jalal Toufic
Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She is a celebrated writer, essayist, and playwright, and is the author of more than twenty books in all these disciplines. Her work as a whole is a faithful record of the times and places she has lived in Beirut, Paris, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. At least eighteen works by Adnan have been published in English. They include Sitt Marie Rose (Post-Apollo Press, 1982); The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; Premonition (Kelsey Street Press, 2014); Surge (Nightboat Books, 2018); Time (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award; and most recently Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020). Her paintings, described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as “stubbornly radiant abstractions,” have been widely exhibited. Spanning media and genres, Adnan’s writings have led to numerous collaborations with artists and musicians, including the French part of CIVIL warS, a multi-language opera by American stage director Robert Wilson, performed in Lyon and Bobigny in 1985.
In 2014 she was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France’s highest cultural honor, by the French Government. She died in Paris, in 2021.
1982 / 2022, English
Softcover, 106 pages, 18 x 14 cm
$45.00 - Out of stock
"Love is a supreme violence...."—Sitt Marie Rose
Sitt Marie Rose is the story of a woman abducted by militiamen during the civil war in Lebanon. Already a classic of war literature, this extraordinary novel won the France-Pays Arabes award in Paris and has been translated into six languages.
Sitt Marie Rose is part of Comparative Literature, World Literature, Women’s Studies and Middle East Studies curricula at more than thirty universities and colleges in the U.S.
Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She is a celebrated writer, essayist, and playwright, and is the author of more than twenty books in all these disciplines. Her work as a whole is a faithful record of the times and places she has lived in Beirut, Paris, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. At least eighteen works by Adnan have been published in English. They include Sitt Marie Rose (Post-Apollo Press, 1982); The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; Premonition (Kelsey Street Press, 2014); Surge (Nightboat Books, 2018); Time (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award; and most recently Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020). Her paintings, described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as “stubbornly radiant abstractions,” have been widely exhibited. Spanning media and genres, Adnan’s writings have led to numerous collaborations with artists and musicians, including the French part of CIVIL warS, a multi-language opera by American stage director Robert Wilson, performed in Lyon and Bobigny in 1985.
In 2014 she was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France’s highest cultural honor, by the French Government. She died in Paris, in 2021.
1995, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 23 x 15 cm
Published by
Litmus Press / Brooklyn
Post Apollo Press / US
$40.00 - In stock -
The poems come from Albuquerque, Beirut, Damascus, the Amazon Basin, the air over Hiroshima, the burial grounds both honored and dishonored all over the world. Counterposed to violence and destruction, these poems offer witness and harbor in love.
Illustrated with etchings by Russell Chatham.
Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She is a celebrated writer, essayist, and playwright, and is the author of more than twenty books in all these disciplines. Her work as a whole is a faithful record of the times and places she has lived in Beirut, Paris, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. At least eighteen works by Adnan have been published in English. They include Sitt Marie Rose (Post-Apollo Press, 1982); The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; Premonition (Kelsey Street Press, 2014); Surge (Nightboat Books, 2018); Time (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award; and most recently Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020). Her paintings, described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as “stubbornly radiant abstractions,” have been widely exhibited. Spanning media and genres, Adnan’s writings have led to numerous collaborations with artists and musicians, including the French part of CIVIL warS, a multi-language opera by American stage director Robert Wilson, performed in Lyon and Bobigny in 1985.
In 2014 she was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France’s highest cultural honor, by the French Government. She died in Paris, in 2021.
2023, English
Softcover, 38 pages, 12.7 x 20.32 cm
Published by
Broken Sleep Books / UK
$30.00 - Out of stock
Who does not envy with us is against us is a collection of essays on working-classness that demonstrates Maria Fusco's exceptional talent for weaving together the analytical and the poetic to create an affecting and profound work. With expressive prose, Fusco deftly captures the experiences of the global working class, illuminating emotions that unite them across borders and lines. This is a tribute to the resilience and tenacity of working-class communities, and an invitation to readers to join in a deeper understanding of their struggles and triumphs. Through her masterful storytelling, Fusco utilises the power of language to elevate the voices of those who have long been silenced, creating a symphony of words that will echo long after the final page.
"I love this book with my entire life and beyond. Fact that I grew up a thousand miles south of Belfast, but, days after reading, feel like I'm - or should be - from there is testament to Fusco's analytic and lyric genius, and her ability to move and affect. Fusco mobilises a previously unnamed mood shared by the international, intergalactic working classes, I've never seen anything like it. Read this book."—Isabel Waidner, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility
Maria Fusco is an award-winning working-class writer, born in Belfast and living in Scotland. Her interdisciplinary work spans the registers of critical, fiction and performance writing. Her work has been commissioned by bodies including: Artangel, BBC Radio 4, National Theatre Wales and supported by Arts Council England, Creative Scotland and the Royal Opera House. She is currently Professor of Interdisciplinary Writing at the University of Dundee, previously holding posts at the University of Edinburgh and Goldsmiths, University of London.
2002, English
Softcover, 312 pages, 23.5 x 15.6 cm
Published by
Duke University Press / North Carolina
$49.00 - In stock -
Richard Bruce Nugent (1906—1987) was a writer, painter, illustrator, and popular bohemian personality who lived at the centre of the Harlem Renaissance. Protege of Alain Locke, roommate of Wallace Thurman, and friend of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, the precocious Nugent stood for many years as the only African-American writer willing to clearly pronounce his homosexuality in print. Selections from his writings, paintings, and erotic art-deco drawings-mostly unpublished or scattered in rare and obscure publications-are collected here for the first time. A contributor to the landmark publication FIRE!! and resident of the notorious Niggeratti Manor, Nugent drew heavily upon his own experiences in his art. Nugent also appeared on Broadway in Porgy (the 1927 play) and Run, Little Chillun (1933).
Thomas H. Wirth, a close friend of Nugent's during the last years of the artist's life, has assembled a selection of Nugent's writings, including his best-known piece, "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade," and some of his poems and short non-fiction. The visual art selections include many of Nugent's sketches, as well as a number of his paintings. Wirth has written an introduction providing biographical information about Nugent's life and situating his art in relation to the visual and literary currents that influenced him. A foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. emphasises the importance of Nugent for African American history and culture. Outliving virtually all other Harlem Renaissance figures, Nugent became a valuable resource to historians during his later years and is quoted in many works about the Harlem Renaissance era. This book offers a trove of hitherto unavailable primary source material and original art.
"The list of gay and lesbian African Americans is impressive and long, but it is surely headed by Bruce Nugent...[Wirth] does us an immeasurable favor by bringing together this collection of Nugent's poems, stories, essays, and visual art, along with a biographical sketch and a thoughtful interpretation. One of the key figures in both the creative world of the Harlem Renaissance and the complex underground world of gay culture, Bruce Nugent at last speaks here for himself."-from the Foreword, by Henry Louis Gates Jr. "Nugent is one of the best-known unknowns of the Harlem Renaissance - widely quoted by its chroniclers and revered by people interested in black gay history. By restoring his place in history and making his work widely available for scrutiny, this book performs an invaluable service. Wirth's introduction also provides an extraordinary tour of the gay side of the Renaissance and vivid glimpses of bohemian life in Harlem and the arts circles Nugent moved in." - George Chauncey, author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World
2023, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 21.5 x 13.9 cm
Published by
Nightboat Books / New York
$33.00 - In stock -
A textual and historigraphical odyssey imbued with queer intergenerational yearning and loss.
Don’t Leave Me This Way blends archival research with sexual fantasy to produce a series of sonnets inspired by Gaétan Dugas, named by Randy Shilts as “Patient Zero” of the AIDS epidemic in North America. Committed to the utopian possibilities of elegy and pornography, Don’t Leave Me This Way exploits the absurdist beauty of the cut-up technique to voice a chorus of lost spirits: poignant, vengeful, and ready to ball.
"Ever a lover eager for experience, Eric Sneathen queers the sonnet by placing a different kind of impossible love at its center: the dead of the AIDS era, whose archives so infuse these lines that our shared history comes alive. With the poet's 'promise to tell of thee like flesh forever,' this book of sticky blisses slips its readers the key to a room in literature's bathhouse, where the voices of gay lives past and present commingle."—Brian Teare
2015, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 240 pages, 22.23 x 15.24 cm
Published by
Rizzoli / New York
$44.00 - Out of stock
The long-awaited memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature.
Described by the London Review of Books as one of "the most brilliant critics writing in America today," Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments.
With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work-from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post-summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he has lived and worked occasionally for the past fifteen years. Connoisseurs will recognize in this—his most personal book yet—the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing.
Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing read and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.
Gary Indiana is a writer, playwright, filmmaker, and artist. He is the author of seven novels, including Do Everything in the Dark and The Shanghai Gesture, as well as several plays, collections of poetry and nonfiction, and essays in publications from Art in America to Vice. His visual art appeared in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
1981 / 2016, English
Softcover, 592 pages, 12.9 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Canongate Books / Edinburgh
$32.00 - Out of stock
"Probably the greatest novel of the century"—Observer
Lanark, a modern vision of hell, is set in the disintegrating cities of Unthank and Glasgow, and tells the interwoven stories of Lanark and Duncan Thaw. A work of extraordinary imagination and wide range, its playful narrative techniques convey a profound message, both personal and political, about humankind's inability to love, and yet our compulsion to go on trying.
First published in 1981, Lanark immediately established Gray as one of Britain's leading writers. This 40th anniversary edition typeset and published in Edinburgh by the book's original Canongate publishing house, with artwork by Alasdair Gray and introduction by William Boyd.
Since 1981, when Lanark was published by Canongate, Alasdair Gray has published twenty books, most of them novels and short stories. In his own words, "Alasdair Gray is a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glaswegian pedestrian who has mainly lived by writing and designing books, most of them fiction."
"It was time Scotland produced a shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom. This is it ... [Gray is] the best Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott"—Anthony Burgess
"When dawn comes up and retires in dismay, we find ourselves in the presence of an overpowering surreal imagination. A saga of a city where reality is about as reliable as a Salvador Dali watch"—Brian Aldiss
"I was absolutely knocked out by Lanark. I think it's the best in Scottish literature this century"—Iain Banks
2023, English
Softcover, 326 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
Paradise Editions / US
$36.00 - Out of stock
With its unique blend of fantasy, horror, and science fiction, Weird Tales was the quintessential pulp magazine of the early 20th century. While classic American writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard established the magazine’s reputation, Weird Tales also regularly published work from abroad. Its longstanding editor Farnsworth Wright took a keen interest in translation as a literary artform, as did frequent contributors such as Clark Ashton Smith. Night Fears gathers fourteen stories and four poems from the magazine’s initial run, showcasing an eclectic mix of voices and genres, from lurid tales of revenge to brooding meditations on mortality, all congealing into a strange new form of literature, into something…weird.
Among the authors included here are Charles Baudelaire, Alexander Pushkin, Guy de Maupassant, Honoré de Balzac, Leonid Andreyev, Alphonse Daudet, Fyodor Sologub, Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Hauff, Jean Richepin, Alexander Kielland, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Alphonse Daudet, and Clark Ashton Smith.
2024, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 22.61 x 15.19 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$38.00 - In stock -
"It's kind of a book of utterances ... it's beautiful and I love it."—Kristen Stewart
I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order-pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.
On the last day of December 2009, Kate Zambreno, then an unpublished writer, began a blog called "Frances Farmer Is My Sister," arising from her obsession with literary modernism and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her partner held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants and melancholy portraits of the fates of the modernist "wives and mistresses," reclaiming the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald- writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community of writers and devised a new feminist discourse of writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon.
In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it-she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles feminine experience to the realm of the "minor," and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. "ANXIETY- When she experiences it, it's pathological," writes Zambreno. "When he does, it's existential." With Heroines, Zambreno provided a model for a newly subjectivized criticism, prefiguring many group biographies and forms of autotheory and hybrid memoirs that were to come in the years to follow.
A book that has become its own canon, Heroines was named one of the "50 Books that define the past 5 Years in Literature" by Flavorwire, an "Essential Feminist Manifesto" by Dazed, and one of the "50 Greatest Books by Women" in Buzzfeed.
2022, English
Softcover, 262 pages, 21 x 13 cm
Published by
11:11 Press / US
$34.00 - In stock -
Campfires of the Dead and the Living is a collection of short fiction by Peter Christopher. This volume contains The Living – an unpublished collection of stories written between 1990 and 2004 – and Campfires of the Dead – Christopher’s first collection, out of print for more than three decades and originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1989.
Peter Christopher taught at Georgia Southern University for many years and was a recipient of a 1991 National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in creative writing. Though only Campfires of the Dead was published during his lifetime, through his teaching, mentorship, and friendships, Christopher had a lasting impact on writers Harry Crews, Gordon Lish, and Chuck Palahniuk among others.
Peter Christopher has been called “...a genius of the nerve-stretching violent quiets of the failing and the failed…” (Garielle Lutz); “Hilariously raw, chiseled and brilliant” (William Tester) and “Unforgettable and necessary” (Lee Smith).
Here is a vision and voice that your heart and blood will never forget. It is about the forgotten, the hurt, and the helpless, but peter christopher’s magic makes these people whole again. I am grateful for finding this book.—Harry Crews
[Camfires of the Dead and the Living] is a double heart attack of vitality and violence, of American poverty and male wretchedness, of broken beauty and hope against hope.—THE NEW YORK TIMES
May this book make you a better reader. If you write, may it make you a better writer.—CHUCK PALAHNIUK (from the Introduction)
2023, English
Softcover, 106 pages, 20.5 x 12.5 cm
Published by
Weirdpunk Books / US
$32.00 - In stock -
J.G. Ballard has held a tremendous influence on culture since he first started writing, much of which turned out to be prophetic. In Feral Architecture: Ballardian Horrors Joe Koch, Donyae Coles, Sara Century, Brendan Vidito, and editor Sam Richard plume the depth of that influence through the lens of horror fiction. The results are surreal, ominous, unexpected, unnerving, and a fitting tribute to the legacy of one of the 20th century’s most impactful and important writers. Featuring a foreword by Scott Dwyer of The Plutonian.
2023, English
Softcover, 250 pages, 20.5 x 12.5 cm
Published by
House of Vlad Press / US
$34.00 - Out of stock
On September 21, 2021 Cory Bennet and Jon Lindsey posted a request for writing by survivors of suicide. This book, co-published by Cash For Gold Books and House Of Vlad Press, contains some of the many responses, including: Allie Rowbottom, B.R. Yeager, Brad Phillips, Charlene Elsby, Chris Clinebell, Cory Bennet, David Fishkind, Dylan Boyer, Evan Cerniglia, Felicia Urso, Garth Miró, Joe Haward, John Tottenham, Jon Berger, Jon Lindsey, Karter Mycroft, Lily Lady, Nick Farriella, Peppy Ooze, Sam Berman, Sarah Gerard, Steve Anwyll, Tj, And Troy James Weaver
All proceeds from the sale of this book go to: The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide please call 988 in the U.S. or for international help visit www.stopsuicide.com.
Cover design: Tex Gresham
2023, English / Hungarian
Softcover, 150 pages, 18.5 x 12.5 cm
Published by
Ugly Duckling Presse / New York
$36.00 - In stock -
“Delicate and shocking. The most remarkable poetry of the last few years.”—András Visky
MyLifeandMyLife is one of the strongest pieces of experimental fiction published in Hungarian in recent years, proposing to talk about emotions through visuality. The book’s protagonist is desperately in love with a mysterious male figure, and this emotional dependency not only leads her to give up her agency but also gradually paves the way to her suffocation and ultimate demise. MyLifeandMyLife can be interpreted as a reversal of sorts of the Biblical episode whereby the holy prophet Hosea is ordered by divine appointment to marry Gomer, known as a “promiscuous woman,” a “harlot,” and a “whore,” so that their scandalous marriage-cum-performance can act as a warning against idolatry. Viewed from the perspective of the canon, this work is also readable in the vein of La Fontaine’s fables, and in this sense it is a non-moralising morality tale that is borderline unbearable yet devastatingly gripping all the same. Melinda Mátyus writes in bold and deeply touching ways about contemporary women and her protagonists examine womanhood in a variety of manifestations and configurations. Mátyus zooms in on the loneliness of socially ostracized women, and is preoccupied with the psychological makeup of those experiencing confinement and forced captivity.
Melinda Mátyus (born 1970) is a theatre critic and author of fiction, writing in Hungarian and based in Romania. She studied theology and comparative literature, and is active as a Calvinist pastor. Her deeply original voice has garnered important professional recognition and catapulted her to some of the most important Hungarian literary journals, such as Litera, szifonline.hu, Jelenkor, Pannon Tükör, Látó, and World Literature Today. She was a recipient of the Látó Award for fiction in 2020, and co-authored the volume Az ember tragédiája (The Tragedy of Man), edited by András Visky (Koinónia). Her first standalone volume of fiction is forthcoming from Jelenkor publishing house in Budapest.
Jozefina Komporaly is senior lecturer at the University of the Arts London and a translator from Hungarian and Romanian into English. She is editor and co-translator of the drama collections How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients and Other Plays (Seagull Books), András Visky’s Barrack Dramaturgy: Memories of the Body (Intellect), and Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion (Bloomsbury), and author of numerous publications on translation and adaptation, including the monograph Radical Revival as Adaptation (Palgrave). Her translations have appeared in Asymptote, Baffler, Hungarian Literature Online, Index on Censorship, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poet Lore, Words Without Borders, and World Literature Today, and have been staged by Foreign Affairs in London and Theater Y and Trap Door in Chicago. Recent translations include Mr K Released by Matéi Visniec, shortlisted for the 2021 EBRD Literature Prize, The Glance of the Medusa by László F. Földényi, The Magnificent Boar by Péter Demény, and Story of a Stammer by Gábor Vida. She is a PEN Translates grant recipient and a member of the UK Translators’ Association.
“MyLifeandMyLife is a most poignant and painful text, written in a mature style and in a manner that can initially baffle the reader. The way in which the narrator impassively details the events in her life, on a tone of apparent detachment, is particularly impactful, seeing that her emotional involvement is obvious all along. Communication by way of tapping into the language of visual arts introduces an additional and unique intellectual quality into the text, enhancing its vitality and organicity.” —Görföl Balázs
“Reading Melinda’s writing one can imagine a lively fragile germ that sprouts from the cracked barks of our austere and bigoted upbringing.” —Láng Zsolt
2023, English
Softcover (stitch-bound), unpaginated, 23 x 18 cm
Published by
Ugly Duckling Presse / New York
$30.00 - In stock -
wordtomydead is a practice in black feminist poethics. using a 1940’s mechanical typewriter, sadé mucks up orthography to investigate disorienting practices of refusal and wade through the fundamental feltness and unintelligibility of thingness.
the concrete poetics deployed on/with/against the typewriter serve as scores for plenum sociality: your head stretches to the page, eyes squint, tongues stutter as you read the cascading letters falling off the margins you race to find understanding to rest on. you may find yourself spinning in circles, zigzagging across the page, deciphering what you can and being jolted by the static of what recedes from you.
roaring through this project is an embodied feeling of black study, an illegible, unspeakable, and unreadable social aesthetic practice.
sadé powell is a native new yorker and antidisciplinary poet, exploring fugitivity, legibility, and interobjectivity through visual and concrete poetry. inspired by her upbringing, she uses the sonic, kinesthetic, and linguistic elements of her 1940s mechanical typewriter to experiment with dissemblance as proximity and relation to otherwise potentialities. sadé holds a ma in performance studies at nyu tisch. her work can be found in Kolaj Magazine, and Tiny Spoon.
"to want to riot so much more than matter wants to matter so riotously, so differently, so invaluably, that it runs over itself in tremble, buzz and moan. neither the book nor the very idea of the grammar book can hold it back. flow clots to spill at broken natural tempi. surfacing abounds the letter’s natural twists and turns. what we get is supernatural flower. no petition for recovery, then a gig; just verbal streetlife in the common wind repeating: wordtomydead, by sadé powell."—Fred Moten
"In a style reminiscent of M. NourbeSe Philip in Zong!, sadé powell asks us to not only read the words and characters but also the spaces comprising the page. I love a text that requires your whole body to approach it, a text that makes you question what it is to read, and to be read. Standingly firmly within the tradition of Black experimental aesthetics, wordtomydead is an invitation to be in conversation with powell and the text to make your own meaning. It's a ritual, one that requires return and continued engagement such that new understandings reveal themselves with each read. powell's question, "what am i unbecoming?" has taken hold of me, and I suspect it won't be letting go any time soon."—Jehan Roberson
"Like a palm reading, sadé powell’s wordtomydead intoxicates the meaning and the limits of flesh. Riding a liminal radio frequency of knowledge—supernatural, ancestral, ancient, displaced—powell and her typewriter hum along at low decibels, “yieldingtothetongue,” of the text, reverberating off of and rearranging all that comes into contact with its “neon sap”. Rooted in antidisciplinary forms and somatic architectures, wordstomydead jailbreaks systemic measures of comprehension and the alphabetic principle. The psychopomps of powell’s poetics reveal for us a new pattern of unlearning.:—Gabrielle Rucker
2024, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 17.5 x 11.5 cm
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$35.00 - Out of stock
‘[A] series of overwhelmingly intense, captivating and often horrifying snapshots of Amazonian life, human and non-human.[……] Rangel’s […] sense of the seething beauty and violent horror of Amazonia is riveting, full of haunting images […]. Beneath its several authors, its multiple timeframes, its blurring of many genres, is the turbulence of Brazilian Amazonia itself […] Amazonia is presented as a world that thwarts any attempt at categorisation, any decision as to what is single and what is multiple; this bamboozling and hearteningly ambitious volume is a parallel challenge to our pre-existing categories, not least the category of the book itself.’—Joe Moshenska, The Observer
A classic of Brazilian literature is twinned with an overheated tract in which tropical delirium swallows up Western philosophy.
Both attack the decolonial question with poetic ferocity, ignited by the moment when colonialist rationality meets its limits in the ‘magnificent disorder’ of the Amazon jungle.
Described in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s foreword as ‘no longer an interpretation of Brazil but an interpenetration with Brazil’, Jean-Christophe Goddard’s strange theory-fiction plunges Western philosophy into the great American schizophrenia, where its ordered categories are devoured by uncontainable contaminations—first and foremost the rainforest itself, a ‘monstrosity unapproachable by the cogito’.
In 1664, the Portuguese Bento de Espinosa wrote of his terrifying hallucination of ‘a scabby black Brazilian’. But rather than a vision of ‘the Other’, the dream figure was a frightful glimpse of Bento’s own duplicity. Upon adopting the ‘clean white nickname’ of Benedict de Spinoza, the philosopher cut ties with his homeland and its colonial misadventures, repudiating this spectre that flees along the lines of migration: ‘Spinoza is American…the journey is intensive’.
And in his wake, a cannibalized cast of conceptual personae are sucked into Goddard’s Pernambucan delirium: Franny Deleuze, Dina Levi-Strauss, Chaya Ohloclitorispector, Galli Mathias…
The rainforest also precipitates a deregulation of the senses in Verdant Inferno, Alberto Rangel’s classic 1904 work of Brazilian literature. In Rangel’s astonishing tales, this ‘poet-engineer’ sent into the dark interior as a state representative records his encounters in a style that shimmers between objective documentary and visionary limit experience.
An Urbanomic K-Pulp Switch: singular texts by two different authors in a classic pulp format.
2023, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 28 x 21 cm
Published by
Void / Reykjavík—Athens
$89.00 - Out of stock
The Amazon Rainforest—often referred to as 'Lungs of our Planet'—has long been idealised as a dense, green expanse and a pristine sanctuary inhabited by isolated tribes. Terra Vermelha, the culmination of 10-years’ work by photographer Tommaso Protti, presents a raw and unfiltered, alternative portrait of the region. Depicting fields ablaze, the dark river as a conduit for cocaine trafficking and urban areas plagued by violence—the images in the book depict a dystopia, dispelling such romanticised notions.
“As I sat in my hotel room in Marabá, a city in the Amazon state of Parà, Jornal Nacional – Brazil’s flagship news program – transmitted images of the country’s newly elected president, Jair Bolsonaro: “The indigenous in their reservations are like animals in a zoo,” he said. It was November 2018. […] It seemed like a threat, an omen of bad times ahead. I felt that the slow-motion social and environmental breakdown I had seen in the previous years in the Amazon was about to get worse.”
“Deforestation, unregulated development, pollution. All of these scenarios are driven by the same forces; poverty, weak institutions, corruption and savage self-interest. More than in other places, in the Amazon region it becomes clear that land is worth more than human life. And on the path towards the destruction of the planet, the first and closest step for mankind is still its own annihilation… The violence consuming the Brazilian Amazon affects us all and sometimes we are even the unknowing perpetrators of it.”
Tommaso Protti (Italy, 1986) lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. Tommaso Protti has documented the intersecting social and environmental crises plaguing the Amazonian states of Brazil, where the photographer has been based for almost a decade. He started his career as a photographer in 2011 after graduating in Political Science and International Relations. Since then, he has devoted himself on creating his own long-term projects focusing on themes such as crime, the environment, and rural conflict. His work has been featured in global publications and exhibited worldwide.
“This is the Brazilian Amazon today, where indigenous communities are fighting for survival in the face of rampant deforestation. What follows is a dense, disorientating and elliptical reportage that riddles through a conflict-stricken hinterland, unravelling – in the dead of night – stories about savage land-grabs, forest fires and brutal gang murders. […] Needless to say, few publishers could have taken us into the Amazon’s heart of chaos as nightmarishly as Void have.”—Alessandro Merola, 1000 Words
2012, English / Japanese
Hardcover, unpaginated, 26.5 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Presspop Gallery / Tokyo
$200.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this fast out-of-print and collectible hardcover volume collecting the artwork of legendary and prolific Japanese horror master Hideshi Hino, including three never-before-seen short manga stories, all in full-colour, published in 2012 by Presspop, Tokyo. Cover-to-cover artworks with only one exceptionally appropriate text, "Pseudo Amida Sutra of a Dreaming Embryo", by fellow horror manga artist Suehiro Maruo. Also includes valuable visual bibliography of all his illustrated books printed as the book's endpapers.
Hideshi Hino (b. 1946) is a Japanese manga artist who specializes in horror stories. His comics include Hell Baby, Hino Horrors, and Panorama of Hell. He also wrote and directed two entries in the Guinea Pig series of horror films: Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985), and Mermaid in a Manhole (1988).
"Mother, breasts, conception, last month of pregnancy, praying for easy delivery, painful delivery, stillbirth, hemorrhage, filth, midwife, pitiless hag, cropping, selling of own child, convention, superstition, Dog Spirit, curse, whisper, lie, paranoia, auditory hallucination, neurosis, insanity, isolation, confinement, basement, cell, prison, reformatory, orphanage, abandoned child, abandoned old men and women, missing woman, old legend of Toono, loner, hermit, bum, beggar, solitary death, prairie fire, will-o'-the-wisp, graveyard, cluster-amaryllis, offering, cake, ant, lizard, viper, hornet, poisonous sting, syringe needle, drugs, morphine, strychnine, promin, opium, drug addiction, sanatorium, tuberculosis, nurse, white robe, hygiene, unsanitary, filthy, stench, body odor, heat rash, scabies, ringworm, pus, eye mucus, trachoma, cataract, eyepatch, bandage, mummy, offering, human sacrifice, regrettable death, grudge, ghost, evil spirit, malice, secession, echtoplasma, spiritualistic medium, shrine maiden, Japanese voodoo doll, little boy, big boy, nostalgia, loss of homeland, childhood, old age, afterlife, pilgrim's hymn, the invocation Namu Amida Butsu, the special practice of one million nenbutsu, death, lotus flower, transmigration, near death experience, immortality of the soul, funeral, black and white striped bunting for funeral, mourning dress, hearse, crematory, smoke, whirlpool, labyrinth, dizziness, acrophobia, claustrophobia, socialphobia, stuttering, deafness, blindness, night-blindness, malnutrition, hypoplasia, poliomyelitis, crutches, crippled legs, bound feet, freak angel, peculiar disease, genetic inheritance, lineage, ancestor, clan, blood relative, incest, necrophilia, maggot, gutbucket, defecation, excreta, drainage, cave, stalagmite, darkness, moonless night, eclipse of the moon, crowd under the moon, Dogra Magra, Pseudo Amida Sutra."
Near Fine—Very Good copy.
1978, German
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 220 pages, 20 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Schirmer & Mosel / Munich
Ludwig Museum / Cologne
Schirmer Mosel
$80.00 - In stock -
First 1978 edition of this gorgeous German book dedicated entirely to the magnificent photographic work of Wols. Lavishly illustrated throughout in b/w with a comprehensive collection of over 100 pages of his accomplished photography of still life object assemblages, portraits, the streets of Paris, interiors, and more, including an additional 120 pages of heavily illustrated in-depth biographical text on the artist, featuring many of his paintings, drawings, photographs and private photo-documents.
Wols was the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (27 May 1913, Berlin – 1 September 1951, Paris), a German painter, photographer, engraver, and graphic designer. Though broadly unrecognized in his lifetime, Wols was close to Surrealism, and is considered a pioneer of Lyrical Abstraction, one of the most influential artists of the Tachisme movement, and of Informal art in Europe. He moved to France when he fled the Hitlerian regime, with a recommendation from the artist-teacher Moholy-Nagy. Illegal immigrant, he was considered as a deserter and a stateless person, arrested many times by the French police. In 1936, Wols received, with Léger and Rivière's help, a limited resident permit, working as a photographer — his unusual fashion and interiors photographs were sold as postcards and printed in many international fashion magazines. Immediately after the beginning of the Second World War, Wols was enprisoned with many Germans in different French internment camps, where Wols realized many surrealist drawings and watercolours that he is now well-known for. He spent most of the war trying to emigrate to the United States, an unsuccessful and costly enterprise that may have driven him to alcoholism. After the hype from the war had died down, he had his first exhibition of watercolors in December 1945 at the Galerie René Drouin, Paris, where despite the lack of commercial success he made an impression. His paintings represented a rejection of figuration and abstraction, and a projection into a metaphysical plane. In the years following the war, Schulze concentrated on painting and etching. His health declined severely towards the end of the 1940s; in 1951 he died of food poisoning at the Hotel Montalembert in Paris, after releasing himself from hospital against medical advice. After his death his works were shown at the Kassel documenta (1955), documenta II (1959) and documenta III (1964).
Very Good with some cover wear/rubbing.
1959, French
Softcover (french-folds), 46 pages, 22 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gallery Europe / Paris
$70.00 - Out of stock
Beautifully designed catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Wols - Decembre 1959 - Fevrier 1960, Gallery Europe, Paris. Illustrated throughout with the paintings and drawings of German painter and photographer Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, known as Wols, mounted as plates in colour and b/w on raw black boards with accompanying texts/lyrics of Will Grohmann, Henri Miller and Wols in French printed on blue machine paper throughout. Closes with Oevres exposées. On of the loveliest Wols catalogues.
Wols was the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (27 May 1913, Berlin – 1 September 1951, Paris), a German painter and photographer predominantly active in France. Though broadly unrecognized in his lifetime, he is considered a pioneer of Lyrical Abstraction, one of the most influential artists of the Tachisme movement. He is the author of a book on art theory entitled Aphorismes de Wols.
Very Good copy with some tanning to cover edges.
1998, German
Hardcover, 224 pages, 23 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Brinkmann & Bose / Berlin
Neue Gesellschaft fur Bildende Kunst / Berlin
$280.00 - Out of stock
First limited edition hardcover edition of this wonderful Unica Zürn monograph. Published to accompany a major survey exhibition in Berlin in 1998, this beautifully produced catalogue, now long out-of-print, is still one of the most cherished and comprehensive collections of Zürn's artwork ever published.
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.
2023, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 12.5 x 19.5 cm
Published by
Is-Land / Aubervilliers
$35.00 - In stock -
For thirty years, Heinz Peter Knes has developed a large body of work, focusing on photographic-documentary practice that seeks to engage image with society. Reflecting on the multiple “correspondences”, influences and interactions at the heart of his artistic work, we travel with him through the five chapters of this book, crossing paths with Josef Winkler, Hervé Guibert, Pasolini, Moyra Davey, Julie Ault, Jean-Luc Moulène, Danh Vo, Artaud and many others. Creating a new language, a sort of echo, as sensitive experience, which in a way dematerialize our perceptions, but enable “to gather” them.