World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2023, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 17.78 x 11.43 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$32.00 - In stock -
A previously untranslated gem of Surrealist prose poetry from the acclaimed French novelist.
In 1941, Julien Gracq, newly released from a German prisoner-of-war camp, wrote a series of prose poems that would come to represent the only properly Surrealist writings in his oeuvre. Surrealism provided Gracq with a means of counteracting his disturbing wartime experiences; his newfound freedom inspired a new freedom of personal expression, and he gave the collection an appropriate title, Great Liberty: "In the occult dictionary of Surrealism, the true name of poetry is liberation." Gracq the poet rather than the novelist is at work here: Surrealist fireworks lace through bewitching modernist romance, fantasy, black humor and deadpan absurdism. A later, postwar section entitled "The Habitable Earth" presents Gracq as visionary traveler exploring Andes and Flanders and returning to the narrative impulse of his better-known fiction.
Julien Gracq (1910-2007), born Louis Poirier, is known for such dreamlike novels as The Castle of Argol, A Dark Stranger, The Opposing Shore and Balcony in the Forest. He was close to the Surrealist movement, and Andr Breton in particular, to whom he devoted a critical study.
Artwork by André Masson.
1999, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 288 pages, 21.5 x 13.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$55.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first edition of CCRU founder Sadie Plant's end-of-the-millennium classic, Writing on Drugs, published by Faber and Faber in 1999.
"All writers on drugs become ghost writers for drugs. Or perhaps their drugs are ghost writing them"—Sadie Plant
Narcotics, stimulants and hallucinogens — these drugs have always affected far more than the perceptions, minds and moods of their users. Writing on Drugs explores the profound and pervasive nature of their influence on contemporary culture. It reads Coleridge on opium, Freud on cocaine, Michaux on mescaline and Burroughs on them all, and with such writers it begins to understand the many ways in which the modern world has found itself on drugs. Psychoactive substances have been integral to its economic history, its politics, media and technologies. They have influenced its poetry and stories, and shaped some if its most fundamental philosophies. They have even exposed the neurochemistry of a human brain which, like its cultures, has never been drug-free.
Sadie Plant was born in Birmingham and studied at the University of Manchester, where she gained her PhD in Philosophy in 1989. She has been a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham and a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, where, in 1995, she formed The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) with Mark Fisher and Nick Land, an experimental cultural theorist collective celebrated for its idiosyncratic and surreal "theory-fiction" which incorporated cyberpunk and Gothic horror, gaining an online cult following related to the rise in popularity of accelerationism. She published The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age in 1992, and Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture in 1997. Having spent much of the 1990s in the academic world, she now works independently and writes full-time.
G—VG in VG dust jacket. Normal page tanning, tanning to dust jacket edge and spine. Not necessarily copy pictured.
2007, English
Softcover, 150 pages, 23 x 15 cm
Published by
State University of New York Press / New York
$70.00 - Out of stock
Provocative essays on language, literature, and the aesthetics of embodiment.
Shocking, brilliant, and eccentric, the French author, translator, and artist Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001) exerted a profound effect on French intellectual culture throughout the twentieth century. The older brother of the painter Balthus, secretary to the novelist André Gide, friend to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, and heralded as one of the most important voices in the French "return to Nietzsche" by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Klossowski pursued his singular vision of mortal embodiment through a variety of scholarly manifestations. In Such a Deathly Desire (Un si funeste désir), Klossowski's original interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return is developed around the enigmatic figure of the "demon," then deepened with provocative readings of Gide's correspondence; Barbey d'Aurevilly's novel A Married Priest; and the intertwining of language and death in the work of Bataille, Blanchot, and Brice Parain. The book concludes with the powerful essay "Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody," in which Klossowski articulates the consequences of the eternal return and the meaning of Nietzsche's genealogy of the fabulation of the world. Intersecting with and confounding a range of disciplines—including psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and philosophy—Klossowski's critical writings on language, literature, and the aesthetics of embodiment remain powerful and original contributions to contemporary concerns in the theoretical humanities.
Translated with afterword by Russell Ford. Russell Ford is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Elmhurst College.
"Pierre Klossowski was one of the most influential (albeit idiosyncratic) literary figures in France during the postwar years, yet his work remains strangely unknown in the English-speaking world. Such a Deathly Desire was one of the essential books of Klossowski's oeuvre, and it includes seminal articles on Gide, Bataille, and Blanchot, as well as his now-classic essay 'Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody. ' The appearance of the book in English has long been anticipated, and we owe an immense debt to Russell Ford for providing us with an accessible and accurate translation. "—Daniel W. Smith, Purdue University
1981/2000, English
Softcover, 34 pages, 15.3 x 23 cm
Published by
Barrytown Ltd. / US
Station Hill Press / Barrytown
$16.00 - In stock -
Jacques Derrida writes (in Deconstruction and Criticism) of The Madness of the Day, first published in English in 1981, that it is a story whose title runs wild and drives the reader mad.la folie du jour, the madness of today, of the day today, which leads to the madness that comes from the day, is born of it, as well as the madness of the day itself, itself mad..La folie du jour is a story of madness, of that madness that consists in seeing the light, vision or visibility, to see beyond what is visible, is not merely 'to have a vision' in the usual sense of the word, but to see-beyond-sight, to see-sight-beyond-sight..The story obscures the sun.with a blinding light.
Translated by Lydia Davis.
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on later post-structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida. He is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern French writing yet no interview, no biographical sketch, and hardly any photographs have ever been published of him.
1976/2000, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 15.3 x 23 cm
Published by
Barrytown Ltd. / US
Station Hill Press / Barrytown
$30.00 - Out of stock
Death Sentence is a philosophical novel by Maurice Blanchot. First published in 1948, it is his second complete work of fiction. This long awaited reprint of a book about which John Hollander wrote: "A masterful version of one of the most remarkable novels in any language since World War II," is the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them. "Through more than 40 years, the French writer Maurice Blanchot has produced an astonishing body of fiction and criticism," writes Gilbert Sorrentino in the New York Review of Books, and John Updike in The New Yorker: "Blanchot's prose gives an impression, like Henry James, of carrying meanings so fragile they might crumble in transit."
Translated from French by Lydia Davis
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on later post-structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida. He is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern French writing yet no interview, no biographical sketch, and hardly any photographs have ever been published of him.
1973/2000, English
Softcover, 132 pages, 15.3 x 23 cm
Published by
Barrytown Ltd. / US
Station Hill Press / Barrytown
$32.00 - Out of stock
Before Sartre, before Beckett, before Robbe-Grillet, Maurice Blanchot created the “new novel,” the ultimate post-modern fiction. Written between 1932 and 1940, Blanchot’s first novel, here brilliantly translated by Robert Lamberton, contains all the remarkable aspects of his famous and perplexing invention, “the ontological narrative”―a tale whose subject is the nature of being itself. This paradoxical work discovers being in the absence of being, mystery in the absence of mystery, both to be searched for limitlessly. As Blanchot launches this endless search in his own masterful way, he transforms the possibilities of the novel. First issued in English in 1973 in a limited edition, this re-issue includes an illuminating essay on translation by Lamberton.
"A novel of consciousness brought to a high point of perfection, Blanchot's masterpiece thus far , one of the major works of contemporary French literature: such is Thomas the Obscure"—Georges Poulet
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on later post-structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida. He is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern French writing yet no interview, no biographical sketch, and hardly any photographs have ever been published of him.
2018, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 20.3 x 13.2 cm
Published by
Strange Attractor / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
A literary mix tape that explores the entwined boundaries between sound, material culture, landscape and esoteric belief.
Trees rigged up to the wireless radio heavens. A fax machine used to decode the language of hurricanes. A broadcast ghost that hijacked a television station to terrorize a city. A failed computer factory in the desert with a slap-back echo resounding into ruin.
In High Static, Dead Lines, media historian and artist Kristen Gallerneaux weaves a literary mix tape that explores the entwined boundaries between sound, material culture, landscape, and esoteric belief. Essays and fictocritical interludes are arranged to evoke a network of ley lines for the “sonic spectre” to travel through—a hypothetical presence that manifests itself as an invisible layer of noise alongside the conventional histories of technological artifacts.
The objects and stories within span from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, touching upon military, communications, and cultural history. A connective thread is the recurring presence of sound—audible, self-generative, and remembered—charting the contentious sonic histories of paranormal culture.
2023, English
Softcover, 312 pages, 20 x 12.5 cm
Published by
Seagull Books / London
$42.00 - Out of stock
Including a number of short essays by Bataille and Leiris on aspects of the other’s work as well as excerpts on Bataille from Leiris’ diaries, this collection of correspondence throws new light on two of Surrealism’s most radical dissidents.
In the autumn of 1924, just before André Breton published the Manifeste du surréalisme, two young men met in Paris for the first time. Georges Bataille, 27, starting work at the Bibliothèque Nationale; Michel Leiris, 23, beginning his studies in ethnology. Within a few months, they were both members of the Surrealist group, although their adherence to Surrealism (unlike their affinities with it) would not last long: in 1930 they were among the signatories of “Un cadavre,” the famous tract against Breton, the “Machiavelli of Montmartre,” as Leiris put it. But their friendship would endure for more than 30 years, and their correspondence, assembled here for the first time in English, would continue until the death of Bataille in 1962.
Translated by Liz Heron.
2017, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$34.00 - In stock -
Why am I writing this book? Because I share Gramsci’s anxiety: “The old are dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” The fascist monster, born in the entrails of Western modernity. Of course, the West is not what it used to be. Hence my question: what can we offer white people in exchange for their decline and for the wars that will ensue? There is only one answer: peace. There is only one way: revolutionary love.
—from Whites, Jews, and Us
With Whites, Jews, and Us, Houria Bouteldja launches a scathing critique of the European Left from an indigenous anti-colonial perspective, reflecting on Frantz Fanon’s political legacy, the republican pact, the Shoah, the creation of Israel, feminism, and the fate of postcolonial immigration in the West in the age of rising anti-immigrant populism. Drawing upon such prominent voices as James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Jean Genet, she issues a polemical call for a militant anti-racism grounded in the concept of revolutionary love.
Such love will not come without significant discomfort for whites, and without necessary provocation. Bouteldja challenges widespread assumptions among the Left in the United States and Europe—that anti-Semitism plays any role in Arab–Israeli conflicts, for example, or that philo-Semitism doesn’t in itself embody an oppressive position; that feminism or postcolonialist theory is free of colonialism; that integrationalism is a solution rather than a problem; that humanism can be against racism when its very function is to support the political-ideological apparatus that Bouteldja names the “white immune system.”
At this transitional moment in the history of the West—which is to say, at the moment of its decline—Bouteldja offers a call for political unity that demands the recognition that whiteness is not a genetic question: it is a matter of power, and it is high time to dismantle it.
Foreword by Cornel West
Translated by Rachel Valinsky
Houria Bouteldja is a French-Algerian political activist and writer focusing on anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and Islamophobia. She serves as spokesperson for the Parti des Indigènes de la République (Party of the Indigenous of the Republic).
2012, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Arcade Publishing / New York
$34.00 - In stock -
“A sort of final philosopher of the Western world. His statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning”—The Washington Post
Introduction by Susan Sontag
Foreword by Eugene Thacker
This collection of eleven essays, when originally published in France, created a literary whirlwind on the Left Bank. Cioran writes incisively about Western civilizations, the writer, the novel, mystics, apostles, and philosophers.
The Temptation to Exist first introduced this brilliant European thinker twenty years ago to American readers, in a superb translation by Richard Howard. This literary mystique around Cioran continues to grow, and The Temptation to Exist has become an underground classic.
In this work Cioran writes about Western civilizations, the writer, the novel, about mystics, apostles, philosophers. For those to whom the very word philosophy brings visions of arduous reading, be assured: Cioran is crystal-clear, his style quotable and aphoristic.
2012, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Arcade Publishing / New York
$36.00 - Out of stock
Foreword by Eugene Thacker
In this collection of aphorisms and short essays, E.M. Cioran sets about the task of peeling off the layers of false realities with which society masks the truth. For him, real hope lies in this task, and thus, while he perceives the world darkly, he refuses to give in to despair. He hits upon this ultimate truth by developing his notion of human history and events as "a procession of delusions," striking out at the so-called "Fallacies of Hope." By examining the relationship between truth and action and between absolutes, unknowables, and frauds, Cioran comes out, for once, in favor of being.
2019, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 13.97 x 20.96 cm
Published by
Arcade Publishing / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
"An antidote to a world gone mad for bedside affirmation"—Washington Post.
E. M. Cioran has been called the last worthy disciple of Nietzsche and a sort of final philosopher of the Western world who combines the compassion of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning (Washington Post).
All Gall Is Divided is the second book Cioran published in French after moving from his native Romania and establishing himself in Paris. It revealed him as an aphorist in a long tradition descending from the ancient Greeks through La Rochefoucault but with a gift for lacerating, subversively off-kilter insights, a twentieth-century nose for the absurdities of the human condition, and what Baudelaire called spleen.
The aphorisms collected here address themes from the atrophy of utterance and the condition of the West to the abyss, solitude, time, religion, music, the vitality of love, history, and the void. The award-winning poet and translator Richard Howard has characterized them as manic humor, howls of pain, and a vestige of tears, but, as he notes too, in these expressions of the philosopher's existential estrangement, there glows a certain sweetness for all of what Cioran calls 'amertume.'
2013, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Arcade Publishing / New York
$34.00 - In stock -
"Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one's reach."
"A love of Cioran creates an urge to press his writing into someone's hand, and is followed by an equal urge to pull it away as poison." — The New Yorker
In this volume, which reaffirms the uncompromising brilliance of his mind, Cioran strips the human condition down to its most basic components, birth and death, suggesting that disaster lies not in the prospect of death but in the fact of birth, that laughable accident. In the lucid, aphoristic style that characterizes his work, Cioran writes of time and death, God and religion, suicide and suffering, and the temptation to silence. Through sharp observation and patient contemplation, Cioran cuts to the heart of the human experience.
"In the company of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard." — Publishers Weekly
"No modern writer twists the knife with Cioran's dexterity .... His writing .... is informed with the bitterness of genuine compassion." — Boston Phoenix
Translated by Richard Howard, Foreword by Eugene Thacker
Emil Mihai Cioran (1911—1995) was a Romanian-born French philosopher and essayist, and author of some two dozen books of savage, unsettling beauty. His works frequently engaged with issues of suffering, decay, and nihilism. For some, he was one of the most subversive thinkers of his time — a 20th-century Nietzsche, only darker and with a better sense of humor. His work has been noted for its pervasive philosophical pessimism, and whimsical, unsystematic, fragmentary style; he is celebrated as one of the great masters of aphorism. He called himself “un homme de fragment.” From the age of 20, Cioran began to suffer from insomnia, a condition which he suffered from for the rest of his life, and permeated his writings. In 1937, Cioran moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris, which became his permanent residence, wherein he lived in seclusion with his partner, Simone Boué, avoiding the public, but still maintained contact with numerous friends, including Mircea Eliade, Eugène Ionesco, Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, Henri Michaux and Fernando Savater.
William H. Gass called Cioran’s work “a philosophical romance on the modern themes of alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as agony, reason as disease”.
“one of the most delicate minds of real power writing today” — Susan Sontag
2012, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Arcade Publishing / New York
$36.00 - Out of stock
E. M. Cioran confronts the place of today's world in the context of human history—focusing on such major issues of the twentieth century as human progress, fanaticism, and science—in this nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Touching upon Man's need to worship, the feebleness of God, the downfall of the Ancient Greeks and the melancholy baseness of all existence, Cioran's pieces are pessimistic in the extreme, but also display a beautiful certainty that renders them delicate, vivid, and memorable. Illuminating and brutally honest, A Short History of Decay dissects Man's decadence in a remarkable series of moving and beautiful pieces.
"When A Short History of Decay was published, it tended to polarize readers. Many dismissed it as overly morose and pessimistic, completely out of tune with the obligatory optimism of postwar European culture. Others praised it for precisely these reasons (in his review of the book, Maurice Nadeau proclaimed Cioran 'the one whose arrival has been prepared by all the philosophers of the void and of the absurd, harbinger of bad news par excellence'). The original impact of Cioran's book can still be felt in reading A Short History of Decay today."—Eugene Thacker, from his Foreword
Translated by Richard Howard, Foreword by Eugene Thacker
Emil Mihai Cioran (1911—1995) was a Romanian-born French philosopher and essayist, and author of some two dozen books of savage, unsettling beauty. His works frequently engaged with issues of suffering, decay, and nihilism. For some, he was one of the most subversive thinkers of his time — a 20th-century Nietzsche, only darker and with a better sense of humor. His work has been noted for its pervasive philosophical pessimism, and whimsical, unsystematic, fragmentary style; he is celebrated as one of the great masters of aphorism. He called himself “un homme de fragment.” From the age of 20, Cioran began to suffer from insomnia, a condition which he suffered from for the rest of his life, and permeated his writings. In 1937, Cioran moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris, which became his permanent residence, wherein he lived in seclusion with his partner, Simone Boué, avoiding the public, but still maintained contact with numerous friends, including Mircea Eliade, Eugène Ionesco, Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, Henri Michaux and Fernando Savater.
William H. Gass called Cioran’s work “a philosophical romance on the modern themes of alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as agony, reason as disease”.
“one of the most delicate minds of real power writing today” — Susan Sontag
2008, English
Softcover, 150 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
Published by
Solar Books / US
$45.00 - In stock -
The work of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) remains a constant source of seminal inspiration, astonishment and provocation across contemporary visual art, film, performance, choreography, digital media, and critical theory, throughout the entire world.
In Artaud: Terminal Curses, Stephen Barber explores the newly-revealed set of 406 notebooks which Artaud used in the final years of his life in Paris, after his release from a decade of asylum-incarceration, to carry through his projects for corporeal transformation and social refusal. Artaud’s notebooks are designed as an autonomous work in their own right, through which he distils his preeminent preoccupations: the envisioning of a new, organ-less human anatomy (crucial for Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical work), his conception of the time and space of gesture, his raw fury against society and all of its manifestions, his visualization of a ruined and supplanted natural and urban world, his intensive confrontation between text and image, and his reflections on the fluctuationg parameters of life and death. Those preoccupations retrospectively illuminate Artaud’s earlier Surrealist work and theories of film and performance.
With 24 pages of illustrations, this eye-opening and original book will be of major significance for all readers interested in the extreme zones of art, literature and media, as well as providing critical new revelations for those engaged with Artaud’s work.
1984, French
Softcover, 72 pages, 30 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Editions Blusson / Paris
$100.00 - Out of stock
First 1984 edition of this very rare French publication, the first work on Artaud's drawings, published by Editions Blusson, Paris. From Artaud's first writings on the visual arts (1920) to the exhibition of his drawings at the Galerie Pierre (1947), Artaud wondered about graphic expression. This heavily illustrated book includes many of Artaud's illustrations accompanying the main texts, dedicated by Artaud to the commentary of his drawings, supplemented by two articles on the correspondence between Artaud and the painter Balthus, and on Artaud's relations with graffiti and art brut. This work remains the first in-depth published book on the question of drawing in Artaud's work. We find there the first constitution, revelation and analysis of the lines of force of the graphic work of Mômo. As well as a description of his analysis of painting and the history of art (the Italian Primitives, Le Vinci, Poussin, Van Gogh, Balthus, Surrealism, etc.). A wonderuful, oversized book. Texts in French.
Very Good copy.
2001, English
Softcover, 334 pages, 14 x 21.5 cm
Published by
Power Publications / Sydney
$30.00 $15.00 - In stock -
"Lacan says that the hysteric is a question raised to the medical establishment: Artaud is nothing but the question itself and it's a question raised to art, to theatre, and to society. The question itself cannot be defined because it's the function of the question that's important."—Sylvere Lotringer
100 Years of Cruelty: Essays on Artaud brings together responses to the Artaud question from some of the leading contemporary scholars working in the humanities today. The essays cover a wide variety of topics in opening the Artaud question to the disciplines – and the demarcations upon which so much knowledge and art practice is defined. They are intended as an affront to conservative thought, as an attack on clinical reason and as an open challenge to the corporate university.
Contributors: Rex Butler, Alan Cholodenko, Lisabeth During, Frances Dyson, Patrick Fuery, Douglas Kahn, Julia Kristeva, Sylvère Lotringer, Mike Parr, Bill Schaffer, Edward Scheer, Lesley Stern, Samuel Weber, Allen S. Weiss.
2000, English
Softcover, 330 pages, 19 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality:
Contemporary Dialogues on the Left
by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek
First --- edition of Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek — The Hegelian legacy, Left strategy, and post-structuralism versus Lacanian psychoanalysis.
What is the contemporary legacy of Gramsci’s notion of Hegemony? How can universality be reformulated now that its spurious versions have been so thoroughly criticized? In this ground-breaking project, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek engage in a dialogue on central questions of contemporary philosophy and politics. Their essays, organized as separate contributions that respond to one another, range over the Hegelian legacy in contemporary critical theory, the theoretical dilemmas of multiculturalism, the universalism-versus-particularism debate, the strategies of the Left in a globalized economy, and the relative merits of post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis for a critical social theory. While the rigor and intelligence with which these writers approach their work is formidable, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality benefits additionally from their clear sense of energy and enjoyment in a revealing and often unpredictable exchange.
Very Good copy.
2017, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 288 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Princeton Architectural Press / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
A cultural history of the face in Western art, ranging from portraiture in painting and photography to film, theater, and mass media
This fascinating book presents the first cultural history and anthropology of the face across centuries, continents, and media. Ranging from funerary masks and masks in drama to the figural work of contemporary artists including Cindy Sherman and Nam June Paik, renowned art historian Hans Belting emphasizes that while the face plays a critical role in human communication, it defies attempts at visual representation.
Belting divides his book into three parts: faces as masks of the self, portraiture as a constantly evolving mask in Western culture, and the fate of the face in the age of mass media. Referencing a vast array of sources, Belting's insights draw on art history, philosophy, theories of visual culture, and cognitive science. He demonstrates that Western efforts to portray the face have repeatedly failed, even with the developments of new media such as photography and film, which promise ever-greater degrees of verisimilitude. In spite of sitting at the heart of human expression, the face resists possession, and creative endeavors to capture it inevitably result in masks—hollow signifiers of the humanity they're meant to embody.
From creations by Van Eyck and August Sander to works by Francis Bacon, Ingmar Bergman, and Chuck Close, Face and Mask takes a remarkable look at how, through the centuries, the physical visage has inspired and evaded artistic interpretation.
Fine copy in Fine dust jacket.
1982, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and plastic sleeve), 126 pages, 33 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Bijutsu Shuppansha / Japan
$150.00 - Out of stock
Published in 1982 and long out-of-print, Masquerade is one of the finest artist books of Japanese illustrator and graphic artist Aquirax Uno. Lavishly illustrated and elaborately designed and directed by the artist himself, this beautiful album collects Uno's most stunning fantastical illustration and painting throughout the 1960s—1980s, alongside texts and photography of Uno in his atelier. Masquerade collates a cross-section of Uno's graphic work spanning his entire career, his iconic and innovative print, book, and theatre works, including many new, unpublished works and illustrations printed in large format across many full-colour fold-outs — a wonderful way to capture his decadent, provocative, stream of consciousness line work in intimate detail. Highly recommended!
Aquirax Uno, also known as Akira Uno (b. 1934) is a Japanese graphic artist, illustrator and painter who was very influential in the 1960s and 1970s. His incredibly unique work is characterized by fantastic visuals, capricious and sensuous line flow, flamboyant (and occasionally grotesque) eroticism, and frequent use of collage and psychedelic bright colours. Uno was prominently involved with the Japanese underground art of the 1960s–1970s, and is particularly notable for his frequent collaborations with Shuji Terayama and his experimental theater Tenjo Sajiki.
Aquirax Uno, also known as Akira Uno (b. 1934) is a Japanese graphic artist, illustrator and painter who was very influential in the 1960s–1970s. His incredibly unique work is characterized by fantastic visuals, capricious and sensuous line flow, flamboyant (and occasionally grotesque) eroticism, and frequent use of collage and psychedelic bright colours. Uno was prominently involved with the Japanese underground art of the 1960s–1970s, and is particularly notable for his frequent collaborations with Shuji Terayama and his experimental theater Tenjo Sajiki.
Fine copy in Near Fine—VG original publisher's textured plastic protector sleeve with usual slight shrinkage from age, very mild in this case.
2023, English
Softcover, 440 pages, 20.2 x 13.6 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$36.00 - Out of stock
Published in 1999 and awarded that year's Prix de Flore, Nicolas Pages marks a departure from the Sadean preoccupations of Guillaume Dustan's first three novels; it is, in essence, a love story. Inspired by a failed romance with the Swiss artist-writer Nicolas Pages and collaging texts that Dustan initially produced for a wide variety of other occasions (magazine articles, short stories, project notes, shopping lists, and more), the "auto-/bio-/porno-graphic" prose of Nicolas Pages is by turns trashy and encyclopedic, corporeal and philosophical. Here Dustan inaugurates a "gay literature" that is no longer painful or shameful, but epicurean and cheerful without ever lapsing into idealism. A vibrant plea for gay rights and a tapestried text that is more than the sum of its many styles, Nicolas Pages is a call to explore the body, sexuality, and writing in all their variety; it is a hymn to life, humanity, pleasure, and desire.
Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. Politics, despair, drugs, music, joy. Dustan remains the sexiest and most radical writer of the late years of the AIDS epidemic in France after Hervé Guibert. From the almost cognitive experience of anal fucking to the critique of social and family institutions, Dustan uses queer sexuality and writing to extract himself from the bourgeois context in which he evolved until his early thirties (he was a judge until he discovered he was HIV positive) to overcome the shame of being outcast as sick and to discover the joy of being alive. Intimate and ferocious at the same time, dazzling and unapologetic. Porn reaches grace and beauty. Dustan was my first editor and my master. Don't miss his books.—Paul B. Preciado, author of An Apartment on Uranus
Guillaume Dustan has the novel straddle his crotch rocket and takes it for a joyride. The outcome? Equal parts fag Kama Sutra and La Vie matérielle. Libidinal philosopher, Dustan dances all night long, knowing "that if we're here then it's to live." With Nicolas Pages, he sets Ecce Homo to house music and goes hard.—Bruce Hainley, author of Under the Sign of [sic]
The point of gay literature, Dustan felt, was not to concentrate on "suffering" but "to roll around on the floor and tell people: you're not having your asses sufficiently eaten and you're not doing enough coke."—Lili Owen Rowlands, London Review of Books
Guillaume Dustan is one of the most important writers of our time. He is also—and this is not the same thing, both qualities being far from homologous—one of the most exciting French intellectuals (which isn't that frequent). Not only did Dustan narrate his life (well), he also reflected upon his time. Very few authors are great writers to such an extent, through the style, power and pure beauty of their texts, while simultaneously producing such a precise, radical, revolutionary and informed reflection on the society around them, a society which remains, through his analysis, ours today.—Constance Debré, author of Love Me Tender
Guillaume Dustan (1965–2005) worked as an administrative judge in France before turning to writing full-time. He is the author of eight books, including the award-winning novel Nicolas Pages. He was posthumously awarded the Prix Sade in 2013.
1983, French
Hardcover, 80 pages, 17 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
L'Autre Musee—La Difference
Paris
$40.00 - Out of stock
First 1983 hardcover edition (later re-printed in the 1990s) of Bellmer — Peintures / Gouaches / Collages by Jean Revol, a lovely pocket monograph on the German artist Hans Bellmer published in France by L'Autre Musee / La Difference, Paris. A heavily illustrated (in colour and b/w) survey of Bellmer's painting and collage works, including some lesser seen early works. Accompanied by text in French from Revol, Bellmer biography, list of exhibitions, bibliography, etc.
Good copy. Clean interior with some marks/light staining to boards.
2023, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 110 pages, 25 x 17 cm
Published by
ACCA / Melbourne
$25.00 - In stock -
Produced in association with the upcoming ACCA exhibition of the same name, this publication casts a lens upon feminist, queer, and non-binary subjectivities to consider the transgressive pleasures and liberations of horror, as makers, masters and consumers of the genre.
From the other side features curatorial texts by Elyse Goldfinch and Jessica Clark, alongside writings from Barbara Creed, author of The Monstrous Feminine; Canadian film writer Kier-La Janisse, author of the cult classic, House of Psychotic Women, 2012; Lisa Fuller, a Murri woman and author of the novel Ghost Bird, 2021; and a horror-themed screenplay by UK-based author and filmmaker Alison Peirse, editor of the Women Make Horror anthology, 2021.
Artists featured in the exhibition and book include Clare Milledge, Cybele Cox, Heather B Swann, Jemima Lucas, Julia Robinson, Karla Dickens, Kellie Wells, Lonnie Hutchinson, Louise Bourgeois, Maria Kozic, Marianna Simnett, Mia Boe, Minyoung Kim, Naomi Blacklock, Naomi Kantjuriny, SJ Norman, Suzan Pitt, Tracey Moffatt and Zamara Zamara.
The exhibition crosses the artificial parameters of horror in the everyday, as something that exists as part of society but also from outside of it. Culminating in a potent synthesis of dread, camp, humour and catharsis, From the other side challenges the traditional narratives and assumed boundaries of the body, gender, the self and the ‘other’.
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 368 pages, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
Published by
Farrar Straus & Giroux / New York
$60.00 - Out of stock
"Destined to become a new classic ... Elkin shatters the truisms that have evolved around feminist thought."—Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography
One of Lit Hub's most anticipated books of 2023
What kind of art does a monster make? And what if monster is a verb? Noun or a verb, the idea is a dare: to overwhelm limits, to invent our own definitions of beauty.
In this dazzlingly original reassessment of women's stories, bodies, and art, Lauren Elkin—the celebrated author of Flaneuse—explores the ways in which feminist artists have taken up the challenge of their work and how they not only react against the patriarchy but redefine their own aesthetic aims. How do we tell the truth about our experiences as bodies? What is the language, what are the materials, that we need to transcribe them? And what are the unique questions facing those engaged with female bodies, queer bodies, sick bodies, racialized bodies?
Encompassing with a rich genealogy of work across the literary and artistic landscape, Elkin makes daring links between disparate points of reference—among them Julia Margaret Cameron's photography, Kara Walker's silhouettes, Vanessa Bell's portraits, Eva Hesse's rope sculptures, Carolee Schneemann's body art, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's trilingual masterpiece DICTEE—and steps into the tradition of cultural criticism established by Susan Sontag, Helene Cixous, and Maggie Nelson.
An erudite, potent examination of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political, the ambiguous and the opaque, Art Monsters is a radical intervention that forces us to consider how the idea of the art monster might transform the way we imagine—and enact—our lives.