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.
1996, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 70 pages, 33.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Janssen Verlag / Berlin
$80.00 - Out of stock
Rare first and only edition of Ed Cervone's Phantasies Of Gay Sex, published in an edition of 1500 copies in 1996 by Janssen Verlag in Berlin, and long out-of-print. Ed's fantastical, whimsical and always joyous colour depictions of homo-erotica fill this over-sized volume, "thirty-one brightly coloured paintings (plus a back cover image), printed on one side of heavy paper to assist pinning up, covering the gamut of the best gay fantasies imaginable. There is no text, just men enjoying each other, by the pool, on the bed, at the drive-in movie theater, on the football field."(—honesterotica)
Born in a refugee camp in Germany during the war's aftermath to a Latvian mother and German soldier, Edmund Cervone (1945 – 2001) and his mother soon found their way to the US. It was in New York City in the 1970's that Ed emerged as an erotic artist and achieved notoriety. Sometimes referred to as Ed of Manhattan, Ed disliked the moniker, an allusion to Tom of Finland. And indeed, his original voice displayed little of the bulked-up stylized figures. Instead, he headed out in another direction, one of more suppleness and litheness. His painterly approach and the motion in his artworks owed as much to his love of landscape painting as it did to the dynamic of the people he would see in the streets of Manhattan. Eschewing models, he would draw from memory from this wealth of characters, matching the joy of his erotic subjects with vibrant, fantastic use of colour. Internationally known as an illustrator for the male erotic press his artwork is part of the permanent collection at the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation in New York City.
Average—Good copy due to moisture rippling/marking to the bottom of the front cover and first book pages, lessening throughout. Light corner bumping, otherwise this would be a VG—Near Copy all other regards.
2023, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 20.2 x 13.7 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$36.00 - In stock -
A remarkable time capsule of Simi Valley, 1979, written before the author would become one of LA's most influential artists of subsequent decades.
When Sean DeLear died prematurely in Vienna in 2017, his friends discovered-among other treasures-an extensive diary kept at the age of fourteen. Still living with his Christian parents in the notoriously racist Los Angeles suburb of Simi Valley, Sean wrote almost every day about crushes and hustling, waterbeds, blackmail, Donna Summer, gloryholes, racism, and shoplifting gay porn.
DeLear would go on to become the frontman for the Los Angeles punk/powerpop band Glue. He was a punk musician, visual artist, intercontinental scenester, video vixen, party host, marijuana farmer, and sometime-collaborator of artists such as Kembra Pfahler and Vaginal Davis.
DeLear's forgotten diaries capture a moment in Los Angeles underground and queer history when, as his friend the writer Cesar Padilla notes, "It wasn't cool at all to be trans, gay, queer or whatever. Those words weren't even in the vocabulary." I Could Not Believe It, Padilla continues, "is a raw fearless innocent gay Black kid's journey coming out into life at an incredible pre-AIDS period. It's not cognizant of being literature. It's as naïve and forthcoming as it gets. It wasn't written with the desire to be published so Sean didn't hold back. Sean's goal was to be true to himself."
"What I love about this 'potent historical artifact of Black youth,' as Brontez Purnell describes it in his introduction, are its notes of uncertainty, lack of pretention and its persistent faith in tomorrow."—Andrew Durbin, Frieze
1974, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi), 112 pages, 26 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kodansha Int / Tokyo
$550.00 - Out of stock
Very rare first 1974 edition of acclaimed female Japanese photographer Ruiko Yoshida's powerful ode to Harlem. Born in Hokkaido in 1938, Yoshida witnessed discrimination against the Ainu, an indigenous peoples native to northern Japan, and much of her work since has been focused on discrimination in society around the world. Harlem : Black Angels is a collection of Yoshida's breath-taking photographs of Harlem in the late 1960s, one of the largest black communities in the world, where she settled after majoring in photojournalism at Columbia University. She married an African American man with whom she had a child. Their daily lives, and the community of Harlemites in the midst of cultural revolution, became the subject of her photographs. The images seem to show a complete assimilation into black culture that had not been depicted by non-black artists at the time and rarely since. Yoshida captures both the time and place with uncanny virtuosity, blurring the frontiers between a personal and an objective documentary of a uniquely vibrant era Harlem. From her touching pictures of the children, to the Vietnam protests, Angela Davis, the funeral of Malcolm X, the Jazz musicians (Coltrane, Davis, Gillespie, Coleman...), the street festivals, the markets, The Black Panthers, Yoshida's gravure images are captioned in both Japanese and English, evoking the powerful sentiments of the time and the spirit of the people.
"Ruiko Yoshida's photographs of Harlem in the early 1970s brilliantly capture various aspects of the culture and the times, showing a side of the U.S. that she felt her Japanese contemporaries knew little about. In the process she created a compelling work that offers an incisive critique of racial hierarchies in the U.S. that, despite its deeply felt humanism, is missing from Bruce Davidson's East 100th Street."—photo-eye
Little known in the West until a reprint in 2010, Harlem : Black Angels has become a jewel of Japanese photo-journalism and a testament to the great breadth of postwar Japanese photobooks. Pictures included in this book were part of the exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power”
Includes text in both Japanese and English by poet Hajime Kijima.
Very Good copy in original publishers plastic dust jacket and original BLUE obi-strip. Dust jacket with the usual shrinkage and wear due to age. Otherwise cover, obi and interior pages VG—NF, preserved by dust jacket all these years. A most complete copy.
1985 / 1993, Japanese
Softcover, 72 pages, 21 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Photographers' Association / Japan
$70.00 - Out of stock
First published in 1985 by the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Photographers' Association, Testament of The Atomic Bomb Survivor presents an unsettling and profound collection of photographs taken by the "hibakusha" (A-bomb survivors) to serve as a stark reminder of the devastation that befell the Japanese people when the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, killing between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians. Richly illustrated glossy b/w photo book, accompanied by captions in Japanese, introduction in Japanese and English, and further historical and biographical information in Japanese.
"The thermal rays and the blast force from the atomic bomb took the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed all the buildings in central Hiroshima in an instant, and turned most of them into ashes. In addition, those who were unharmed at the time of the explosion but exposed to the radiation suffered the symptoms of the A-bomb disease caused by the residual radioactivity, and died one after another. There are still many survivors all over Japan as well as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who are suffering the aftereffects of the bombing. That is something that should never happen again. But we are in danger of having new destruction be- fore the old wounds are healed, and we cannot simply disregard the threat of human extinction. We, the Association of the Photographers of the atomic (Bomb) Destruction of Hiroshima, published a collection of photographs taken by us entitled, "The Time of the Destruction of Hiroshima," in August 1981. As hibakusha (A-bomb survivors) we cannot help but feel indignant at the present situation of the ever continuing production, testing, and de- ployment of nuclear weapons. The forty years following the destruction by the atomic bomb have seen seven of the twenty photographers who survived the bombing die. Those remaining are getting old and the average age of our group is above seventy years. We get impatient at the fact that the atomic bomb is the great enemy of humanity, but the people who can bear witness to what happened are fading out. Hundreds of thousands of people died in bitterness. I intend to offer my short remaining life to keep on telling the story as a witness, lest the death of those people be in vain, while I pray for the repose of their souls.—Yoshito Matsushige, Representative of the Association of the Photographers of the Atomic (Bomb) Destruction of Hiroshima
Very Good—NF copy of 1993 reprint of the 1985 edition. Only light wear.
2023, English
Hardcover, 554 pages, 23 x 15.24 cm
Published by
Lightning Source / Tennessee
$69.00 - Out of stock
Dogra Magra is an unclassifiable, surreal and haunting novel by Japanese author Yumeno Kyūsaku, without any equivalents in the history of Japanese and world literature. First published in 1935, this extremely disturbing work remained totally unknown to the general public for almost thirty years, although it was considered a pure masterpiece by the philosopher Tsurumi Shunsuke who, in a landmark article, placed its author Yumeno Kyūsaku on par with the works of Kafka and Poe. It is a complex and enigmatic work that combines elements of mystery, horror, and philosophy, and has been hailed as a masterpiece of Japanese literature. It is available in English here for the first time.
"An astonishing, unclassifiable work, Dogra Magra is both an unparalleled writing performance and an extraordinary detective novel with a paradoxial program: novel where detectives are criminals. Or rather where the murderer is a victim. An amnesiac wakes up in the middle of the night in the room of a psychiatric hospital. We will see him struggling in the middle of a spider's web woven by the institution's doctors, searching for his identity and possible connection to a mysterious criminal case [...] A masterpiece of parody writing where the Buddhist doctrine of karma and the psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious rub shoulders, this disturbing novel to the extreme, published almost confidentially in 1935 was rediscovered in the sixties. Since then, it has become a cult book in Japan, and reviews and studies about it follow one another continuously. When we close the last page, we understand why it is now considered in his country as one for the major novels of the twentieth century."—back cover of book.
Translated from Japanese to French to English by Patrick Honnoré and Colton R. Auxier
2023, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 16.6 x 23 cm
Published by
Memo Review / Naarm
$35.00 - In stock -
Issue 1 of Memo’s first glossy annual magazine features an extended artist focus on Archie Moore, the 2024 Venice Biennale Australian Representative, with essays by Rex Butler, Tara Heffernan, Tristen Harwood, and Hilary Thurlow.
Audrey Schmidt unveils a covetous history of tall-poppy takedowns in the Melbourne art world. Philip Brophy rips into Hollywood’s shallow art-world playbook, while Cameron Hurst checks-in with the once-celebrated Spike magazine cultural critic, Dean Kissick, in his post-zenith era. The Manhattan Art Review’s Sean Tatol visits the Dutch artist group, KIRAC, reporting on their legal woes with French literature’s ageing enfant terrible, Michel Houellebecq.
We also have essays and reviews on art from all around Australia and the world. Amelia Winata turns up the heat on Melbourne’s public museums as Callum McGrath uncovers a typically Eurocentric failure at the heart of British art historian Claire Bishop’s recent Artforum essay on research-based art. Helen Hughes writes on Helen Johnson’s The Birth of an Institution (2022) and Chelsea Hopper and Shaune Lakin on Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993). Stars like Isa Genzken, Royal Academy graduates like Anna Higgins, cult-favourites like Jas H. Duke — Memo features all this and more.
Texts by Adam Ford, Aimee Dodds, Amelia Winata, Anastasia Murney, Andrew Harper, Audrey Schmidt, Callum McGrath, Cameron Hurst, Camille Orel, Chelsea Hopper, Darren Jorgensen, Gemma Topliss, Giles Fielke, Helen Hughes, Hilary Thurlow, Lévi McLean, Loren Kronemyer, Maraya Takoniatis, Paris Lettau, Philip Brophy, Rayleen Forester, Rebecca Edwards, Rex Butler, Sam Beard, Sean Tatol, Shaune Lakin, Susie Russell, Tara Heffernan, Tristen Harwood, Verónica Tello, Victoria Perin.
2005, English / Japanese
Softcover (in printed envelope), 32 pages, 26 x 18 cm (book) / 30 x 22 cm (envelope)
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Comme des Garçons / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
Issued in 2005 in conjunction with leading Japanese "Magazine for City Boys" Popeye, Comme des Garçons in Wonderland is a whimsical look-book of 2005 CdG menswear and accessories inspired by Alice in Wonderland. Young male models and headless mannequins roam the Tokyo streets, shot by Yasuo Kobayashi and Mark Segal. Concept and creation by Comme des Garçons. Comes in printed envelope (this copy unsealed, complete w. envelope).
Very Good copy.
2008, English
Flexi-cover, 120 pages, 25.8 x 19.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
MoMu / Antwerp
$380.00 - Out of stock
Now a very collectible book, this is first comprehensive book dedicated to Maison Martin Margiela was published on the occasion of Maison Martin Margiela ’20’ The Exhibition, a major touring show celebrating 20 years of work by the influential and enigmatic Belgian fashion designer.
Conceived in close collaboration with Margiela and curated by the Mode Museum (MoMu), Antwerp, the exhibition was later shown at Haus der Kunst, Munich, and Somerset House, London. This book is the catalogue which accompanied the original Antwerp exhibition, and captures Maison Martin Margiela’s deconstructivist, subversive, and often radical approach to fashion, through an examination of the themes and influences that have underpinned the fashion house since its creation. Through colour and black and white photography the book documents 20 years of Maison Martin Margiela collections, fashion shows, events, shop designs, and much more.
A graduate of Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Martin Margiela formerly worked as design assistant to Jean Paul Gaultier before showing his first collection under his own label in 1988. Employing a ‘deconstructivist’ approach - monochromatic palette, outsized garments, non-traditional fabrics, the use of recycled materials and exposing the construction of his clothes - Margiela displayed a radically new visual language that diametrically opposed the power dressing of the 1980s. In deciding to let his fashion speak for itself and remain anonymous, Margiela as a brand is driven by product and sheer invention rather than fad, hype and celebrity often linked to other fashion labels.
This multi-layered exhibition captured Margiela’s unique aesthetic and vision spanning 20 years, by incorporating installations, photography, video and film. It provided an opportunity to learn more about the brand and its philosophy through a visual examination of themes that underpin the essence of the fashion house since its creation - from its deconstructivist, subversive design aesthetic and avant-garde couture to its understated branding, unusual boutique interiors and ‘trompe-l’oeil’ or optical illusion and its couture atelier white coats. Various iconic pieces from both the women and menswear collections will be on display, such as the highly replicated ‘Tabi’ boots, as well as specially recreated garments for the exhibition.
Very Good copy with light wear.
2004, English
Hardcover (clothbound w. illustrated obi strip), 160 pages, 22 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Petit Gras / Japan
$220.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the long out-of-print 2004 hardcover monograph on the work of New York fashion designer/artist Susan Cianciolo. This extensive, profusely illustrated book features a photographic archive of Cianciolo's RUN collections, workshops, performances, exhibitions, collaborations and workshops from the mid 1990s into the early 2000s. An artist who expresses the DIY spirit in all mediums, this wonderful document is a must for any fan. Edited by Taka Kawauchi, includes texts by Aaron Rose.
For the past twenty years, Susan Cianciolo has moved between fields and formats including fashion, performance, installation and filmmaking. After working as an assistant for X-Girl led by Kim Gordon, she produced her critically acclaimed and commercially successful RUN collection (1995–2001), a fashion line of hand crafted clothing made from found or recycled garments and textiles. Cianciolo collections are regularly featured in museums and galleries internationally; her designs, artworks, and films have been included in recent solo exhibitions at Yale Union in Portland, Oregon, 356 Mission Road in Los Angeles, California, and Bridget Donahue in New York, as well as in group exhibitions at White Columns, Lisa Cooley, and MoMA PS1, among others. Cianciolo identifies as "a designer who also makes art, and a conceptual artist who occasionally designs clothes".
Very Good copy with original illustrated obi-strip, some light marking and wear to cloth and edges.
2008, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 912 pages, 13.84 x 20.96 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Farrar Straus & Giroux / New York
$80.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of the posthumous masterwork from "one of the greatest and most influential modern writers”—James Wood, The New York Times Book Review
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.
Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.
Fine in Fine dust jacket. First HC Ed. 2008.
2011, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 19.7 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
New Directions / New York
$65.00 - In stock -
Scarce first 2011 New Directions hardcover edition of The Secret of Evil, a one-of-a-kind collection from the prince of Latin American literature, Roberto Bolaño, internationally celebrated for his novels The Savage Detectives and 2666. Included is everything he was working on just before his death in 2003. A North American journalist in Paris is woken at 4 a.m. by a mysterious caller with urgent information. For V. S. Naipaul, the prevalence of sodomy in Argentina is a symptom of the nation's political ills. Daniela de Montecristo (of Nazi Literature in the Americas and 2666) recounts the loss of her virginity. Arturo Belano - Bolano's alter ego - returns to Mexico City and meets a band called The Asshole of Morelos. Belano's son Geronimo disappears in Berlin during the Days of Chaos in 2005. Memories of a return to the native land. Argentine writers as gangsters. Zombie schlock as allegory ...Opening The Secret of Evil is like being granted access to the Chilean master's personal files; it offers a final opportunity to read the work of an intense, brilliant and truly original writer.
Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. He is the author of The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize, and 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty.
Very Good—Near Fine copy, with Very Good dust jacket.
1986 / 1988, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
St. Martin's Press / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
"What is the postmodern scene? Baudrillard's vision of excremental culture par excellence or a final coming home to a mediascape which even as a 'body without organs' (Deleuze and Guattari), a 'negative space' (Krauss), a 'pure implosion' (Lyotard) or 'a symbolic experience' (Kristeva) is now first nature, and thus the terrain of a new political refusal?"
THE POSTMODERN SCENE is a series of major theorisations about key artistic and intellectual tendencies in the postmodern condition. A variety of texts, ranging from Nietzsche's The Will to Power, Serres' Hermes, Baudrillard's Precession of Simulacra, the visual art of Fischl, Hopper, Colville, and Magritte and recent performance art are used as probes of the human fate in the contemporary century. Here, theoretical reflection is viewed as a privileged artistic act: simultaneously a critical encounter with the 'shock of the real', and a meditation in the form of a lament over the 'intimations of deprival' which speak to us now of postmodern culture, art, and philosophy in ruins.
Arthur Kroker is the founding editor of the Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory. He teaches political science and the humanities at Concordia University, Montreal.
David Cook teaches political theory at Erindale College, University of Toronto.
Good copy, Second 1988 expanded edition. Light general wear, tanning to spine edge.
2013, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 336 pages, 20.8 x 13.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Verso / London
$60.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of Fredric Jameson's The Antinomies of Realism, a history of the nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it impossible to recreate. The works of Zola, Tolstoy, Perez Galdos, and George Eliot are in the most profound sense inimitable, yet continue to dominate the novel form to this day. Novels to emerge since struggle to reconcile the social conditions of their own creation with the history of this mode of writing: the so-called modernist novel is one attempted solution to this conflict, as is the ever-more impoverished variety of commercial narratives - what today's book reviewers dub "serious novels," which are an attempt at the impossible endeavor to roll back the past.
Fredric Jameson examines the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism, approaching the subject himself in terms of the social and historical preconditions for realism's emergence. The realist novel combined an attention to the body and its states of feeling with a focus on the quest for individual realization within the confines of history.
In contemporary writing, other forms of representation - for which the term "postmodern" is too glib - have become visible: for example, in the historical fiction of Hilary Mantel or the stylistic plurality of David Mitchell's novels. Contemporary fiction is shown to be conducting startling experiments in the representation of new realities of a global social totality, modern technological warfare, and historical developments that, although they saturate every corner of our lives, only become apparent on rare occasions and by way of the strangest formal and artistic devices.
In a coda, Jameson explains how "realistic" narratives survived the end of classical realism. In effect, he provides an argument for the serious study of popular fiction and mass culture that transcends lazy journalism and the easy platitudes of recent cultural studies.
"Fredric Jameson is America's leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction."—Terry Eagleton
1996, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 432 pages, 22.8 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Columbia University Press / New York
$80.00 - Out of stock
First 1996 hardcover edition of Julia Kristeva's "Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature". Not only a meditation on Proust, this is a commentary on how the experience of literature is manifested in time and sensation. Kristeva uses Proust as a starting point to reflect upon broader notions of character, time, sensation, metaphor, and history.
"Kristeva as always brings a resourceful and sophisticated theoretical awareness to her interpretive work. By translating much of Proust's post-symbolic discourse on literature into her own psychoanalytic idiom, she invites us to reread him with an innocence and an enthusiasm that today, in this age of suspicion we call our own, are becoming rare."—Modern Philology
Fine copy in NF dust jacket
2017, English
Softcover, 182 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Nine-Banded Books / West Virginia
$35.00 - In stock -
Dennis Cooper has described New Juche as “one of the most inspiring, original and groundbreaking artists working today,” and Mountainhead is arguably the elusive writer/photographer’s most accomplished work to date. Within the structure of a sexually charged exotic travelogue, we discover prose that is at once repulsive, lyrical, and deeply sensual; that is anchored by a raconteur’s instinct for gritty storytelling, yet punctuated by liminal flights of feverish imagination. Mountainhead deftly interlaces personal confession with an unsettling disquisition on pornography, photography, prostitution, the body, identity, and place. In its cascading momentum, readers are confronted by a vertiginous exposition of interpersonally fraught revelation and deception that remains implacably wedded to the thematic emblem of nature as moral alibi.
New Juche is the nom de guerre of a writer and photographer who lives and works in Southeast Asia. He is also the author of Wasteland, The Mollusc and Gymnasium.
2023, English
Softcover, 170 pages, 24 x 18 cm
Published by
Gallows Fruit / Thailand
$70.00 - In stock -
Issue 1 of New Juche's journal HEAT DEATH, published by Gallows Fruit, Thailand. Text and image by New Juche; editorial assistance by Steve Finbow and Karolina Ursula Urbaniak; Design by Karolina Ursula Urbaniak and New Juche.
TOPOPHILIA; NOSTALGIA; ARCHITECTURE; LANDSCAPE; ZONE; RUIN; SEX; ENVIRONMENT; PHOTOGRAPHY; NON-AFFILIATED
"In a room on the top floor I closed the door behind me and took a photo album into the dusty bathtub and lent back with my knees up in front of me and my head on a greasy pillow. Light filtered very pleasantly down through the green vines that laced the unglazed window and the fulsome trees outside. A second shaft of light fell through a space in the torn ceiling. My body felt very still, apart from my heart which I could feel beating and also hear, and it was the only sound in the room apart from birdsong."
New Juche is a writer and artist based in Southeast Asia since 2003. Dennis Cooper has called him "one of the most inspiring, original and groundbreaking artists working today". New Juche's published books include Mountainhead, Bosun, The Devils, and The Worm.
1972, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 96 pages, 22 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Vision Press / London
$90.00 - In stock -
First 1971 hardcover edition of QUE VIVA MEXICO! by Sergei Eisenstein, with an Introduction by Ernest Lindgren and an Afterword by Ivor Montagu, published by Vision Press, London.
"The scenario of Eisenstein's unfinished masterpiece Que Viva Mexico!, together with Ernest Lindgren's enthralling account of the background to the film and its making, was first published in 1951. Sadly, the blocks of the illustrations to the first edition were lost at the printers and the book went quickly out of print. Now, twenty-one years later, the publishers have reprinted the scenario and Lindgren's introduction, both without alteration, and have added thereto twenty freshly lithographed stills from the film, many of which did not appear in the 1951 edition, and an analysis by Ivor Montagu of subsequent events and find- ings relating to the film. Sergei Eisenstein, world-famous creator of the films Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, believed that Que Viva Mexico!, had he been allowed to complete it, would have been his greatest work. The reappearance in print, therefore, of the scenario is, as Ivor Montagu puts it, 'a blessing because it gives the most clear and authentic picture of this remarkable film as Eisenstein sought to make it, while the admirably compact introduction by Lindgren puts the director squarely in his place in film history and the "Mexican project" squarely in its place in his life and work'.
Ernest Lindgren is Curator of the National Film Archive and a Director of the British Film Institute.
Ivor Montagu is the author of With Eisenstein in Hollywood and an acknowledged British authority on the Russian cinema.
Fine copy in VG dust jacket with light wear, preserved in mylar wrap.
2017, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 17 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Nero / Rome
$260.00 - In stock -
The unfinished works of Sergei Eisenstein are traversed by aesthetic, anthropological, and political questions.
First, only edition of this incredible, fast out-of-print book published on the occasion of the exhibition Sergei Eisenstein: The Anthropology of Rhythm, 2017—2018, edited by the curators, art and film historians Marie Rebecchi and Elena Vogman, in collaboration with the artist and typographer Till Gathmann, published by NERO. Copiously illustrated with documents from Eisenstein’s archives that were exhibited for the first time, including notebooks, drawings, film footage and photographs, this book "proposes to explore the intersecting aesthetic, anthropological and political dimensions of three unfinished film projects by Sergei Eisenstein. The Soviet director (b. 1898, Riga — d. 1948, Moscow) is best known today as the paradigmatic author of revolutionary Soviet cinema. Yet there is another face to this Janus-like figure, many of whose unfinished film projects and extensive theoretical works remained unpublished and unknown during his lifetime — and to a certain extent until today. It is this as yet unacknowledged body of work which make up the subject matter of the present book. Focusing in particular on the anthropology of rhythm in Eisenstein’s Mexican project (Que viva Mexico!, 1931–1932), the book follows this thread to two other unfinished projects: the destroyed film Bezhin Meadow (1935–37) and Fergana Canal (1939), which came to a halt before filming even begun".
Fine copy.
1969, English
Softcover, unpaginated, 31 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gaberbocchus Press / London
$200.00 - In stock -
Very rare copy of the first and only 1969 edition of Franciszka Themerson's artist book, Traces of Living: Drawings, self-published by her avant-garde London publishing house, Gaberbocchus Press, founded in 1948 by the artist couple Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, along with translator Barbara Wright and the artist Gwen Barnard. Traces of Living is a gorgeous over-sized album teeming with Themerson's remarkable line drawings. Her experimental drawings became synonymous with the radical originality of the presses book-design, which includes works by Alfred Jarry, Kurt Schwitters, Bertrand Russell, Raymond Queneau, and many others. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi was its flagship publication, published in many editions and still in print. The Gaberbocchus edition is a most apposite evocation of the spirit of Jarry's grotesque fable. The text, which was hand-written directly onto lithographic plates by the translator, Barbara Wright - interspersed with Themerson's conte crayon illustrations - is printed on loud yellow pages. Themerson's contributions as illustrator contributed enormously to the autograph originality of design of Gaberbocchus books. The content of the Themersons' own books were often experiments with language and visual effects. The form was tailored for each publication to support and complement the content, using self-produced paper and other techniques. Apart from appearing in many journals worldwide, several collections of Franciszka Themerson's drawings have been published as books: Forty Drawings for Friends, London 1940-42 (1943), The Way It Walks (1954), Traces of Living (1969) and Music (1998). Themerson's theatre designs included marionette productions of Ubu Roi, Ubu Enchainé and the Threepenny Opera, mostly made for the Marionetteatern in Stockholm, in the 1960s, which toured worldwide for decades, and were rewarded with international acclaim. Many of these were exhibited at the National Theatre in 1993.
Good—Very Good copy with some light spine pinches, markings to covers.
1962, English
Softcover (staple-bound), unpaginated, 32 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gaberbocchus Press / London
$350.00 - In stock -
Exceptionally rare copy of the first and only 1962 edition of wife and husband Franciszka Themerson and Stefan Themerson's experimental artist book, Semantic Divertissements, self-published by their avant-garde London publishing house, Gaberbocchus Press, founded in 1948 by the artist couple, along with translator Barbara Wright and the artist Gwen Barnard. Semantic Divertissements is a gorgeous over-sized album presenting ten collaborative artworks combining Stefan's amusing concrete poetry with Franciszka's whimsical drawings. Married in 1931, the couple begun collaborating together making experimental film, inventing the ‘moving photogram’ as its principal medium. As key catalysts behind a vital film-making avant-garde in 1930s Warsaw, they made five short, lyrical and technically inventive films. The Themerson's own books were often experiments with language and visual effects. The form was tailored for each publication to support and complement the content, using self-produced paper and other experimental techniques. Their radical approach was echoed in the presses original book-design and catalogue, which included works by Alfred Jarry, Kurt Schwitters, Bertrand Russell, Raymond Queneau, and many others.
Good—Very Good copy with some light corner bumping, light cover marks and light bug nibbles.
1997, English
Softcover, 223 pages, 18.5 x 13 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Purple Books / Paris
$300.00 - Out of stock
Very rare early Purple Fashion - the original run, original design, original format. Purple Fashion number 3 (1997), edited by Elein Fleiss, embodies the anti-Fashion attitude and aesthetic Purple were so much a crucial part of in the mid-late 1990s. Includes a fantastic Martin Margiela piece, Comme des Garçons by Mark Borthwick, Camille Vivier, Maurizio Cattelan, Elein Fleiss, Terry Richardson, Susan Ciancolo, Helmut Lang, Anders Edstrom, Kim Gordon by Mark Borthwick and much more. Really incredible and now so rare these early issues. And this one is in great condition!
In 1992 Olivier Zahm and his partner Elein Fleiss printed the first issue of Purple Prose, a Parisian literary art zine that over the years has evolved into Purple Fashion Magazine. Soon after the birth of Purple Prose, Zahm and Fleiss created spin-off publications like les cahiers purple, Purple Sexe, Purple Fiction, and of course, Purple Fashion. Zahm aimed at fusing together his two worlds, fashion and art, in creating Purple Fashion.
Very Good copy.
2023, English
Softcover, 78 pages, 20 x 29.9 cm
First edition, edition of 150,
Published by
no more poetry / Naarm
$28.00 - In stock -
no more poetry presents nmp.18
SOMETHING WRITING
the debut anthology by Carmen-Sibha Keiso
Carmen-Sibha Keiso is an Arab-Australian artist, writer and facilitator working in performance, video, and text. Through a socially-collaborative and research based process, Keiso approaches their practice as a subjugated, intersectional mise-en-scéne in order to delineate how we utilise place to further understand the self. This is their debut publication.
cskeiso.com
readtheroom.info
First edition, edition of 150
2023, English
Softcover (chicago screw, exposed spine), 60 pages, 14.8 x 21 cm
First edition, edition of 120, numbered,
Published by
no more poetry / Naarm
$25.00 - In stock -
Enter into Jessica Rose Pearson’s debut poetry collection Yearning At The Opera Bar:
The curtain opens on a girl or girl-like thing, early
20’s, laying on the floor of her studio apartment,
masturbating, listening to Mass B Minor, BWV 232
“Hohe Messe”: No. 4 Chorus: Et
incarnatus est
play it
The next 52 pages descend into the exact document of sex, love and living that you could hope for. The book arrives sharp and stays unrelentingly funny until the very end. What is so special about Pearson’s humour is that it cuts in a way that, while buoyant and playful, reveals something of deep philosophical intrigue. The poetry is determined in its delicate exploration of interpersonal minutiae. Pearson is deeply attuned to both touch and colour and their potential to evoke and seduce the reader. The poetry is concise, considerate and intelligent.
Pearson will define love many times throughout this collection; a pizza hut pamphlet, a green apple, car sex, hourly spoonfuls of yoghurt, stanley tucci. Strangely, what love is doesn’t seem to be what is most important in these poems. What is important is that we get to watch this exploration and in turn witness the many forms desire takes. Indeed we are given a document on love’s mesmerising temporality and strange unpredictable movement. This book is a brilliant survey of attraction’s mysteries.
Jessica Rose Pearson has written a book that reminds us of the unwavering curiosity that unites all artforms across all mediums. We are given 39 scenes. However, we could just as easily say that we have been given 39 paintings or 39 songs or 39 photographs or perhaps 39 poems. There is a broadness and openness to Pearson’s writing that invites us to daydream and extrapolate and animate the writing in whatever way we desire, as if laying free in the hard setting light of the sun across the tiled floor of our respective apartments truly living as the main character of our own little life.
We are invited to play it. And so we read on...
First edition, edition of 120, numbered
2023, English
Softcover, 244 pages, 10.8 x 17.8 cm
Third edition, edition of 160, numbered,
Published by
no more poetry / Naarm
$35.00 - In stock -
no more poetry presents one story a day, the the debut anthology by writer Genevieve Callaghan.
Third edition, edition of 150, numbered.
"…Il était une fois… an Australian woman had an idea on the plane to France. The idea was quite simple - she would write one very short story every day, and post it on Instagram. Posting the stories online would keep her accountable to any potential followers, but handwriting the stories in her often illegible script would keep her from pandering to those followers - keep her storytelling pure. Honest. Her handwriting was like her speaking voice, or her language, or her mind - some people would understand it, some people wouldn’t. C’est la vie. Aside from the artistic and practical benefits the woman thought she might gain from embarking on the project, the deeper benefit (she hoped) would be a personal one."
“the woman” reflects on one story a day.
What we have been given by Genevieve Callaghan in one story a day is an unwavering mastery of time and craft. The book offers a generous mapping of the author’s spontaneity in speculation and narrative. What we receive is therefore not just a collection of stories, questions and ponderings, but an illuminating insight into the operation of ritual and persistence. We are given an inspiring perspective on the craft of craft itself; the honed, daily practice of observation and imagination.
Sure, a day presents us with a near endless expanse of possibilities, but these possibilities are often so tightly wound within the expectations of work, time, care and place that we fail to see or act in accordance to our infinite potential. Which is to say life gets in the way. But what Callaghan reminds us is of the limitlessness of poetry and art; the expansive opportunity and delight of our own minds and how we may use this to remind ourselves of our own and other’s immeasurable potential. Or perhaps how we may use writing or art to operate on our own grief, pain, confusion or indecision. The writing is therefore both grounding and inspiring, in her own words as Callaghan states in story 28 she is ‘humming something holy to remind us where we are’.
We follow the author in her survey of all things: unwavering grief, striking humour, bountiful love, paralysing normality, professional explorations of intimacy, musical perchance, unbridled joy, lengthy pain, spiritual mundanity, quiet indulgence, failing memory, potent magic, elongated heartbreak, blind risk, chaotic bus rides, uncontrollable loss, supreme silence, unexpected fantasy, and nothing… sometimes nothing at all. We follow the author as she explores the whirlwind navigation of life through the eyes of children, construction workers, jasmine vines, pigeons, lovers, diplomats, cities, spiders, monuments, nurses, jacaranda trees, oceans, and even the humble ponderings of a concrete block. Callaghan throws us briefly but surely between time and desire. Her writing is specific and generous, at once both simple and elaborate.
one story a day delicately strings together the disparate and unifying elements of human and non-human existence; the broad mechanics of life itself. Further, through tenderness, wit and striking nuance Callaghan so gently monitors and magnifies the delightful and alluring specificities that colour such existence. As she states in story 381 ‘I eyed the world, daring it to say one fucking thing.’
Callaghan states in story 167 ‘i realise that the same things can happen anywhere’. And so here in this book we are given a few things that happen in a few places to a few people, and what a glorious few it is. no more poetry are incredibly excited to publish what will be our 13th collection and one of the most enriching and unique books to date. We are extremely grateful to Genevieve for trusting our home to let it land in.