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.
1972 / 1983, English
Softcover, 166 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
$18.00 - Out of stock
'Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.'
'But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.'
John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: 'This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.' By now he has.
John Peter Berger (1926 – 2017) was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was published in 1958, and since then his books have included Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, and the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently and moved to a small village in the French Alps. He died in 2017.
'Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of professional art critics ... he is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings to work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation'
Peter Fuller, Arts Review
'One of the most influential intellectuals of our time'
Observer
1977, Japanese
Softcover, 100 pages, 27.5 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
PARCO / Tokyo
$65.00 - Out of stock
Second issue (1977) of Parco's wild Surprise House magazine. Like Super Art Gocoo, Surprise House was a crazy late 1970s-1980s graphic art journal published by the mighty Parco gallery, imprint and department-store-like-no-other in Tokyo. A celebration of psycho graphic visual language and advertising provocation (MADVERTISING) from the new (and old) of Japan's avant-garde, this issue of SUPER, with covers by airbrush superstars Pater Sato (front) and Harumi Yamaguchi (back), features everything from Ghetto Sesame Street to "Nazi products" in a series of Japanese responses to works from America's legendary National Lampoon magazine, the work of Tsunehisa Kimura, Shūji Terayama, Teruhiko Yumura, Genpei Akasegawa, Hajime Sawatari, Iku Akiyama, Osamu Harada, Nobuhiro Kawanaka, Kenji Kawamoto, more Harumi Yamaguchi, more Sato, manga by Shinta Chō, and much more. Parco were instrumental in exhibiting, publishing and promoting Japanese and international graphic artists and new pop culture in this period, and these journals create a wonderful time-capsule at the height of that incredible time.
Very Good - Fine copy.
2005, Japanese
Softcover, unpaginated, 21 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
TACO che / Tokyo
$90.00 - In stock -
Scarce book collection / catalogue of illustrations by Gekko Hayashi aka Gojin Ishihara, published on he occasion of and exhibition at TACO che gallery/store in Tokyo in 2005. Illustrated throughout in colour, the book focusses almost entirely on Hayashi's gay erotic works, with some further S&M erotic fantasy for good measure. Gojin Ishihara, once known as an illustrator of monsters in boys’ and girls’ magazines, moved on to pornographic magazines in the 1970s under the name Gekko Hayashi. He was one of the main illustrators for the gay magazine “Sabu” and “Queen”. In the boy’s love magazine, “June”, he became popular among Yaoi (boys’ love) fans for his outstanding drawing skill. He is a pioneer in the genre of boys’ love and his dazzling sensuality still attracts many readers.
As New copy.
2022, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 318 pages, 15 x 21 cm
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
The book collection of gay illustrations done under the name of Gekko Hayashi aka Gojin Ishihara.
Gojin Ishihara, once known as an illustrator of monsters in boys’ and girls’ magazines, moved on to pornographic magazines in the 1970s under the name Gekko Hayashi. He was one of the main illustrators for the gay magazine “Sabu” and “Queen”. In the boy’s love magazine, “June”, he became popular among Yaoi (boys’ love) fans for his outstanding drawing skill. He is a pioneer in the genre of boys’ love and his dazzling sensuality still attracts many readers.
Contributions (in japanese) by Tomomi Shibuya (Sociologist), Gengoroh Tagame (Manga artist), Ayumi Nakayama (TACO che bookstore)
1999, English
Hardcover (with velvet cloth and plastic jacket), 56 pages, 18.8 x 21.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Pan-Exotica / Tokyo
$50.00 - Out of stock
First velvet-covered edition of illustrator Trevor Brown's illustrated "Lolita Punk" alphabet book, a cute and grotesque alphabet book in a children's book style, published in 1999 in Japan, where the English artist has resided since 1994. Trevor Brown (b. 1959) is an illusive and prolific artist who's work explores paraphilias, such as lolicon, ero guro, BDSM, and other fetish themes. Innocence and violence collide in Brown's confronting images. Early features on his art appeared in Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture II, Shade Rupe's Funeral Party 2, and in Jim Goad's ANSWER Me! zine, garnering him wide notoriety across the provocative underground publishing scene of the 1980s—90s. He's contributed artwork to many album covers of Whitehouse, Coil, John Zorn, and many more, illustrated for Coup de Grace, an edition of Friedrich Nietzsche's Der Antichrist, the covers of Timeless magazine, and more recently illustrated the cover of the Gothic & Lolita Bible (a subculture in which Brown has many dedicated fans) in Japan, where Brown's work has been published in many art book editions.
Near Fine copy.
2022, English
Softcover, 300 pages, 15 x 20 cm
Published by
Mary Go Wild / Amsterdam
$59.00 - In stock -
Trance has been the flagship for electronic music across the globe during the nineties and early zeroes. The sound’s trademark optimistic and euphoric aspects has brought some of the most compelling musical pieces of its time, and undoubtedly had a significant influence on future electronic music to come. Yet, its historical significance has been highly overlooked.
Hypnotised is the first encyclopedia to cover the global trance movement during its most prolific years. The book spans a near-complete discography of supposedly essential albums, labels and releases, alongside in-depth interviews with influential artists and label owners.
''Most don’t know that the power of repetition was already understood by classical musicians. Their works can warp you into a trance-like state. Trance was built on those same principles and its influence on popular music has been widespread ever since. Although I am lucky enough to be part of trance since the late nineties, I still learned a great deal from this book.''—Armin van Buuren
''This encyclopedia dives deep into the history, meaning and evolution of trance, thereby exposing its importance as well as its footprint on other genres to dig inspiration from. A fantastic read that will most definitely raise eyebrows and bring 'aha' moments with the most dedicated trance fans and its harshest critics alike.''—Ferry Corsten
2006, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 25.5 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Eros Comix / Seattle
$160.00 - Out of stock
Rare early English-language collection of the cult classic eromanga Bondage Fairies, "the first hit translated adult manga" — Manga: The Complete Guide. This is the first edition of Book One, The Original Bondage Fairies, published by Eros Comix in 2006, collecting the first of the original series from the early 1990s. These English editions are super hard to come by.
Created by manga artist Teruo Kakuta under the pen name "Kondom", a multilingual pun, meaning "little insect" in Japanese and "condom" in English, Bondage Fairies is an erotic series about highly sexual female forest fairies, who work as police officers protecting the forest, whilst engaging in a wild array of anthropomorphized, inter-species sexual acts. The series began in Japan in 1990 as Insect Hunter, but it was quickly banned from sale by the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance. Under a new title, the manga was serialized in manga magazine Lemon Kids. The series is among the earliest sexually explicit manga (eromanga) commercially translated and published uncensored in the United States where the earliest editions date from 1994 (Venus Press). Eros Comix subsequently published a multi-volume series of the collected Bondage Fairies, and subsequent stories, now all very collectible. Translated to Swedish, German, French, and Italian, Bondage Fairies is one of the most popular underground adult Japanese comics outside Japan.
Very Good copy.
2005, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 24 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Eros Comix / Seattle
$140.00 - Out of stock
Rare early English-language collection of the cult classic eromanga Bondage Fairies, "the first hit translated adult manga" — Manga: The Complete Guide. This is the first edition of Book Two, The Original Bondage Fairies, published by Eros Comix, Seattle, in 2005, collecting the first of the original series from the early 1990s. Each of these graphic collections compiles 5-6 issues of the comic book with additional artworks. Very collectible in the English language.
Created by manga artist Teruo Kakuta under the pen name "Kondom", a multilingual pun, meaning "little insect" in Japanese and "condom" in English, Bondage Fairies is an erotic series about highly sexual female forest fairies, who work as police officers protecting the forest, whilst engaging in a wild array of anthropomorphized, inter-species sexual acts. The series began in Japan in 1990 as Insect Hunter, but it was quickly banned from sale by the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance. Under a new title, the manga was serialized in manga magazine Lemon Kids. The series is among the earliest sexually explicit manga (eromanga) commercially translated and published uncensored in the United States where the earliest editions date from 1994 (Venus Press). Eros Comix subsequently published a multi-volume series of the collected Bondage Fairies, and subsequent stories, now all very collectible. Also translated to Swedish, German, French, and Italian, Bondage Fairies is one of the most popular underground adult Japanese comics outside Japan.
Good copy with some corner bumps.
2011, English
Softcover, 108 pages, 22.9 x 15.3 cm
Published by
The Hedayat Foundation / Iran
$30.00 - In stock -
The definitive English translation of one of the most important, controversial Iranian novels. As inscrutable as it is universal, Blind Owl is the seminal work of Persian modernism, and one of the great novels of the twentieth century. This 75th anniversary edition, translated by award-winning writer Naveed Noori and published in conjunction with the Hedayat Foundation, is the first translation to use the definitive Bombay edition (Hedayat's handwritten text), and the only available English translation by a native Persian and English speaker.
Written by one of the greatest Iranian writers of the twentieth century, Blind Owl, Hedayat's masterpiece defies categorization. It tells a two-part story of an isolated narrator with a fragile relationship with time and reality. In first person, the narrator offers a string of hazy, dreamlike recollections fueled by opium and alcohol. He spends time painting the exact same scene on the covers of pen cases: an old man wearing a cape and turban sitting under a cypress tree, separated by a small stream from a beautiful woman in black who offers him a water lily. In a one-page transition, the reader finds the narrator covered in blood and waiting for the police to arrest him. In part two, readers glimpse the grim realities that unlock the mysteries of the first part. In a new translation that reflects Hedayat’s conversational, confessional tone, Blind Owl joins the ranks of classics by Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky that explore the dark recesses of the human psyche.
This 75th anniversary edition, translated by award-winning writer Naveed Noori and published in conjunction with the Hedayat Foundation, is notable for a number of firsts: The only translation endorsed by the Sadegh Hedayat Foundation The first translation to use the definitive Bombay edition (Hedayat's handwritten text) The only available English translation by a native Persian and English speaker The preface includes a detailed textual analysis of the Blind Owl Finally, by largely preserving the spirit as well as the structure of Hedayat's writing, this edition brings the English reader into the world of the Hedayat's Blind Owl as never before. Extensive footnotes (explaining Persian words, phrases, and customs ignored in previous translations) provide deeper understanding of this work for both the causal reader and the serious student of literature.
Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951) was an Iranian short-story writer, novelist, playwright, and essayist who introduced modernist techniques into Persian fiction. Hedayat was interested in Iranian folk-lore and was a central figure in Tehrān intellectual circles, belonging to the antimonarchical, anti-Islamic literary group known as the Four. Hedayat’s most famous novel, the haunting and profoundly pessimistic Būf-e Kūr (1937; The Blind Owl), tells of death, loss and psychosis, and is considered the most important work of literature to come out of Iran in the past century. A deeply melancholy man, he lived with a vision of the absurdity of human existence and his inability to effect a change for the good in Iran. He withdrew from his friends and began to seek escape from his sense of futility in drugs and alcohol. In 1951, overwhelmed by despair, he left Tehrān and went to Paris, where, on April 4, 1951, he took his own life by gassing himself. Dubbed the father of ‘psycho-fiction’, or the Iranian Franz Kafka, Sadeq Hedayat left behind an oeuvre that is mesmerising, puzzling, and petrifying.
1973, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 18 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Dell / New York
$65.00 - Out of stock
"Up from the underground! The most outrageous, erotic, and mind-boggling cartoon adventures you'll ever see!"
First edition of this paperback collection of comics featuring an assortment of Junkwaffel lizards and busty Bodé girls originally produced by Vaughn Bodē for Cavalier Magazine in the 60's and early 70's and published following his legendary "Cartoon Concert" tour. Beginning in 1972, Bodē toured with a show called the "Cartoon Concert," that featured him vocalizing his characters while their depictions were presented on a screen behind him via a slide projector. Touring comic book conventions and becoming very popular on the college lecture circuit, Bodē even performed it at The Louvre, in Paris.
Vaughn Bodē (1941 – 1975) was an American underground cartoonist and illustrator known for his character Cheech Wizard and his artwork depicting voluptuous women. In 1963, at age 21, and while living in Utica, New York, Bodē self-published Das Kämpf, considered one of the first underground comic books. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he illustrated covers and interior art for the science fiction digests Amazing Stories, Fantastic, Galaxy Science Fiction, Witzend and Worlds of If. Discovered by fellow cartoonist Trina Robbins, Bodē moved to Manhattan in 1969 and joined the staff of the underground newspaper the East Village Other. Beginning in 1968 and continuing until his untimely death from autoerotic asphyxiation in 1975, Bodē entered a prolific period of creativity, introducing a number of strips and ongoing series, most of which ran in underground newspapers or erotic magazines. Bodē described his sexuality as "auto-sexual, heterosexual, homosexual, mano-sexual, sado-sexual, trans-sexual, uni-sexual, omni-sexual." A contemporary of animator Ralph Bakshi, Bodē has been credited as an influence on Bakshi's animated films Wizards and The Lord of the Rings. He warned Bakshi against working with Robert Crumb on the animated film adaptation of Crumb's strip Fritz the Cat. Bodē has a huge following among graffiti artists, with his characters remaining a popular subject of the culture. Bodē was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame for comics artists in 2006.
Very Good copy, tightly bound.
2018, English
Softcover, 162 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Bottle of Smoke Press / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
THE NEW NIHILISM contains 13 new essays on a variety of anarchist-related themes; nihilism, comix (and their relationship to anarchist philosophy), class, environmentalism, modern medicine, law (and the lack of justice), crime, modern media, celtomania, late style, and MUCH more. An important and fascinating book that will change the way that you see the world. A must-read for followers of Mr. Wilson's work or anyone interested in opening their minds to un-filtered reality of life and the way the modern world really works.This book will open your eyes. A very important work from an important author and thinker.
Rear cover blurb and author photo by Gerard Malanga.
1999 / 2005, English
Softcover, 260 pages, 21.5 x 13.2 cm
Published by
Feral House / Los Angeles
$35.00 - In stock -
Against Civilization, first published in 1999 by Uncivilized Books and out of print for several years, is the well-regarded primer to Green Anarchism, Anarcho-Primitivism and the most radical but relevant form of anarchism to develop in the past decade. Anarcho-primitivism is a shorthand term for a radical current that critiques the totality of civilisation from an anarchist perspective and seeks to initiate a comprehensive transformation of human life. Revised and expanded edition.
1994 / 2012, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 21.6 x 14 cm
Published by
Feral House / Los Angeles
$35.00 - In stock -
As our society is stricken with repeated technological disasters, and the apocalyptic problems that go with them, the "neo-primitivist" essays of John Zerzan seem more relevant than ever.
"Future Primitive," (1994) the core innovative essay of Future Primitive Revisited, has been out of print for years. This new edition is updated with never-before-printed essays that speak to a youthful political movement and influential writers such as Derrick Jensen and Paul Theroux.
An active participant in the contemporary anarchist resurgence, John Zerzan has been an invited speaker at both radical and conventional events on several continents. His weekly Anarchy Radio broadcast streams live on KWVA radio.
"Anyone who travels with his eyes open understands the sense of much of what you have written, and the longer I live the greater my contempt for the opportunists who run governments and dictate our lives with technology."—Paul Theroux
"Zerzan's writing is sharp, uncompromising, and tenacious."—Derrick Jensen
"John Zerzan's importance does not only consist in his brilliant intelligence, his absolute clearness of analysis and his unequalled dialectical synthesis that clarifies even the most complicated questions, but also in the humanity that fills his thoughts of resistance. Future Primitive Revisited is one more precious gift for us all."—Enrico Manicardi, author of Liberi dalla Civiltá (Free from Civilization)
"Of course we should go primitive. This doesn't mean abandoning material needs, tools, or skills, but ending our obsession with such concerns. Declaring for community, our true origin: personal autonomy, trust, mutual support in pursuit of all the joys and troubles of life. Society was a trap—massive, demanding, impersonal and debilitating from day one. So hurry back to the community, friends, and welcome all the consequences of such an orientation. The reasons for fear and despair will only multiply if we remain in this brutal and dangerous state of civilization."—Blok 45 publishing, Belgrade
2013, English
Softcover, 90 pages, 16.5 x 11.5 cm
Published by
AK Press / Edinburgh
$25.00 - Out of stock
First circulated on the streets of Greenwich Village in 1967, the SCUM Manifesto is a searing indictment of patriarchal culture in all its forms. Shifting fluidly between the worlds of satire and straightforward critique, this classic is a call to action--a radical feminist vision for a different world. This is an update of the essential AK Press edition, with a new foreword by Michelle Tea.
"To see the SCUM Manifesto's humor, to let it crack you up page after page, is not to read it as a joke. It's not. The truth of the world as seen though Valerie's eyes is patently absurd, a cosmic joke. Humor such as this is a muscle, a weapon... It was the truth, and the truth is so absurd it's painful."—Michelle Tea
"Unhampered by propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, 'morals', the respect of assholes, always funky, dirty, low-down SCUM gets around... You've got to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex, and SCUM's been through it all, and they're now ready for a new show; they want to crawl out from under the dock, move, take off, sink out."—Valerie Solanas
Valerie Solanas was a radical feminist playwright and social propagandist who was arrested in 1968 after her attempted assassination of Andy Warhol. Deemed a paranoid schizophrenic by the state, Solanas was immortalized in the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 28 pages, 16 x 11 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$28.00 - In stock -
A new edition of the posthumously published collection 'A Book of Music' by the American poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965).
While little known outside a circle of friends and poets in his lifetime, Spicer is widely considered one of the major figures of twentieth century American poetry.
After being removed from a teaching position at Berkeley in 1950 for refusing to pledge allegiance to the United States, he became a founder of the radical and counter-cultural San Francisco Renaissance movement of poets in an age when homosexuality was illegal.
He believed that the poet was a “radio” able to collect transmissions from an “invisible world,” as opposed to the idea that poetry was driven by a poet’s voice and will. In this sense he believed that his poems were dictated from a spirit world and saw poetry as a form of magic, most potent when spoken aloud.
He died at the age of 40 in the poverty ward of San Francisco General Hospital, from acute alcohol poisoning. One of his last coherent sentences was, “My vocabulary did this to me.”
This new edition of A Book of Music, published 65 years after its original was composed, is risograph printed on Munken Lynx paper and saddle-stitched by Earthbound Press.
2023, English
Softcover, 137 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$35.00 - In stock -
Solitary Pleasure is a new collection of poetry, journal entries, letters and ephemera by the American poet John Wieners, edited by Richard Porter with an introduction by Nat Raha.
John Wieners (1934-2002) was a poet, a Black Mountain College alumnus and an antiwar, gay rights & mental health activist.
‘John Wieners has been described as both ‘the greatest poet of emotion’ (by Robert Creeley) and ‘the poet laureate of gay liberation’ (within the Gay Liberation press). Solitary Pleasure delivers us this poet raw with mid-century queer feelings. Here, we encounter a writer preoccupied with the power and magic of poetics to profoundly render love, loss and survival in the face of destruction.’—Nat Raha, from the introduction
'Any "selected poems" is going to reveal the tastes of its editor, especially when those poems are selected from among an extensive body of work like the one John Wieners left us. Richard Porter's taste is exquisite, and his selection covers great ground, from the torch song poems of Wieners' early career to the rich, tessellated works of his beautiful and anguished late-sixties period. If I wanted a friend to fall in love with John Wieners, I'd give them this book.'—Michael Seth Stewart, editor of Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners (City Lights)
'This book is a great love held on paper, groaning out of Black Mountain and Boston. You are hit accurately by the poet flying around you as a reincarnated bow and arrow cherub. John Wieners is a fever dream where the poems forever maintain their mystery, releasing a flood of spontaneity in the reader's imagination. Let's get in the magic with both feet; let's do it now!'—CAConrad, author of Amanda Paradise and While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books)
2023, English
Softcover, 590 pages, 12.7 x 20.4 cm
Published by
Whiskey Tit / USA
$42.00 - In stock -
Here you are, shopping for books online because honestly, who has the energy to go out anymore? There are so many people out there, all buying the same Oprah-stickered crap to take to the coffee shop and Instagram next to their PSLs and blueberry muffins with one perfect bite taken out (or pretend to read until their latest Tinder date shows up). It’s insufferable – the performance of it all – and everyone knows small presses are where the real literary vanguard is happening these days anyway. Well, maybe not everyone. But that’s kind of the point of your being here, isn’t it?
You consider yourself something of a snob when it comes to your reading choices, though not in a pretentious way. You’re discerning is all. A serious person of uniquely refined and sophisticated tastes. Perhaps you felt drawn to click on this particular novel due to its provocative, all-caps title, or the cheeky contrast between its memeified typeface and classical-realist cover art. Perhaps you were intrigued by the blurbs and social media chatter invoking transgressive iconoclasts like Michel Houellebecq, Bret Easton Ellis, and Chuck Palahniuk. Or perhaps you’re already an acolyte of this particular indie press and its stated mission of “degeneracy and degradation.” You are, after all, the kind of unflappable literary deviant who actively seeks to have your ethical buttons pushed and your moral boundaries tested. The kind who enjoys nothing quite so much as a vicarious tramp through such aberrantly foul and filthy lives as you could never dare live yourself. And the kind who, even while wallowing in narcissism and self-loathing at your own complicity in same, feels such a profoundly personal anguish at the ongoing commodification of all art beneath the endless crush of content culture that you probably think this book is about you, (don’t you? Don’t you?).
And quite frankly, if you’ve read this far, then maybe it is. Maybe you are exactly who this book is about. And by. And for. And as such, maybe you should give it a look, and let the world know exactly what you think. It’s not like anyone reads anymore anyway. They’re all too busy watching, and posting, and “liking” and “following” to notice a true original like you. So what’s the difference? Why shouldn’t you add your voice to the fray? After all, nothing matters these days quite so much as what you think about it. And as you’ve already mentioned, you do have excellent taste.
"Open Troll’s pages and submit to a golden shower of vitriol and subverted pathos, of media and over-scrutinised shit, all the time laughing yourself to tears via sitcom hellscapes as your glutted, insta-world, your confederacy of fuck-ups, is stoned into frayed soft focus and porn-sick inceloquence. Open your mouth to breathe – and drown."—Gary J. Shipley, author of Terminal Park
"Dave Fitzgerald’s triumphant debut, Troll, picks at the scab of our moldering culture until it bleeds—and it is profoundly entertaining to watch it ooze. In this outrageously scatological satire, the weed-stoked, masturbating, click-baiting narrator that is “You” dispenses some of the funniest, disturbing, full-frontal scenes in literature—and toilet. Fitzgerald has gathered every hot-button reserved for the smartest, most provocative comedians and pushed them all, with equally riotous and sobering effect. At its core, Troll is an important philosophical discourse, beautifully written, exposing our sins of anonymity, selfie-love and hypocrisy. I wish everyone would read it."—Debra di Blasi, author of Birth of Eros
"A lacerating, remorseless trip to the bottom of the modern male psyche, shot through with incisive pop cultural insight of the highest and lowest order, and animated with withering humor, Svankmajerian grotesquerie, and an unwavering sense of genuine pathos as the search for love and meaning in the age of Tinder and Trump stumbles on, determined to resist the allure of the void no matter how futile such resistance may seem. It belongs on your grungiest, most dimly lit, and secretly best-loved shelf beside The Elementary Particles, A Confederacy of Dunces, and Martin Amis' Money."—David Leo Rice, author of The New House
"I know this guy; we all do. Charming, sinister, and all-too-real, Fitzgerald’s brilliant characterization reveals in unabashed detail his breathy snicker, his feminist misogyny, the toxic social structures under which he came to be, and the continuous dread that extends beyond this book—that he’s going to hurt somebody."—Charlene Elsby, author of Hexis and Bedlam
2023, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 18.8 x 13 cm
Published by
British Library Publishing / London
$32.00 - In stock -
'Darkness now was around me - and sound. I seemed to stand in the centre of some yelling planet, the row resembling the resounding of many thousands of cannon, punctuated by strange crashing.' The violent peals of a disconnected bell in the night; a trudging footfall in the hush of an abandoned manor; the whisper of a deathly voice in the ear: uncanny sounds remain the most frightening heralds of danger and terror in supernatural fiction. Gathered here are fourteen tales which resonate with the unique note of fear struck by weird happenings experienced through the aural sense. Divided into four sections exploring noises from invisible presences, ghostly voices, possessed technology and the power of extreme levels of sound or silence, this collection pulses with pioneering pieces from B. M. Croker, Algernon Blackwood, Edith Wharton and M. P. Shiel alongside haunting obscurities from the British Library collections.
2023, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 19.6 x 13.1 cm
Published by
Random House / New York
$32.00 - In stock -
Explores the weird world of lo-fi music to investigate its revolutionary potential and its ability to subvert what we think music can do.
Homemade records, tape-hiss worship and a taste for a very peculiar kind of psychedelia have carved themselves a weird niche in the contemporary musical landscape under the name of lo-fi.
This genreless genre, characterized by poor recordings and rough sounds, spanning from the most extreme heavy metal to the sweetest ear-candies pop can offer, has become a solid presence in our collective sensibility. And yet, it has largely been neglected: this staunch refusal of anything hi-fi and hi-tech has fallen under the radar of the categories we use to analyse ourselves and our times.
The Great Psychic Outdoors, dedicated to the most interesting and controversial artists in this movement, will rectify this injustice and vindicate the revolutionary potential of lo-fi music, engaging with this weird genre on its own terms and facing head on the contradictions and possibilities of this multi-faceted phenomenon. Confronting the aesthetic and conceptual stakes of this sonic craft, The Great Psychic Outdoors shows what lo-fi says about us, our lives under capitalism and the strange ways we cope with pain, madness and beauty.
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 400 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Simon and Schuster / New York
$52.00 - Out of stock
Brad Sela is living an apathetic suburban life in his affluent neighborhood until two new friends drag him down a destructive path toward self-discovery.
“My favorite millennial provocateur.”—Bret Easton Ellis, NYLON Magazine Must-Reads September 2023
“This book is raucous, raunchy, and sure to offend, and there are readers who’ll appreciate those things. I will forever defend Kazemi’s ability to write this book and entertain his intended audience against those who’d torch all three.”—Ellen Hopkins, author of Crank and a dozen other banned books
Freshly seventeen and entering his Y2K senior year, Brad is feeling fatigued by the cookie-cutter image his new-agey Oprah-loving mom and corporate-Boomer dad expect him to maintain, so when the new transfer students, Lu and Shane, invite him out to the woods, he agrees to see what this Baphomet-worshipping goth kid and classic-rock stoner have to offer.
“There's no way a robot wrote this book. A no-holds-barred tour of the Millennial mindset's spiritual DNA. Anything goes.”—Douglas Coupland
Soon, he’s dealing with the delicate balance of a double life, forsaking old friends for his new ones, and secretly embarking on a journey of indulging his darkest impulses—even documenting some of their most dangerous and disturbing exploits on their Handycams. But as their hijinks increase and threaten to expose him, Brad is forced to reconcile who he really is or risk drowning in his downward spiral.
“There is some twisted shit in this book that will likely fuck with your head and break your heart. Remember Woodstock ’99, and how a sick, profit-driven media culture pushed boys to their worst impulses? Think Larry Clark or Bret Easton Ellis by way of Charles Bukowski or J.G. Ballard. These kids are not all right. Kazemi’s prose produces the same visceral response as an early Tarantino movie. Proceed with caution.” —Douglas Rushkoff
At turns hair-raising and harrowing, Alex Kazemi’s thrilling debut novel is an unnerving examination of the collision of traditional masculinity, the early internet, and irresistible pop culture that shaped the turn of the century and transformed the way boys engage with the world. The bastard love child of Bret Easton Ellis and Gregg Araki, New Millennium Boyz presents an uncensored and unsettling portrait of the year 2000 that never could have aired on MTV.
“I walked a path parallel to my own, and it was honest, authentic and awful. New Millennium Boyz is an intrusively intimate narration of someone who lived in familiar coordinates yet a different social stratum. That wholly un-unique alienation and emptiness is one that fills me with a nostalgia for a past that was, and was not, my own.”—Brooks Brown, Columbine Survivor and Author
“In New Millennium Boyz, Alex Kazemi dissects the post-Columbine generation with wit and a sharp scalpel. His characters are damaged products of their time. While this is a dark chronicle, there's also a cozy High School Confidential feel to the tale and the various media Kazemi employs to tell it, resulting in a compulsively readable novel.”—Poppy Z. Brite
“Alex Kazemi is a boy wonder.” —Shirley Manson
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 192 pages, 21.6 x 16.9 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
Sex and art, we're told, are sacred, two spheres that ought to be kept separate from the ravages of the marketplace. Yet both prop up two incredibly lucrative industries, built on the commodification of creativity and desire, authenticity and intimacy. Our reaction to this should not be moral or political outrage, nor legal regulation or denial, but rather—as Sophia Giovannitti argues here—acceptance, through which we can find a more autonomous way to live.
In this searching and provocative work, drawing on cultural and political theory, the contemporary art world, and the author's own experience as a sex worker and artist trying to make a living, Giovannitti argues that if we delve into our anxieties around art and sex, we can instead find new ways to live and spaces, however small, of freedom. When there is nothing left to protect, she argues, everything is possible.
2023, English
Softcover, 536 pages, 21 x 16 cm
Published by
Blank Forms / New York
$58.00 - In stock -
In this captivating memoir, the first full-length account of life in the Arkestra by any of its members, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts two decades of traveling the spaceways with the inimitable composer, pianist, and big-band leader Sun Ra. Gigging everywhere from the legendary Bed-Stuy venue the East to the National Stadium in Lagos, Abdullah paints a vivid picture of the rise of loft jazz and the influence of Pan-Africanism on creative music, while capturing radical artistic and political developments across Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s. Richly illustrated with more than fifty pages of photographs and posters from Adger Cowans, Marilyn Nance, Val Wilmer, and others, A Strange Celestial Road interweaves the author’s own moving story—his battles with addiction, spiritual development, and life as a working class performer—with enthralling tales of tutelage under Cal Massey, collaborations with the likes of Ed Blackwell, Marion Brown, and Andrew Cyrille, and profound, occasionally confounding, mentorship by Sun Ra. Originally written in the 1990s with the help of Nuyorican poet Louis Reyes Rivera and published now for the first time, with a foreword by Salim Washington, A Strange Celestial Road is not only an autobiography, but a history of a remarkable and under-documented movement in music.
"There are other worlds they have not told you of," Sun Ra said. The trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah, a longtime member of Sun Ra's Arkestra, has journeyed through several of those extraterrestrial worlds of sound, and returned to Earth to tell the tale, in this invigorating memoir of a life in Black Creative music.—Adam Shatz, US editor of the London Review of Books
In this first book-length reportage from behind the scenes of Sun Ra’s world, Ahmed Abdullah manages to express the omniverse-exploding wonder of Ra as well as the musical mechanics of the Arkestra and its complex interpersonal politics. His invaluable and unique perspective—focused on the woefully overlooked work of the band from the 1970s forward—is brilliantly articulated in these information-packed, often hilarious pages, which are essentially impossible not to turn.—John Corbett, author of Pick Up the Pieces: Excursions in Seventies Music
A rare personal glimpse into the life of one of the twentieth century's most monumental and imposing figures.—Matthew Blackwell, The Wire
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 280 pages, 22 x 14 cm
Published by
Unnamed Press / Los Angeles
$55.00 - In stock -
At a meatpacking facility in the Missouri Ozarks, Dee-Dee and her co-workers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift.
The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee’s more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term.
Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges Dee-Dee to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish. With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother’s and boyfriend’s newfound parturient attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete.
When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living in the shadows. Neither the ultimate indignity of yet another miscarriage nor Sloane’s own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby’s arrival.
"Elle Nash dances a knife's edge in DELIVER ME, a world where a person's hands can save or steal, conceal or reveal, lure you in or lie, and sometimes all of these at once. Her characters act so appalling, yet still I prayed for their salvation. She's that good at guiding you all the way into them."—Sarah Gerard, author of 'True Love: a Novel'
"Audacious, disturbing, and utterly unique, Elle Nash’s DELIVER ME is body horror at its most shocking and unforgettable."—Eric LaRocca, Bram Stoker Award Winner and author of 'Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke'
"Elle Nash is one of the best writers alive. This book is utterly fearless, utterly devastating, and an uncompromising masterpiece. Reading DELIVER ME made me feel like I was possessed."—Juliet Escoria, author of 'Juliet the Maniac' and 'I Am The Snake'
Elle Nash is the author of the novel Animals Eat Each Other (Dzanc Books), which was featured in O Magazine and hailed by Publishers Weekly as a "complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire." Upon publication of her novel in the UK, she appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to present the work of under-represented voices with Amnesty International, and to speak about sex, death and feminism in literature. Her work appears in Guernica, Adroit, The Creative Independent, Hazlitt, Literary Hub, Cosmopolitan, New York Tyrant and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and currently lives in Glasgow, Scotland.
1974, Japanese
Softcover, 208 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Bunken Shiryo Kankokai / Tokyo
$55.00 - In stock -
September 1974 issue of Fuzoku Kitan, an important Japanese SM magazine was published between 1960—1974, and edited by Hajime Takakura. Filled with SM stories and illustrations, along with colour and b/w gravure photographic kitan and fetish photoshoots and art galleries, the magazine published a wild array of subjects on sexual customs, especially a significant amount of queer and transgender sexuality, lots of cross-dressing, masochism, torture, sodomy, sadophelia and fem-dom material. Includes artwork by Tatsuji Okawa, a number of kinbaku photo features, lots of stories from Japanese cross-dressers, readers confessions, a treasure-trove of illustrated transgressive fiction, almost all articles under nom de plumes! Also, excellent ads.
VG—Good copy, with light wear, tanning.