World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
BOOKSHOP CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10.
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED AND WILL BE PROCESSED AFTER NOV 10.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
Theory / Essay
Architecture / Interior
Graphic Design / Typography
Photography
Fashion
Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction / Horror
Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
Painting
Sculpture / Installation
Performance / Dance / Theater
Drawing
Sound / Music
Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
Periodicals
Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
Japanese Photography
Conceptual Art
Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
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.
1989, English
Softcover,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$28.00 - In stock -
1988 print of Ingmar Bergman's memoir of a turbulent and incendiary career. Bearing all the narrative trademarks of a Bergman film, his story unfolds not in strict chronology but as a series of flashbacks to his childhood of bitter unhappiness.
Good copy.
1976, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 22 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Marion Boyars / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
Issued the year of the film's release, first 1976 edition of Face to Face: a Film by Ingmar Bergman, the illustrated script book to the great Swedish psychological drama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. The film tells the story of a psychiatrist who is suffering from a mental illness and stars Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson. It is also the film debut of Lena Olin.
Very Good copy. Small previous-owner's inscription.
1972, English
Softcover, 188 pages, 20 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Lorrimer / London
$65.00 - In stock -
First scarce 1972 English edition of the illustrated film scripts to Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967) and Wind from the East (1970), with texts by Robin Wood, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, and James Roy Macbean. In Weekend Roland Durand (Jean Yanne) and his wife Corinne (Mireille Darc) embark on a weekend getaway to the French countryside. Each is contemplating adultery as they head for the coast, but end up ensnared in a traffic jam along the way. Hilarity ensues in this absurdist romp as it devolves into all manners of human folly and destruction. Wind from the East is a loosely conceived leftist-western that moves through a series of practical and analytical passages into a finale based around the process of manufacturing homemade weapons.
Good copy with some light edge wear, stamps/inscriptions to title page from previous owner/bookshop.
?, French / Japanese
Hardcover, 48 pages (all heavy board), 18.5 x 10.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
? / Japan
$100.00 - In stock -
First and only edition of the one-of-a-kind Japanese Jean-Luc Godard "MADE IN U.S.A." film book. This photo souvenir book is printed on thick board pages and made up of full-colour stills from Godard's 1966 classic "MADE IN U.S.A.", starring Anna Karina, Jean-Pierre Léaud, László Szabó, Yves Afonso, and Marianne Faithfull. Includes text/dialogue fragments throughout in French; profiles on the actors, Godard, cinematographer Raoul Coutard, producer Georges de Beauregard; lyrics to Marianne Faithfull's featured "As Tears Go By"; comic strip; and other texts in Japanese and French.
A very special collectable Godard book.
"With its giddily complex noir plot and color-drenched widescreen images, Made in U.S.A was a final burst of exuberance from Jean-Luc Godard’s early sixties barrage of delirious movie-movies. Yet this chaotic crime thriller and acidly funny critique of consumerism—starring Anna Karina as the most brightly dressed private investigator in film history, searching for a former lover who might have been assassinated—also points toward the more political cinema that would come to define Godard. Featuring characters with names such as Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, David Goodis, and Doris Mizoguchi, and appearances by a slapstick Jean-Pierre Léaud and a sweetly singing Marianne Faithfull, this piece of pop art is like a Looney Tunes rendition of The Big Sleep gone New Wave."
Very Good copy with some faint foxing/dustiness to pages.
1979, English
Softcover, 300 pages, 15.24 x 22.86 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Harper and Row / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
First edition of Symbolism, published by Routledge in 1979, the last major study by Robert Goldwater who passed away suddenly prior to its completion. Goldwater (1907—1973) was an art historian, African arts scholar and the first director of the Museum of Primitive Art, New York, from 1957 to 1973. He was married to the French-born American artist and sculptor Louise Bourgeois.
Of all the European artistic movements of the nineteenth century, Symbolism is perhaps the one with most resonance today. A major but short-lived style, it set the foundations of modern art in the first decade of the twentieth century. Art Nouveau, in France and Britain, and Jugendstil in Germany are two major movements associated with Symbolism that together can be seen as the foundation of Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, and Abstract Art. Beginning in the 1880s, it can be described as a reaction against Naturalism and Impressionism. In broader terms, Symbolism could be defined as a philosophical idealism in revolt against a positivist and materialistic attitude that affected not only painting and literature, but life altogether. For the Symbolists the importance of art lay precisely in its ability to reach beyond realism. Their search for the mysterious reality behind appearances resulted in an art that aimed at representing inner states through generalized figures and congruent, "emotionalized" settings. The viewer was asked to re-experience the emotions that the artist had felt in front of his motif. In this way the artists hoped their subjectivity would become meaningful for humanity at large. These aesthetics anticipate certain ideas at the base of Abstract Art, which is one of the reasons for the appeal of Symbolism today. Another is the Symbolists' concern with refined, even morbid sensibility, with subli-mated sexuality, with the reality of evil, and with love and death as the two poles of human experience.
With singular erudition and insight, Robert Goldwater traces the history and evolution of the movement beginning with Gauguin's revolutionary paintings of the 1880s and ending with the last outposts in Vienna, Holland, and Scotland. Among the artists discussed are Gauguin, Redon, Van Gogh, Munch, Rodin, Klimt, Seurat, Klinger, and Ensor. Profusely illustrated throughout.
Good copy with light wear and marginalia in pen.
2019, English
Hardcover, 512 pages, 27 x 24 cm
Revised, expanded edition,
Published by
Strange Attractor / London
$120.00 - Out of stock
Jesús Franco was a fascinating, iconic gure in world cinema. A passionate believer in artistic and sexual freedom, he constantly tested the boundaries of taste and censorship during an extraordinary career spanning sixty years and more than 170 films.
His delirious spontaneity turned the raw basics of popular cinema – sex and violence – into an avant-garde whirl of sensations. Franco’s taste for the kinky and horrific, his idiosyncratic visual style, and his lifelong obsession with the Marquis de Sade, birthed a whole new strain of erotica.
Films like Succubus, Vampyros Lesbos, A Virgin Among the Living Dead and The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein throw out the rulebook and reinvent genre cinema, while even his weakest efforts exude something strange and wild amid the chaos. Meanwhile, multiple international variants turn the Franco filmography into a dizzying hall of mirrors, entrancing for the aficionado but confusing for beginners – until now.
Originally published in 2015, Murderous Passions delves into Franco’s career from 1953 to 1974 (a second volume, Flowers of Perversion, covers 1975 to 2013). Assisted by esteemed critic and researcher Julian Grainger, Thrower shines a light into the darkest corners of the Franco filmography, uncovering a wealth of new information. Unparalleled in scope and ambition, this revised and updated edition of Murderous Passions contains eighty more pages of images (almost 600 in total), many in colour, and a thorough index.
Stephen Thrower is the acclaimed author of Flowers of Perverison, Beyond Terror: the films of Lucio Fulci and the ground-breaking Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents.
2018, English
Hardcover, 512 pages, 27 x 24 cm
Published by
Strange Attractor / London
$120.00 - In stock -
The second volume in Stephen Thrower’s monumental study of Jess Franco’s cinematic delirium, covering the years 1975 to his death in 2013.
Jesús “Jess” Franco is an iconic figure in world cinema. His sexually charged, fearlessly personal style of filmmaking has never been in vogue with mainstream critics, but for lovers of the strange and sado-erotic he is a magician, spinning his unique and disturbing dream worlds from the cheapest of budgets.
Stephen Thrower has devoted many years to examining each and every known Franco film, second only to the maestro himself. This book—the second in a two-volume set—delves into the latter half of Franco’s career, covering films that have never received critical appraisal before, as well as exclusive interviews with Franco collaborators including Antonio Mayans, Juan Soler, Katja Bienert and Monica Swinn.
In the world of Jess Franco freedom was the key, and he pushed at the boundaries of taste and censorship repeatedly, throughout an astonishingly varied career spanning sixty years. The director of more than 180 films, at his most prolific he worked in a supercharged frenzy that yielded as many as twelve titles per year, making him one of the most generative auteurs of all time.
Franco’s taste for the sexy and horrific, his lifelong obsession with the Marquis De Sade, and his roving hand-held camera style launched a whole new strain of erotic cinema. Disturbing, exciting, and defiantly avant-garde, films such as Shining Sex, Barbed Wire Dolls, Ilsa The Wicked Warden and Bloody Moon are among the jewels of European horror, while a plethora of multiple versions, re-edits and echoes of earlier works turn the Franco experience into a dizzying hall of mirrors, further entrancing the viewer who dares enter Franco’s domain.
Thrower shines a light into the darkest corners of the Franco filmography and uncovers previously unknown and unsuspected facts about their casts, crews, and production histories.
Unparalleled in scope and ambition, Flowers of Perversion brings Jess Franco’s career into focus with a landmark study that aims to provide the definitive assessment of his labyrinthine film universe.
2010, English
Softcover, 207 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Western Sydney University / WA
$70.00 $40.00 - Out of stock
Conceptual Beauty is a collection of essays that are in some way representative of a particular moment in contemporary Australian art: a moment marked by the enduring belief in the social power of art but also by cognizance of the largely illusory nature of individual agency; a moment energised by the lively debates of post-structuralist theory and the politics of representation (in particular feminist perspectives), but one also marked by a sense of loss, namely the loss of the aesthetic dimension of art in the wake of conceptualism. Many of the essays are about works that seek to connect art with wider social and political questions in full awareness of its limitations; works that grapple with the apparent dichotomy between critical idea and beautiful object; works that are drawn equally to conceptual approaches that engage in meta-analysis of language and institutions - including the figure of the artist him/herself - and to the well-crafted piece, the affectively joyful. Conceptual Beauty includes essays on the work of Robyn Backen, Barbara Campbell, Maria Cruz, Anne Ferran, Adam Geczy, Bronia Iwanczak, Vanila Netto, David Noonan, Mike Parr, Sue Pedley, Patricia Piccinini, Ben Quilty, Julie Rrap, Robyn Stacey, Monika Tichacek and Ruth Watson amongst others.
As New copy with some light tanning.
2009, English
Softcover, 344 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$70.00 $30.00 - In stock -
Who gets to say what counts as contemporary art? Artists, critics, curators, gallerists, auctioneers, collectors, or the public?
Revealing how all of these groups have shaped today's multifaceted definition, Terry Smith brilliantly shows that an historical approach offers the best answer to the question: What is Contemporary Art? Smith argues that the most recognisable kind is characterised by a return to mainstream modernism in the work of such artists as Richard Serra and Gerhard Richter, as well as the retro-sensationalism of figures like Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami. At the same time, Smith reveals, postcolonial artists are engaged in a different kind of practice: one that builds on local concerns and tackles questions of identity, history, and globalisation. A younger generation embodies yet a third approach to contemporaneity by investigating time, place, mediation, and ethics through small-scale, closely connective art making.
Inviting readers into these diverse yet overlapping art worlds, Smith offers a behind-the-scenes introduction to the institutions, the personalities, the biennials, and of course the works that together are defining the contemporary. The resulting map of where art is now illuminates not only where it has been but also where it is going.
1994, Japanese / English
Hardcover, 92 pages, 19.3 x 13.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Nippon Geijutsu Shuppan (NGS) / Japan
$380.00 - Out of stock
Very rare 1994 hardcover volume of nude photography by French photographer Jacques Bourboulon from Japanese imprint Nippon Geijutsu Shuppan (NGS). Cover to cover glossy collection of Bourboulon's colour-saturated photography spanning many years, capturing the beauty of his young amateur models in nature. Printed in Japan. First edition, never re-printed.
Jacques Bourboulon (b. 1946) is a French photographer, specializing in nude photography. In 1967 he started as a fashion photographer, publishing in Vogue and working for the fashion designers Dior, Féraud, and Carven. In the mid-1970s he sought the freedom and innocence of a natural landscape and switched to nude photography, never again to work with professional models or studios. His most famed pictures portray girls and women on the Spanish island of Ibiza, where he lived through the 1970s—1980s, a refuge for hippies, artists and other free spirits from all over the world, his photographs are a testament to the freedom and experimentation of this time, and to the beauty, and natural simplicity of the island environment itself. Bourboulon's pictures were shot with a Pentax camera and focus on bright light and sharp contrasts, playing on the sun-kissed colours of his natural environment. His images become iconic through the pages of PHOTO magazine, Club, High Society, and calendars for Pentax and BASF. Bourboulon's photography books sold over 400,000 copies.
Very Good copy.
1980, French
Hardcover, 110 pages, 20 x 27.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Editions Filipacchi / Paris
$400.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the collectable cult classic "Des corps naturels" photo book by French photographer Jacques Bourboulon, first published in 1980 by Filipacchi, Paris. A collection of Bourboulon's nude photography alongside a collection of sonnets by French singer Serge Gainsbourg. Largely photographed on Bourboulon's island home of Ibiza in the 1970s-80s, a refuge for hippies, artists and other free spirits from all over the world, his photographs are a testament to the freedom and experimentation of this time, and to the beauty, nature and simplicity of the island life itself.
Jacques Bourboulon (born 8 December 1946) is a French photographer, specializing in nude photography. In 1967 he started as a fashion photographer, publishing in Vogue and working for the fashion designers Dior, Féraud, and Carven. In the mid-1970s he switched to nude photography. Bourboulon's pictures were shot with a Pentax camera and focus on bright light and sharp contrasts. His most typical pictures portray girls and women on the Spanish island of Ibiza, playing on the juxtaposition of blue sky, white walls, and sun-tanned skin. His images become iconic through the pages of PHOTO magazine, CLub, High Society, Playmen and calendars for Pentax and BASF. Bourboulon's photography books sold over 400,000 copies.
Very Good copy in good dustjacket.
1984, French
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 86 pages, 31 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Carrere / Paris
$500.00 - Out of stock
The very collectable cult photo book "Attitudes" by French photographer Jacques Bourboulon, first published in 1984 by Carrere, Paris. An iconic colour-saturated collection of Bourboulon's photographs capturing the beauty of his young amateur models in nature. Photographed on Bourboulon's island home of Ibiza in the 1970s-80s, a refuge for hippies, artists and other free spirits from all over the world, his photographs are a testament to the freedom and experimentation of this time, and to the beauty, and natural simplicity of the island environment itself.
Jacques Bourboulon (born 8 December 1946) is a French photographer, specializing in nude photography. In 1967 he started as a fashion photographer, publishing in Vogue and working for the fashion designers Dior, Féraud, and Carven. In the mid-1970s he sought the freedom and innocence of a natural landscape and switched to nude photography, never again to work with professional models or studios. His most famed pictures portray girls and women on the Spanish island of Ibiza, where he lived from 1976-1986, playing on the juxtaposition of blue sky, white walls, and sun-tanned skin. Bourboulon's pictures were shot with a Pentax camera and focus on bright light and sharp contrasts. His images become iconic through the pages of PHOTO magazine, Club, High Society, and calendars for Pentax and BASF. Bourboulon's photography books sold over 400,000 copies.
Very Good copy with good dustjacket.
1982, French
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 86 pages, 31 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Contrejour / Paris
Kactus / Paris
$650.00 - In stock -
The very rare and collectable cult photo book "Coquines" by French photographer Jacques Bourboulon, this first edition published in 1982 by Contrejour and Kactus, Paris. An iconic colour-saturated collection of Bourboulon's photographs capturing the beauty of his young amateur models in nature. Photographed on Bourboulon's island home of Ibiza in the 1970s-80s, a refuge for hippies, artists and other free spirits from all over the world, his photographs are a testament to the freedom and experimentation of this time, and to the beauty, and natural simplicity of the island environment itself.
Jacques Bourboulon (b. 1946) is a French photographer, specializing in nude photography. In 1967 he started as a fashion photographer, publishing in Vogue and working for the fashion designers Dior, Féraud, and Carven. In the mid-1970s he sought the freedom and innocence of a natural landscape and switched to nude photography, never again to work with professional models or studios. His most famed pictures portray girls and women on the Spanish island of Ibiza, where he lived through the 1970s—1980s, a refuge for hippies, artists and other free spirits from all over the world, his photographs are a testament to the freedom and experimentation of this time, and to the beauty, and natural simplicity of the island environment itself. Bourboulon's pictures were shot with a Pentax camera and focus on bright light and sharp contrasts, playing on the sun-kissed colours of his natural environment. His images become iconic through the pages of PHOTO magazine, Club, High Society, and calendars for Pentax and BASF. Bourboulon's photography books sold over 400,000 copies.
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket with closed tears. Some small tape residue on some pages throughout.
1999, English
Softcover, 154 pages, 24 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Soundworld Publishers / Chelmsford
$140.00 - Out of stock
First 1999 English edition of Les Sculptures Sonores: The Sound Sculptures of Bernard and François Baschet. This book is a classic in the history of art. Francois' book is many things, not only a fascinating account of his life and travels, with amusing anecdotes detailing meetings, working relationships and friendships in Paris and New York in 40s and 60s with major forces in the art and music world, such as Jean Cocteau, Yehudi Menhuin, Edgard Varese, Pierre Schaeffer, Henri Lazarof, Ravi Shankar, John Cage, David Tudor and Toru Takemitsu, but a complete description and technical analysis, research and chronological development of his Sound Sculptures, with which he began a pioneering career combining art and science, sculpture and music. The willingness to share his findings inspired another breakthrough: participatory exhibitions, spaces where everyone could explore and play with sound. François Baschets conception of acousticsa method of understanding the functional relations between form, matter, action and sound, led to the invention of hundreds of Sound Sculptures of all sizes and sonority, which can be found all over the world. Bernard and François Baschet had great success in the early sixties, when after meeting and forming their performance group with Jaques and Yvonne Lasry, their sculptures were featured in major periodicals such as 'Time', 'Life' and 'The New Scientist' magazine, in many films (most famously in William Klein's "Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?"), and highly prestigious tours and exhibitions all over the world, such as The 1970 Osaka World Fair and the MOMA, (Museum of Modern Art in New York), and even three appearances on the Ed Sullivan show.
Fine copy with accompanying CD of music featuring the baschets creations, documenting recordings by composers and performers of the instruments such as Daniel Ouzounoff, Jacques Lasry, Malcolm Ball and Michel Deneuve.
2022, English
480 pages, 480 pages, 25.4 x 17.7 cm
Published by
Feral House / Los Angeles
$60.00 - Out of stock
Expand your aural and sensory experiences with Extreme Music. An exploration of tomorrow’s sounds (and silences) today.
Michael Tau had spent years obsessed by the extremes of musical expression. Extreme Music: Silence to Noise and Everything In Between is the culmination of decades of research into the sounds (and silences) that comprise the outer limits and conceptual expressions that stretch the definition of music.
Tau defines and categorizes these recorded sounds into sections that allow fans and newcomers to explore the fascinating world of musicians who defy convention. He explores a wide range of extremes including volume, speed, and vulgarity to packaging, recording methods, unplayable media, outdated technologies, and digital pioneers. He asks and answers the questions: Are all sounds music? Is silence music? Is a plate of rotting food once cataloged, packaged and sold by a distributor qualify as music?
Extreme Music includes over 100 interviews with makers and musicians as Tau uses his background in psychiatry to help readers understand what motivates people to create and listen to non-mainstream music. As a fan of multiple avant-garde musical genres, Tau uncovers the pleasures (and sometimes pain and frustration) found at the outré fringes of music.
Extreme Music is the ideal guide for curious seekers, die-hard fans, and cultural investigators. Features images and curated links to samples of music.
2022, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 13 x 17 cm
Published by
Masala Noir / Paris
$45.00 - Out of stock
A visual compilation of death metal vinyl, cassette and fanzine graphics from 1980 to 2010 compiled by Masala Noir.
Limited edition.
Cover illustration by Félix Ernoult
2012, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 21.8 x 28.7 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$115.00 - Out of stock
Rare English edition of this 1992 monograph on American artist Mike Kelley.
Harald Falckenberg, one of the most important collectors of Mike Kelley's works, gives in his essay a detailed overview over the various periods in the development of this artist. In detail Falckenberg investigates the influences of the art-market on Kelley's production and the reasons for the suicide of the artist in January, 2012. Beside documentary photographs of important exhibitions of Mike Kelley between 1982 and 2011, and reproductions of seminal works from various periods the book offers numerous stills from the legendary videos by and/or with Mike Kelley, like Banana Man (1983), Heidi (1992) in collaboration with Paul McCarthy, EVOL (1984) by Tony Oursler, Sir Drone (1989) by Raymond Pettibon.
1992, English
Softcover, leporello fold-out double-sided card, 15.5 x 11.5 cm (15.5 x 34.5 cm unfolded)
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Feature Inc. / New York
$90.00 - Out of stock
Very rare show card/fold-out catalogue published on the occasion of the duel exhibition of drawings by Tom of Finland (1920—1991) and G.B. Jones (b. 1965) at Feature, New York, July 10 — August 9, 1991. Titled "Tom of Finland — Drawings and Sketches" and "G.B. Jones — Tom-Girl Drawings", the exhibition, in commemoration of Touko Valio Laaksonen (Tom of Finland) who passed away the same year, is previewed in this lovely little double-sided leporello fold-out catalogue, with three works from each artist, and cover work by Tom of Finland, along with work and exhibition information.
Touko Valio Laaksonen (8 May 1920 – 7 November 1991), best known by his pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist known for his stylized highly masculine homoerotic fetish art, and his influence on late twentieth century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade. Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3500 illustrations.
G.B. Jones (b. 1965) is a Canadian artist, filmmaker, and founding member of Canadian queer punk band Fifth Column (K Records/Outpunk/Kill Rock Stars/et al). She published legendary queercore fanzine J.D.s (Juvenile Delinquents) with fellow queer filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, which regularly featured her iconic Tom Girl drawings. According to novelist Dodie Bellamy, G.B. Jones' drawing "co-opts the male-on-male objectifying gaze of gay erotica and converts it to a female-on-female gaze." Depicting autonomous women through fantasies of bikers, punks and degenerates in the style of and situations similar to those drawn by Tom of Finland, her Tom Girls are "unapologetic, thrillingly anti-assimilationist."
Fine copy, beautifully preserved.
2022, English
Softcover, 20.2 x 25 cm
Published by
Galerie Neu / Berlin
$69.00 - Out of stock
Published on the occasion of Manfred Pernice’s exhibition accrochage, at Galerie Neu, Berlin 29 April—5 June, 2021, this new publication edited by Galerie Neu and designed by Manuel Raeder surveys Pernice’s practice across the past 15 years.
Since the early 1990s, Berlin-based artist Manfred Pernice has created sculptural vessels with scales, materials, and aesthetics derived from the worlds of architecture, shipping cargo, and mass packaging—these works serve as complex, open-ended meditations on the increased segmentation, containment, and, to use Pernice’s term, “canning” of objects and space. His seemingly slapdash sculptures are often juxtaposed with sketches, maquettes, photographs, text and, more recently, video to create systems of meaning.
1987, English
Softcover, 414 pages, 22.6 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Columbia University Press / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
First edition from 1989 of Kristeva's Tales of Love, wherein her analysis deals with the role of narcissism and idealization in the formation of a love object. She accounts for the role of the death drive by coining the term "love/hate."
Assuming the voices of psychoanalyst, scholar, and postmodern polimicist, Kristeva discusses both the conflicts and commonalities among the Greek, Christian, Romantic and contemporary discourses on love, desire, and self... the analytical work is punctuated throughout by the personal, so that intelligently moving thoughts on motherhood aptly intervene. Kristeva makes a very strong case for the claim that the goal of analysis is not a truth in, but a dynamic rebirth of, the analysand via language.—Choice
From the Back Cover :
In 'Tales of Love' Julia Kristeva pursues her exploration of the basic emotions that affect the human psyche. The processes are similar to those followed in 'Powers of Horror'. She begins with a statement from personal experience and follows it with a critical examination of the psychoanalytic position with respect to the matter at hand.
Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She has taught at Columbia University, and is now a professor emerita at Université Paris Cité.
Good copy, cover wear, marginalia in erasable light lead pencil.
Good copy, wear to cover edges, erasable light lead pencil marginalia.
1985, English
Hardcover (w. slipcase), unpaginated, 22 x 16 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Parlor / Tokyo
$190.00 - Out of stock
1985 edition of Japanese illustrator Ken Katayama's masterpiece artbook, Beautiful Days, originally issued in this same hardcover, slipcased form in 1969 in a limited edition. Beautiful Days is the most crystallised embodiment of one of the most unique artistic visions of fantasy illustration one could ever find, and the first collection ever published by the artist, when, after discovering the erotic works on the fringe of Surrealism he gave up becoming a painter and gave himself over to the obscene impulses of drawing. "There, so to speak, masturbation became a picture. Until then, I never thought that masturbation could become a painting"—excerpt from Ken Katayama's 1985 postscript. Katayama's magnificently, obsessive graphite-rendered world-making is, like those of Lewis Carroll before him, made up almost entirely of children; children in states of blank-faced entrancement, possession and naked abandon; groping, lost and frozen in a psychosexual schoolhood theatre. Unlike anything else, aspects of Katayama's bewildering sadomasochistic fairytale visions recall the tales of de Sade, Balthus, Hans Bellmer, Carroll's Alice, the architectural dreamscapes of Delvaux or the Metaphysical painters and even fellow Japanese artist Yoshifumi Hayashi — a haunted landscape of eroticised adolescent memories with recurring motifs of free flowing urination and defecation, violently strewn newspapers, urinals, and apparitions of cat-people. Nothing like it! The work even inspired an experimental film of boyhood memories directed by the provocative film-maker Nakamura Masanobu in 1970.
"If you
keep your hands in your pockets
in your pocket
what are you hiding
that's how I got it
darkness in my pocket, days of dust
I opened the old album and showed
beautiful days other days"
Virtually unknown outside his native Japan, Katayama (b. 1940, Tokyo) studied at the Musahino Art University and in the 1960s and 1970s begin contributing illustrations to underground art and literary magazines such as Black Notebook, Featured Story and fetish magazines such as SM Select, amongst many others. He published art books such as Angel Hour, Lost Child's Top, Match Taker, The Cat in Boots, and many more, and went on to become a successful children's story book illustrator, publishing many works throughout the 1980s—90s.
Fine copy, beautifully preserved in Very Good slipcase.
1975, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 168 pages, 24 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Overlook Press / New York
$180.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this rare and most comprehensive first English-language monograph on the work of Italian artist Domenico Gnoli, published by Overlook Press, New York, in 1975. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with Gnoli's paintings, focusing on the period of his last and most mature work from 1954 to 1969. Luigi Carluccio's incisive text presents Gnoli's life and an evaluation of his work. Includes biography, exhibition history and catalogue of Gnoli's works.
Domenico Gnoli (1933–1970) is a unique and difficult figure to place. He died young, at 36, and lived fast, hanging with a glamorous crowd and marrying twice. He began as a stage designer in Rome, for which he was well received. He was also a successful illustrator, spending the better part of his life in New York City, illustrating for magazines such as Sports Illustrated, and Fortune, where he found favour with art director Leo Lionni in the 1960s. He was also a painter. His paintings exhibited internationally, characteristically zooming in on some crisp fragment of a domestic interior or sartorial flourish: a perfectly made bed, with a serenely patterned spread, or the top of a man’s head, hair meticulously parted. "Gnoli’s paintings are neither Pop nor Surrealist, though they have trace elements of both within them. Their realism is clear enough, and traditional, but the too-closeness of Gnoli’s gaze gives one the sense that abstraction is eating reality up from within."
Very Good copy with some light wear / ageing to plastic coating of dust jacket.
1972, Japanese
Softcover, 34 pages, 20 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Hanashi-no-Tokushu / Tokyo
$140.00 - In stock -
First edition of Japanese photographer Yoshihiro Tachiki's photo book "Erotica Larotica", published in 1972. This book is one of the early masterpieces of Tatsuki — a unique collaboration between the Austrian painter Dina Larot (b. Maria Elisabeth Lebzelten in 1942), a student of Kokoschka best-known for her paintings and drawings of "women" in Austria, and photographer Yoshihiro Tatsuki, best known for his photography of "women" in Japan. It consists of playful portraits and nudes of Lalo herself and her friends lavishly dressed and undressed photographed by Tachiki in Vienna, paired with SM-lesbian erotic drawings and paintings by Larot throughout, plus a few photographs from a Crazy Horse show in Paris in the mix.
Tatsuki was born into a family that operated an photographic portrait studio. While at Tokyo junior College of Photography, he exhibited photographs of his family at the Fuji Photo Salon. After graduation, he began working as a photographer at Ad Center under the art direction of graphic designer Seiichi Horiuchi. Tatsuki’s name entered the limelight when he was just 26 years old with the publication of "A Fallen Angel", an astonishing 56 pages feature of his photographs shots for Camera Mainichi. Since starting as a freelance photographer in 1969, he has worked on the front lines of the advertising, magazine, publishing, and motion picture industries. He has published a number of celebrated photo books on female subjects and is best-known for works such as GIRL, EVES, Private (Mariko Kaga), Aoi Toki, My America, and Portrait of Family.
Very Good copy with publisher's obi-strip and dust-jacket. Light cover wear and pinch to spine, one page with crease to top corner.
1991, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$35.00 - Out of stock
You can say I write stories with sex and violence and therefore my writing isn't worth considering because it uses content much less lots of content. Well, I tell you this: 'Prickly race, who know nothing except how to eat out your hearts with envy, you don't eat cunt'...
Edited by Sylvere Lotringer and published in 1991, this handy, pocket-sized collection of some early and not-so-early work by the mistress of gut-level fiction-making, Hannibal Lecter, My Father gathers together Acker's raw, brilliant, emotional and cerebral texts from 1970s, including the self-published 'zines written under the nom-de-plume, The Black Tarantula. This volume features, among others, the full text of Acker's opera, The Birth of the Poet, produced at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1985, Algeria, 1979 and fragments of Politics, written at the age of 21. Also included is the longest and definitive interview Acker ever gave over two years: a chatty, intriguing and delightfully self-deprecating conversation with Semiotext(e) editor Sylvere Lotringer—which is trippy enough in itself as Lotringer, besides being a real person, has appeared as a character in Acker's fiction. And last, but not least, is the full transcript of the decision reached by West Germany's Federal Inspection Office for Publications Harmful to Minors in which Acker's work was judged to be "not only youth-threatening but also dangerous to adults," and subsequently banned.
Acker is the sort of the writer that should be read first at 16, so that you can spend the rest of your life trying to figure her out; she confuses, infuriates, perplexes and then all of a sudden the writing seems to be in your bloodstream, like some kind of benign virus. She's definitely not for the easily offended—but then, there are worse things in life than being offended. Such as the things that Acker writes about...