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:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
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
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 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. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or 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.
1998, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 23 x 15.24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cornell University Press / New York
$65.00 - In stock -
Scarce first paperback edition of Suzanne R. Stewart's Sublime Surrender : Male Masochism at the Fin-de-siècle, published in 1998.
When Heinrich Heine left his sick bed in 1848 and stumbled to the Louvre to fall before a statue of the goddess of beauty and lie in the pitying, cold glance she seemed to cast on his prostrate body, he defined a recurring motif of the second half of the nineteenth century, according to Suzanne R. Stewart. Directing her attention to the voice of the shriveled male body at beauty's feet, she investigates the discourse by and about men that took hold in the German-speaking world between 1870 and 1940 and that articulated masculinity as and through its own marginalization. Male masochism, she suggests, was a rhetorical strategy through which men asserted their cultural and political authority paradoxically by embracing the notion that they were (and always had been) wounded and suffering.
Stewart demonstrates and develops her contentions through close readings of the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Richard Wagner, and Sigmund Freud, in each case showing that the very act through which men sacrificed themselves to women comprised the essence of the new male subject "deeply penetrated by relations of political and sexual power." Masochistic scenarios, whether in literature, music, the visual arts, or medicalized diagnoses of the fin-de-siècle malaise, stage the male as one who submits, as Stewart explains, "to an aestheticized and eroticized gaze and voice."
Very Good copy with light general wear.
2025, English
Hardcover, 160 pages, 13 x 13 cm
Published by
kiddiepunk / Paris
$62.00 - In stock -
A series of haunted and tragic events are pieced back together in Thomas Moore’s first book of poems in 7 years. Told in shattered, three-lined verses, "I RUINED YOUR LIFE" explores guilt, mourning, regret and blame with a searingly precise economy of language.
2014 / 2015, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 13 x 13 cm
Published by
kiddiepunk / Paris
$35.00 - Out of stock
After a couple of years out of print, Thomas Moore's stone-cold classic "Skeleton Costumes" returns with a new printing.
Thomas Moore's stunning 2014 book "Skeleton Costumes" saw the writer's work stripped down to its most raw and effecting form yet. Now "Skeleton Costumes" returns with a new printing of its 2015 expanded edition which includes an additional 30 poems in the form of a haunting new section titled "No One Will Ever Find You". Skinned of any extraneous flesh, the simplicity of these pieces bely their emotional impact and visceral depth. These short stabs and sharp explosions of verse accumulate to create an unconventional and, at times, harrowing narrative that investigates fear, lust and an abandonment of moral codes.
"In his latest poetry collection, 'Skeleton Costumes', Thomas Moore takes the hideously beautiful and stretches it out into a pockmarked skin that enfolds his reflections on death, loneliness, fear and alienation. Like his lapidary 2011 novella, 'Graves', this new work is mostly populated by desperate youths who find themselves violently exploited by predatory adults or who are determined to end their own lives in grisly and courageous ways. 'Skeleton Costumes' is slighter and much more intense than the earlier work however, comprising 151 evocative haikus — tiny, delicate, and evanescent as eyelashes that appear unannounced on bright white pages."—Diarmuid Hester
1972, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The Seventies Press / Minnesota
$35.00 - In stock -
Rare inaugral issue of The Seventies, Spring 1972, "The Three Brains", edited by American poet, essayist, and activist, Robert Bly (1926 –2021), featuring the poetic works, criticism, essays of Federico Garcia Lorca, Cesar Vallejo, Blas de Otero, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Jerome Rothenberg, Shinkichi Takahashi, John Weiners, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tom Pickard, and others. Lots of bi-lingual Spanish and English, with many works translated to English from Spanish here for the first time.
Good copy, with wear to cover edges, some marking/stains.
1974, English / Spanish
Softcover, 142 pages, 23 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
E P Dutton / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
First 1974 edition.
Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni
The poems collected here, Borges has said, are the first he has written since 1929 with an actual book in mind. After the onset of his blindness in the 1950s, he turned increasingly to the writing of poetry rather than short stories because he could work on the lines of a poem in his memory. The darkness in the title, says Borges, "stands for both blindness and death."
In addition to the English translations, this volume contains the definitive Spanish-language text, which, to date, exists in no other edition of these writings.
Jorge Luis Borges, now in his seventies, is universally considered one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. Of his collaboration with NORMAN THOMAS DI GIOVANNI, he has said: "When we at- tempt a translation, or re-creation, of my poems or prose in English, we don't think of ourselves as being two men. We think we are really one mind at work."
Very Good copy, light tanning/wear.
1969, English
Softcover, 206 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Dover / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
Full, unabridged Dover 1969 English paperback edition of Huysmans' famous "A Rebours" from 1884, with Huysmans' original 1903 preface and introduction by Havelock Ellis.
"Because of his extreme sensitivity to the absurd and grotesque in human affairs, the protagonist of this masterpiece of decadence has estranged himself from society and savors the most bizarre aspects of human existence in his quest for novelty. This landmark novel is filled with weird images and biting wit."
Infamous as the inspiration for the novel which slowly corrupts Oscar Wilde's "Dorian Gray", Joris-Karl Huysmans' A Rebours ("Against The Grain" or "Against Nature") is the original handbook of decadence. A wildly original fin-de-siecle novel, Against Nature contains only one character. Des Esseintes is a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. Against Nature, in the words of the author, exploded 'like a grenade' and has enjoyed a cult following to this day.
Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) is now recognized as one of the most challenging and innovative figures in European literature and an acknowledged principal architect of the fin-de-siecle imagination. He was a career civil servant who wrote ten novels, most notably "A Rebours and La-Bas". Huysmans died in 1907.
VG with tanned spine, light wear/age.
1965, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Ohsawa Foundation / California
$25.00 - In stock -
1965 revised (fourth) printing of Zen Macro-Biotics: The Art of Rejuvenation and Longevity (The Philosophy Of Oriental Medicine. Vol I) by Georges Ohsawa, Ohsawa Foundation, California. Revised, edited and annotated by Lou Oles in this edition after Ohsawa's Zen Macrobiotics was first published in mimeographed format in 1960. This expanded edition introduces Ying-Yang theory, macrobiotics philosophy and the power of soy foods and ancient Eastern folk medicine and recipes to treat diseases, profoundly influencing the Western health consciousness in the 1960s.
Good copy with some old tape ghosts to front and back flyleaf, general age/wear to extremities, previous owner's name to front flyleaf.
2015, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Collective Effort Press / Melbourne
$35.00 - In stock -
Wonderful anthology of works by Greek-Australian visual poet t h a l i a, edited and introduced by TT. O. and published by Collective Effort Press, Melbourne, which was co-founded by t h a l i a in the 1970s. Issued in 2015 and now out of print, "this exploration into the poetry & poetics of shorthand writing" is packed with t h a l i a's incredible visual poetics, and includes an index and selected bibliography/discography.
"Simone de Beauvoir in the Second Sex sez "It is evident that woman's "character" - her convictions, her values, her wisdom, her morality, her tastes, her behavior are to be explained by her situation". thalia (small-t) was born in 1952 in Katerini / Greece. She migrated to Australia as a child in 1954, and grew up in the working class suburb of Fitzroy in Melbourne. Her family ran a number of cafes, restaurants, and hamburger shops (all mainly fronts for gambling and sly grog outlets). She attended Fitzroy Girls Secondary School, in Bell St., Fitzroy. By the time she reached 3rd Form (aged 14) she was taken out of school (in preference to her brother) to help out in the Milk Bar, as her mother developed acute symptoms of depression and schizophrenia. thalia suffered (and still does) occasional bouts of epilepsy, dyslexia, and ambidextrousness. In 1971 (after the collapse of the Milk Bar business), she attended Stott's Business College in Melbourne to try and get a qualification as a Stenographer & Secretary. She obtained Certificates for both speed and accuracy in typing, shorthand, business practices, and worked at a number of secretarial jobs. During a prolonged exposure to speed typing, and under pressure from managerial tyrants, she developed Tenosynovitis a crippling work related injury affecting the tendons, to hands, elbows, arms and shoulders.
Her involvement in the continued "small magazine explosion" of the late 60s included extensive labours on such magazines: as Fitzrot, 925, thalia publications, Unusual Work, as well as others. Publications of her work include Night Flowers (A6 Books), and thalia new & selected poems (collective effort press), Words Penciled on Paper (a homage to Jas Duke). She was one of the founders of "performance poetry" in Australia, and collective effort press. In a now famous incident (elaborated in Off The Record Penguin Books 1985) she was physically punched in the face by a misogynist who objected to her staging a "women only" reading. The incident "split" the poetry world "in Australia" and particularly "performance poetry" down the middle. [...]—from introduction by TT. O.
t h a l i a (b. 1952) has lived and worked in the inner suburbs of Melbourne and began writing poetry in the 1970s with a particular interest in concrete poetry. Her work has been read on Radios 3CR, 3RRR, 3PBS and Radio ABC and she has read at numerous venues including 'prisons, schools, universities, pubs, festivals and clubs'. She has exhibited her work in Melbourne, Perth, New South Wales and Queensland as well as in Brazil, Canada, Russia, America and Italy.
Very Good copy, light buckling, light wear.
1961, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 468 pages, 22 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
$85.00 - In stock -
Rare first 1961 hardcover edition of John Hollander's The Untuning of The Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500-1700, a classic study exploring the concept of music and its role in English poetry during the Renaissance and early modern periods.
"The use of performed and speculative music as a subject for, and as imagery in, English poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries is the interest of this book. Mr. Hollander's concern is not so much with musical practices as with beliefs about music's power, its place in the world-view of the times. The title of the book is taken from John Dryden's Song for St. Cecilia's Day, where it is used as an extravagant ejaculation in praise of the power of music.
Mr. Hollander traces the change that developed in the beliefs about music's power during the Renaissance, and demonstrates the relation between this change in speculative attitude and parallel developments in the conventions of English poetry during the same period. Almost all the English poetry of any musical relevance during the period is considered. Such major 17th century poems as Crashaw's Musick's Duell and Milton's At a Solemn Musick, as well as such hitherto almost totally unregarded poems as Marvell's Musick's Empire, are illuminated by observing the use of musical ideas."
JOHN HOLLANDER is editorial associate for poetry of Partisan Review and a member of the Yale University Department of English.
"Musicologists and musicians can learn a great deal from it about the literary treatment of their art. Scholars in the field of literature who are not musicologists should find much enlightenment here."—NATHAN BRODER, editor Musical Quarterly.
Very Good copy in VG unclipped dust jacket with some light damage/marking, foxing to book block edges. Previous owner's name to front flyleaf.
1986, English
Softcover, 124 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fontana / UK
$15.00 - In stock -
'Perfect, a tour de force... accessible in the way Thomas Mann's Death in Venice or D M Thomas's The White Hotel are accessible... dealing successfully with strong themes of erotic love and death.'—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Saigon, 1930s: a poor young French girl meets the elegant son of a wealthy Chinese family. Soon they are lovers, locked into a private world of passion and intensity that defies all the conventions of their society.
A sensational international bestseller, and winner of France's coveted Prix Goncourt, THE LOVER is disturbing, erotic, masterly. Here is an unforgettable portrayal of the incandescent relationship between the lovers, and of the hate that slowly tears the girl's family apart.
'A spectacular success... Duras at the height of her powers'—EDMUND WHITE
Good copy of 1986 ed. with general light wear to extremities and tanning.
1997, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 180 pages, 22 x 14 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$35.00 - In stock -
1997 Hardcover Yale edition. Edited with an introduction and notes by Ronald Paulson.
Born three hundred years ago in Smithfield, London, William Hogarth established himself as a central figure in eighteenth-century English culture through his paintings, engravings, and outspoken art criticism. In this new edition of Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty-a unique work combining theory with practical advice on painting-Ronald Paulson includes the complete text of the original work; an introduction that places the Analysis in the tradition of aesthetic treatises and Hogarth's own "moral" works; extensive annotation of the text and accompanying illustrations; and illuminating manuscript passages that Hogarth omitted from the final printed version.
In the development of English aesthetics, the Analysis of Beauty takes a position of high significance. Hogarth's stature in his own time suggests the importance of his attempt to systematize and theorize his own artistic practice. What he proposes is an aesthetics of the middle range, subordinating both the Beautiful and the Sublime to the everyday world of human choice and contingency-essentially the world of Hogarth's own modern moral subjects, his engraved works.
William Hogarth FRSA (1697—1764) was an English painter, engraver, pictorial satirist, social critic, editorial cartoonist and occasional writer on art. His work ranges from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects", and he is perhaps best known for his series A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode. Familiarity with his work is so widespread that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as "Hogarthian".
Very Good copy in Good—VG dust jacket with some wear to edges.
1966 / 1985, English
Softcover, 400 pages, 20 x13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Calder and Boyars / London
$55.00 - Out of stock
First English paperback edition published by Calder in 1985.
Translated by Donald Watson
One of the most admired contemporary French novelists. Robert Pinget, although often grouped with the nouveau roman, remains an individual voice whose main preoccupation lies with the nature of truth and the ways with which we deceive ourselves or others. The Inquisitory, his longest novel to appear in English, was his first break-through in France from admiration by the literary establishment to national acclaim and was the runner-up for the Prix Femina in a hotly-contested prize election, subsequently winning the Prix des Critiques. It concerns an old house.
recently deserted, where an inquisitor is asking questions of an old caretaker, whose answers are often evasive, often untrue, sometimes surprising or provocative. In the course of the question and answer session which makes up the novel, much emerges about the house in question, its inhabitants, visitors and servants, but we also learn about the community as a whole and the inhabitants of the local town, their daily doings, eccentricities and interests.
Although The Inquisitory has many aspects of a puzzle for the reader to solve, it is also a very amusing, witty and readable novel for all its unusual approach. It also has more than a sinister atmosphere as the web of evidence builds up from the questioning and the reader begins to ask himself questions too about the inhabitants of the house.
The Inquisitory first appeared in France in 1963 and in this translation in 1966. This is the first paperback edition. Robert Pinget is now the author of more than a dozen novels and several plays for both stage and radio which have been produced internationally. He lives principally in the centre of France, but was born in Switzerland, educated as a lawyer and known as a painter before starting to write.
Very Good copy, some sunning to covers and block edges, light wear. No spine creasing.
2017, English
Softcover, 162 pages, 22.6 x 15.1 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$48.00 - In stock -
Why sexuality is at the point of a "short circuit" between ontology and epistemology.
Consider sublimation-conventionally understood as a substitute satisfaction for missing sexual satisfaction. But what if, as Lacan claims, we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we get from sex from talking (or writing, painting, praying, or other activities)? The point is not to explain the satisfaction from talking by pointing to its sexual origin, but that the satisfaction from talking is itself sexual. The satisfaction from talking contains a key to sexual satisfaction (and not the other way around)-even a key to sexuality itself and its inherent contradictions. The Lacanian perspective would make the answer to the simple-seeming question, "What is sex?" rather more complex. In this volume in the Short Circuits series, Alenka Zupancic approaches the question from just this perspective, considering sexuality a properly philosophical problem for psychoanalysis; and by psychoanalysis, she means that of Freud and Lacan, not that of the kind of clinician practitioners called by Lacan "orthopedists of the unconscious."
Zupancic argues that sexuality is at the point of a "short circuit" between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link between being and knowledge in their very negativity.
1971, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 104 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Secker & Warburg / London
$320.00 - In stock -
Rare first English hardcover edition of Yukio Mishima's Sun and Steel, a masterpiece of modern Japanese literature, translated by John Bester, and published by Secker & Warburg, London, in 1971. With the iconic book jacket designed by Yukio Mishima.
In this fascinating document, one of Japan's best known-and controversial-writers created what might be termed a new literary form. Sun and Steel: Art, Action and Ritual Death (Japanese: 太陽と鉄, Hepburn: Taiyō to Tetsu) is an autobiographical essay, a memoir of the author's relationship to his body. It is new because it combines elements of many existing types of writing, yet in the end fits into none of them.
At one level, it may be read as an account of how a puny, bookish boy discovered the importance of his own physical being; the "sun and steel" of the title are themselves symbols respectively of the cult of the open air and the weights used in bodybuilding. At another level, it is a discussion by a major novelist of the relation between action and art, and his own highly polished art in particular. More personally, it is an account of one individual's search for identity and self-integration. Or again, the work could be seen as a demonstration of how an intensely individual preoccupation can be developed into a profound philosophy of life.
All these elements are woven together by Mishima's complex yet polished and supple style. The confession and the self-analysis, the philosophy and the poetry combine in the end to create something that is in itself perfect and self-sufficient. It is a piece of literature that is as carefully fashioned as Mishima's novels, and at the same time provides an indispensable key to the understanding of them as art.
The road Mishima took to salvation is a highly personal one. Yet here, ultimately, one detects the unmistakable tones of a self transcending the particular and attaining to a poetic vision of the universal. The book is therefore a moving document, and is highly significant as a pointer to the future development of one of the most interesting novelists of modern times.
"One of the twentieth century's outstanding statements of literary and personal purpose."—Library Journal
"Had we [read this before his suicide], the extravagant events surrounding his death would have been more readily comprehensible."—Sunday Times
YUKIO MISHIMA, one of the most spectacularly gifted writers in modern Japan, was born into a samurai family in 1925. Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai ("Shield Society"), an unarmed civilian militia. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. His works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Mishima's work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death", according to author Andrew Rankin. In November 1970 he and his Tatenokai forced their way into a Self-Defense Force headquarters in Tokyo, where Mishima, after reading out a proclamation, committed ritual suicide with a young follower in the commanding officer's room. On the morning of his death, the last volume of Mishima's tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility (The Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel) was delivered to his publisher.
The Translator, JOHN BESTER, born and educated in England, is one of the foremost translators of Japanese fiction. Among his translations are Masuji Ibuse's Black Rain, Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry, Fumiko Enchi's The Waiting Years, and Junnosuke Yoshiyuki's The Dark Room. He received the 1990 Noma Award for the Translation.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket. Light tanning, spots and edge wear. Well preserved copy.
1970, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
Reprint,
Published by
Lightning Source / Tennessee
$42.00 - Out of stock
Official bootleg-looking reprint of the first 1970 English softcover edition of Yukio Mishima's Sun and Steel, a masterpiece of modern Japanese literature.
In this fascinating document, one of Japan's best known-and controversial-writers created what might be termed a new literary form. Sun and Steel: Art, Action and Ritual Death (Japanese: 太陽と鉄, Hepburn: Taiyō to Tetsu) is an autobiographical essay, a memoir of the author's relationship to his body. It is new because it combines elements of many existing types of writing, yet in the end fits into none of them.
At one level, it may be read as an account of how a puny, bookish boy discovered the importance of his own physical being; the "sun and steel" of the title are themselves symbols respectively of the cult of the open air and the weights used in bodybuilding. At another level, it is a discussion by a major novelist of the relation between action and art, and his own highly polished art in particular. More personally, it is an account of one individual's search for identity and self-integration. Or again, the work could be seen as a demonstration of how an intensely individual preoccupation can be developed into a profound philosophy of life.
All these elements are woven together by Mishima's complex yet polished and supple style. The confession and the self-analysis, the philosophy and the poetry combine in the end to create something that is in itself perfect and self-sufficient. It is a piece of literature that is as carefully fashioned as Mishima's novels, and at the same time provides an indispensable key to the understanding of them as art.
The road Mishima took to salvation is a highly personal one. Yet here, ultimately, one detects the unmistakable tones of a self transcending the particular and attaining to a poetic vision of the universal. The book is therefore a moving document, and is highly significant as a pointer to the future development of one of the most interesting novelists of modern times.
"One of the twentieth century's outstanding statements of literary and personal purpose." -Library Journal"Necessary reading." -Times Literary Supplement"Had we [read this before his suicide], the extravagant events surrounding his death would have been more readily comprehensible." -Sunday Times"A key to the novelist's behavior." -Sunday Telegraph
YUKIO MISHIMA, one of the most spectacularly gifted writers in modern Japan, was born into a samurai family in 1925. Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai ("Shield Society"), an unarmed civilian militia. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. His works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Mishima's work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death", according to author Andrew Rankin. In November 1970 he and his Tatenokai forced their way into a Self-Defense Force headquarters in Tokyo, where Mishima, after reading out a proclamation, committed ritual suicide with a young follower in the commanding officer's room. On the morning of his death, the last volume of Mishima's tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility (The Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel) was delivered to his publisher.
The Translator, JOHN BESTER, born and educated in England, is one of the foremost translators of Japanese fiction. Among his translations are Masuji Ibuse's Black Rain, Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry, Fumiko Enchi's The Waiting Years, and Junnosuke Yoshiyuki's The Dark Room. He received the 1990 Noma Award for the Translation.
1970, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Grove Press / New York
$150.00 - Out of stock
First 1970 English softcover edition of Yukio Mishima's Sun and Steel, a masterpiece of modern Japanese literature.
In this fascinating document, one of Japan's best known-and controversial-writers created what might be termed a new literary form. Sun and Steel: Art, Action and Ritual Death (Japanese: 太陽と鉄, Hepburn: Taiyō to Tetsu) is an autobiographical essay, a memoir of the author's relationship to his body. It is new because it combines elements of many existing types of writing, yet in the end fits into none of them.
At one level, it may be read as an account of how a puny, bookish boy discovered the importance of his own physical being; the "sun and steel" of the title are themselves symbols respectively of the cult of the open air and the weights used in bodybuilding. At another level, it is a discussion by a major novelist of the relation between action and art, and his own highly polished art in particular. More personally, it is an account of one individual's search for identity and self-integration. Or again, the work could be seen as a demonstration of how an intensely individual preoccupation can be developed into a profound philosophy of life.
All these elements are woven together by Mishima's complex yet polished and supple style. The confession and the self-analysis, the philosophy and the poetry combine in the end to create something that is in itself perfect and self-sufficient. It is a piece of literature that is as carefully fashioned as Mishima's novels, and at the same time provides an indispensable key to the understanding of them as art.
The road Mishima took to salvation is a highly personal one. Yet here, ultimately, one detects the unmistakable tones of a self transcending the particular and attaining to a poetic vision of the universal. The book is therefore a moving document, and is highly significant as a pointer to the future development of one of the most interesting novelists of modern times.
"One of the twentieth century's outstanding statements of literary and personal purpose." -Library Journal"Necessary reading." -Times Literary Supplement"Had we [read this before his suicide], the extravagant events surrounding his death would have been more readily comprehensible." -Sunday Times"A key to the novelist's behavior." -Sunday Telegraph
YUKIO MISHIMA, one of the most spectacularly gifted writers in modern Japan, was born into a samurai family in 1925. Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai ("Shield Society"), an unarmed civilian militia. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. His works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Mishima's work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death", according to author Andrew Rankin. In November 1970 he and his Tatenokai forced their way into a Self-Defense Force headquarters in Tokyo, where Mishima, after reading out a proclamation, committed ritual suicide with a young follower in the commanding officer's room. On the morning of his death, the last volume of Mishima's tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility (The Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel) was delivered to his publisher.
The Translator, JOHN BESTER, born and educated in England, is one of the foremost translators of Japanese fiction. Among his translations are Masuji Ibuse's Black Rain, Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry, Fumiko Enchi's The Waiting Years, and Junnosuke Yoshiyuki's The Dark Room. He received the 1990 Noma Award for the Translation.
Very Good copy with light wear and age.
1979, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 20.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Grove Press / New York
$20.00 - In stock -
India Song, the new play by the French author of Hiroshima, Mon
Amour, was originally commissioned by Peter Hall for the opening of the Lyttelton Theatre of London's National Theatre. Harold Hob- son, writing in London's Sunday Times, called it "an unusual and magnificent work. This play will make the opening of the Lyttelton Theatre as memorable a date in the history of the drama as were Waiting for Godot and The Birthday Party; and for the same reason, that India Song, like them, is a shock to received ideas delivered by a dramatist of genius."
A film version of India Song, written and directed by Marguerite Duras, was shown at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, and again that year at The New York Film Festival. Molly Haskell, writing in The Village Voice, called the film "Marguerite Duras's most perfectly realized film-the most feminine film I've ever seen. As in her previous films, the voices function as an echo chamber whereby the past is imprinted and repeated to infinity. The place and the time, refracted through one real and many figurative mirrors, is the French Embassy in India, in 1937, the air heavy with heat and cut flowers, and the knowledge that the 'real India, the untouchable India, presses against the pane of an illusory sanctuary.'"
Marguerite Duras is the celebrated author of the novels Moderato Cantabile, The Square, The Ravishing of Lol Stein, The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas, and others. She also wrote and directed the film Destroy, She Said.
1960, English
Softcover, 568 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Dover / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
"This new Dover edition, first published in 1960, is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the first edition of the work which first appeared in 1924 under the title The Story of Early Chemistry."
"Add the blood of a red-haired man."—Theophilus
"To this crystal add the urine of an ass, and after 40 days you will find emeralds"—Democritus
These are quotes from two of the many alchemists whose writings are included in this book. Alchemy is one of the oldest arts practiced by man, and to uncover its history is to learn of extraordinarily strange beliefs and practices. But alchemy had a definite effect on the advance of thought and theory in true chemistry, and the histories of the two fields are often intermingled. In this volume, Professor Stillman has applied a lifetime of knowledge to the problem of developing these histories authoritatively, fully, and readably.
The author, head of the Chemistry Department at Stanford from 1891 to 1917, constructed his book from original Greek, Latin, German, and French texts-solid, factual material that you would have to go to dozens of different books to find elsewhere. He quotes liberally from the writers of all periods; you read the alchemists' own words about the transmutation of metals, Boyle's "Skeptical Chymist," Newton's ideas about the force of chemical affinity, Lavoisier's last letter before he was guillotined, and many other famous documents. You get concise studies of the lives and works of every leading figure in alchemy and early chemistry (through Lavoisier and the birth of modern chemistry).
The book is written with impeccable scholarship, but it is also an exciting story that will delight and inform both the general reader and the chemist. Combining science, art, and mysticism, it contains some of the greatest achievements of science as well as instances of superstition, credulity, and imagination unique in man's history.
Average—Good copy with discolouration/tanning/marking to covers/spine edges, previous owner's name penned to top of title page, some tape marks and tears patches to covers. Good interior.
2015, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$38.00 - In stock -
A moving meld of essay, memoir, and story, When the Sick Rule the World collects Dodie Bellamy’s new and recent lyric prose. Taking on topics as eclectic as vomit, Kathy Acker’s wardrobe, and Occupy Oakland, Bellamy here examines illness, health, and the body—both the social body and the individual body—in essays that glitter with wit even at their darkest moments.
In a safe house in Marin County, strangers allergic to the poisons of the world gather for an evening’s solace. In Oakland, protesters dance an ecstatic bacchanal over the cancerous body of the city-state they love and hate. In the elegiac memoir, “Phone Home,” Bellamy meditates on her dying mother’s last days via the improbable cipher of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Finally, Bellamy offers a piercing critique of the displacement and blight that have accompanied Twitter’s move into her warehouse-district neighborhood, and the pitiless imperialism of tech consciousness.
A participant in the New Narrative movement and a powerful influence on younger writers, Bellamy views heteronormativity and capitalism as plagues, and celebrates the micro-revolts of those on the outskirts. In its deft blending of forms, When the Sick Rule the World resiliently and defiantly proclaims the “undeath of the author.” In the realm of sickness, Bellamy asserts, subjectivity is not stable. “When the sick rule the world, mortality will be sexy,” Bellamy prophesies. Those defined by society as sick may, in fact, be its saviors.
About the Author
Dodie Bellamy is an American novelist, nonfiction author, journalist, and editor.
Reviews
“Dodie Bellamy’s latest work, When the Sick Rule the World, is a series of biting, ouroboric takes on the bi-polar allure of sickness, a fantastic book of psychic bloodletting and cauterizing ironies.”—The Rumpus
““Art writers lie. Art lies.” Bellamy fishhooks these sentences into an essay that begins with an ingenuous art review, passes through cancer and the Rust Belt, ends with the dreams of a child. And each piece of writing in this book does something similar—whether it’s essay or narrative or both at the same time—which is to say that no two pieces are alike. Whether she writes about the death of her mother or Occupy Oakland, Kathy Acker’s Gaultier dress or “Techrification with Heart” (in a letter to Twitter), Bellamy never fails to infect the holistic pieties of contemporary culture, to expose art’s enduring lies.”—Flavorwire
2017, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 15.5 x 23 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$38.00 - Out of stock
A forgotten gem of French literature, Duvert's version of The Lord of the Flies: an indictment against the violence embedded in a middle-class community. Translated by Purdey Lord Kreiden and Michael Thomas Taren.
Tony Duvert's novel Atlantic Island (originally published in French in 1979) takes place in the soul-crushing suburbs of a remote island off the coast of France. It is told through the shifting perspectives of a group of pubescent and prepubescent boys, ages seven to fourteen, who gather together at night in secret to carry out a series of burglaries throughout their neighborhood. The boys vandalize living rooms and kitchens and make off with, for the most part, petty objects of no value. Their exploits leave the adult community perplexed and outraged, especially when a death occurs and the stakes grow more serious.
Duvert's portrayal of adult life on this Atlantic Island is savage to the point of satire, but the boys and their thieving and sexuality are explored with sympathy. A novel on the loneliness of childhood and the solitude induced by geographical space, it is also an empathetic and generous homage to youth, a crime novel without suspense, and an unsettling fairytale for adults.
Atlantic Island today is a forgotten gem of French literature: Duvert's own version of The Lord of the Flies, it is attentive to details and precise in its depiction of French mores and language. An indictment against the violence embedded in a middle-class community, it is also a love letter to childhood, incorporating the heroic vistas in which a child needs only a fertile imagination to become the secret hero of his or her own life.
Tony Duvert (1945–2008) is the author of fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction. His fifth novel, Strange Landscape, won the prestigious Prix Médicis in 1973. Other books translated into English include the novels When Jonathan Died and Diary of an Innocent as well as the essay Good Sex Illustrated, the last two both available from Semiotext(e).
1976 / 2000, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 15.3 x 23 cm
Published by
Barrytown Ltd. / US
Station Hill Press / Barrytown
$30.00 - Out of stock
Death Sentence is a philosophical novel by Maurice Blanchot. First published in 1948, it is his second complete work of fiction. This long awaited reprint of a book about which John Hollander wrote: "A masterful version of one of the most remarkable novels in any language since World War II," is the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them. "Through more than 40 years, the French writer Maurice Blanchot has produced an astonishing body of fiction and criticism," writes Gilbert Sorrentino in the New York Review of Books, and John Updike in The New Yorker: "Blanchot's prose gives an impression, like Henry James, of carrying meanings so fragile they might crumble in transit."
Translated from French by Lydia Davis
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on later post-structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida. He is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern French writing yet no interview, no biographical sketch, and hardly any photographs have ever been published of him.
2024, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 20.32 x 13.34 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$37.00 - In stock -
When Jean Maleux, a young, naïve sailor, is appointed assistant keeper of the Ar-Men lighthouse off the coast of Brittany, he is drawn into a lonely, dark world of physical peril, sexual obsession, and necrophilia. The lighthouse is a chamber of locked doors and terrible secrets—and home to the eccentric, embittered keeper he is to assist, Mathurin Barnabas: an illiterate, irascible, and grizzled old man who appears to be more animal than human.
Time passes in alternating stages of mind-numbing monotony and bouts of horror as our hero struggles against the endless assaults of wind and loneliness, with only his duties, his mind fraying with guilt, and his mute companion for distraction. The sea evolves into a wild force and the lighthouse itself into a monster that Jean must tame if he is to survive.
First published in French in 1899 and never before translated, this gripping novel retains its shock value even now, and will be of keen interest to readers of Decadence, Symbolism, and Romantic horror fiction.
Rachilde was the pen name of Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (1860–1953). By her mid-twenties she was a prominent figure in Parisian literary circles and was the only female writer for the literary journal Le decadent (1886–1889). Her life and work were unconventional: she was a cross-dresser (in direct violation of French law) who constantly questioned gender identity and social norms, and her 1884 novel Monsieur Vénus was judged to be pornographic and was subsequently banned in Belgium, incurring for the author a sentence of two years in prison and a fine of two thousand francs. In 1889 she married Alfred Vallette, with whom she cofounded the Mercure de France, the most important journal and publishing house of the French Symbolists.
Translated by Jennifer Higgins, with an introduction by Melanie C. Hawthorne
“A captivating exercise in intriguing symbolism.”—John Taylor, Times Literary Supplement
“Gothic, gorgeous, thrilling, unnerving, and deliriously ahead of its time.”—Warren Maxwell, Independent Book Review
2023, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 12.7 x 21.6 cm
Published by
McNally Editions / US
$38.00 - In stock -
A noir tour-de-force set in the world of hustlers from "one of America's darkest and funniest chroniclers."—The Guardian
It's New York City, 1981, and everyone wants to be at the Emerson Club, from Cindy Crawford to Cindy Adams; from Famous Roger, one-time lion of the talk shows, to Sandy Miller, the “downtown” writer with the tattoos and the leather; from Lauren Hutton to the art star who does the thing with the broken plates. Everyone, that is, except Danny. Danny just works there, waiting tables to put himself through architecture school, turning tricks on the side. And when he’s not on the clock, he’s recording the sexual, aesthetic, and financial transactions that make up his life, in gruesome detail. But even a clever boy like Danny can wind up on the menu. Blinded by love for his fellow rent boy, Chip—as gorgeous as he is reckless—Danny is about to learn that there’s more than one way to turn your body into cash, and that cynicism is no defense when the real scalpels come out. A gimlet-eyed crime novel with an inventively filthy mind, Rent Boy is Gary Indiana at his most outrageous—and his best.
Gary Indiana is the author of the novels Horse Crazy, Gone Tomorrow, Do Everything in the Dark, and the acclaimed “true crime” trilogy made up of Resentment, Three-Month Fever, and Depraved Indifference. He has also published a memoir, I Can Give You Anything but Love; a collection of art criticism, Vile Days; and Fire Season: Selected Essays.
2018, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 600 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$52.00 - In stock -
Gary Indiana's collected columns of art criticism from the Village Voice, documenting, from the front lines, the 1980s New York art scene.
In 1985, the Village Voice offered me a job as senior art critic. This made my life easier and lousy at the same time. I now had to actually enter all those galleries instead of peeking in the windows. At times, the only tangible perk was having the chump for a fifth of vodka whenever twenty more phonies had flattered my ass off in the course of a working week. - from Vile Days
From March 1985 through June 1988 in The Village Voice, Gary Indiana reimagined the weekly art column. Thirty years later, Vile Days brings together for the first time all of those vivid dispatches, too long stuck in archival limbo, so that the fire of Indiana's observations can burn again. In the midst of Reaganism, the grim toll of AIDS, and the frequent jingoism of postmodern theory, Indiana found a way to be the moment's Baudelaire. He turned the art review into a chronicle of life under siege.
As a critic, Indiana combines his novelistic and theatrical gifts with a startling political acumen to assess art and the unruly environments that give it context. No one was better positioned to elucidate the work of key artists at crucial junctures of their early careers, from Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince to Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman, among others. But Indiana also remained alert to the aesthetic consequence of sumo wrestling, flower shows, public art, corporate galleries, and furniture design. Edited and prefaced by Bruce Hainley, with an afterword by Tobi Haslett, Vile Days provides an opportunity to track Indiana's emergence as one of the most prescient writers of his generation.