World Food Books

The Lover
by Marguerite Duras

1986, English
Softcover, 124 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Fontana / UK

$15.00 - Out of 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.

File under: Marguerite Duras Marguerite Duras Fontana / UK Fiction / Poetry Eros Out-of-print / Rare

The Analysis of Beauty
by William Hogarth

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 -

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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.

File under: William Hogarth William Hogarth Ronald Paulson Yale University Press / New Haven Painting Art Theory / Essay Out-of-print / Rare

The Inquisitory: A Novel
by Robert Pinget

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

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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.

File under: Robert Pinget Calder and Boyars / London Fiction / Poetry Out-of-print / Rare

What Is Sex?
by Alenka Zupančič

2017, English
Softcover, 162 pages, 22.6 x 15.1 cm
Published by The MIT Press / Massachusetts

$48.00 - In stock -

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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.

File under: Alenka Zupančič The MIT Press / Massachusetts Eros Philosophy Psychoanalysis Theory / Essay

Sun and Steel: Art, Action and Ritual Death
by Yukio Mishima

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 -

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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.

File under: Yukio Mishima Secker & Warburg / London LGBTQ+ Fiction / Poetry Out-of-print / Rare Sociology / Politics Theory / Essay Art

Sun and Steel: Art, Action and Ritual Death
by Yukio Mishima

1970, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
Reprint,
Published by Lightning Source / Tennessee

$42.00 - In stock -

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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.

File under: Yukio Mishima Lightning Source / Tennessee LGBTQ+ Fiction / Poetry Theory / Essay Art

Sun and Steel: Art, Action and Ritual Death
by Yukio Mishima

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

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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.

File under: Yukio Mishima Grove Press / New York LGBTQ+ Out-of-print / Rare Fiction / Poetry Theory / Essay Art

India Song
by Marguerite Duras

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 -

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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.

File under: Marguerite Duras Marguerite Duras Grove Press / New York Performance / Dance / Theater Out-of-print / Rare Fiction / Poetry

The Story of Alchemy and Early Chemistry
by John Maxson Stillman

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 -

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"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.

File under: John Maxson Stillman Dover / New York Occult / Esoterica Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay Ancient / Medieval / Gothic

When the Sick Rule the World
By Dodie Bellamy

2015, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles

$38.00 - In stock -

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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

File under: Dodie Bellamy Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles Fiction / Poetry Theory / Essay

Atlantic Island
By Tony Duvert

2017, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 15.5 x 23 cm
Published by Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles

$38.00 - Out of stock

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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).

File under: Tony Duvert Purdey Lord Kreiden Michael Thomas Taren Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles Fiction / Poetry Transgressive / Visceral / Abject Eros LGBTQ+

Death Sentence
by Maurice Blanchot

1976 / 2000, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 15.3 x 23 cm
Published by Barrytown Ltd. / US Station Hill Press / Barrytown

$30.00 - In stock -

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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.

File under: Maurice Blanchot Barrytown Ltd. / US Station Hill Press / Barrytown Fiction / Poetry Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction Philosophy

The Tower of Love
by Rachilde

2024, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 20.32 x 13.34 cm
Published by Wakefield Press / Cambridge

$37.00 - In stock -

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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

File under: Rachilde Wakefield Press / Cambridge Fiction / Poetry Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction

Rent Boy
By Gary Indiana

2023, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 12.7 x 21.6 cm
Published by McNally Editions / US

$38.00 - In stock -

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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.

File under: Gary Indiana McNally Editions / US LGBTQ+ Fiction / Poetry

Vile Days : The Village Voice Art Columns, 1985-1988
By Gary Indiana, Edited by Bruce Hainley

2018, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 600 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles

$52.00 - Out of stock

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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.

File under: Gary Indiana Bruce Hainley Tobi Haslett Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles Theory / Essay Art

American Magus — Harry Smith : A Modern Alchemist
by Paola Igliori

2022, English
Softcover, 328 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles

$40.00 - Out of stock

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A privileged look into the life and artistic practice of the experimental filmmaker, music anthologist, and enigmatic polymath Harry Smith.

Best known during his lifetime as an experimental filmmaker and Folkways Records music anthologist, Harry Smith (1923-1991) was a spiritual outsider and one of the most original, influential artists of the mid-century American avant-garde. An avid, inspired collector of old blues and hillbilly recordings during his youth, he became a fan of such bebop jazz as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and began making avant-garde film animations featuring patterns painted directly onto the negatives as visual accompaniments to jazz performances. Smith crossed paths with nearly everyone central to the cultural avant-garde; he lived for art and gnosis with little thought for practical consequences. In 1991, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in New York.

Five years after Smith's death, the poet Paola Igliori began conducting intimate interviews with the filmmakers, musicians, poets, and artists who knew him best. The result, American Magus Harry Smith, offers a privileged look not only into Smith's life and artistic practice, but also into his era and the informal economy of influence that operated during that time. It provides invaluable insight into the mind of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic polymaths. This expanded edition includes photos of Smith and many other color images.

File under: Harry Smith Paola Igliori Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles Theory / Essay Film / Video Sound / Music Occult / Esoterica Art Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic

Fascination (Memoirs)
By Kevin Killian

2018, English
Softcover, 312 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles

$38.00 - In stock -

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A memoir of gay life in 1970s Long Island by one of the leading proponents of the New Narrative movement.

Fascination brings together an early memoir, Bedrooms Have Windows (1989) and a previously unpublished prose work, Bachelors Get Lonely, by the poet and novelist Kevin Killian, one of the founding members of the New Narrative movement. The two together depict the author's early years struggling to become a writer in the sexed-up, boozy, drug-ridden world of Long Island's North Shore in the 1970s. It concludes with Triangles in the Sand, a new, previously unpublished memoir of Killian's brief affair in the 1970s with the composer Arthur Russell. Fascination offers a moving and often funny view of the loneliness and desire that defined gay life of that era—a time in which Richard Nixon's resignation intersected with David Bowie's Diamond Dogs—from one of the leading voices in experimental gay writing of the past thirty years. “Move along the velvet rope,” Killian writes in Bedrooms Have Windows, “run your shaky fingers past the lacquered Keith Haring graffito: 'You did not live in our time! Be Sorry!'”

Edited by Andrew Durbin

File under: Andrew Durbin Kevin Killian Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles Theory / Essay

Diary of an Innocent
By Tony Duvert

2010, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 15.5 x 23 cm
Published by Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles

$38.00 - In stock -

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"'I always write completely nude, and I don't wash before,' writes Tony Duvert, whose explosive Diary of an Innocent is part tract, part porn, part theory, part fiction, and (I presume) part fact. Certain pages of Gide, Genet, Hocquenghem and certain scenes from Bresson or Pasolini suggest themselves as mild precursors, but Duvert goes further, filthier, faster. Only the Marquis de Sade outpaces him. Must we burn Duvert? I pray not. This book, troubling and memorable, interrogates with delicate strokes the damaged state of contemporary sexual relations."—Wayne Koestenbaum

Now in English, Duvert's shocking novel about a sexual adventurer among a tribe of adolescent boys in Northern Africa. Translated with introduction by Bruce Benderson.

"I'd find it amusing if, in a few centuries, the only thing that our descendents condescend to retain of our artistic production, the only thing in which they'll see worlds to admire, to penetrate, the only thing that they'll show off as precious in immense museums after having flushed down the toilet all our acknowledged masterpieces, the only thing that will give them nostalgia and love for us will be our porn."—from Diary of an Innocent

Exiled from the prestigious French literary circles that had adored him in the 1970s, novelist Tony Duvert's life ended in anonymity. In 2008, nineteen years after his last book was published, Duvert's lifeless body was discovered in the small village of Thoré-la-Rochette, where he had been living a life of total seclusion.

Now for the first time, Duvert's most highly crafted novel is available in English. Poetic, brutally frank, and outright shocking, Diary of an Innocent recounts the risky experiences of a sexual adventurer among a tribe of adolescent boys in an imaginary setting that suggests North Africa. More reverie than narrative, Duvert's Diary presents a cascading series of portraits of the narrator's adolescent sexual partners and their culture, and ends with a fanciful yet rigorous construction of a reverse world in which marginal sexualities have become the norm.

Written with gusto and infused with a luminous bitterness, this novel is more unsettling to readers today than it was to its first audience when published in French in 1976. In his openly declared war on society, Duvert presents a worldview that offers no easy moral code and no false narrative solution of redemption. And yet no reader will remain untouched by the book's dazzling language, stinging wit, devotion to matters of the heart, and terse condemnation of today's society.

"Diary of an Innocent by Tony Duvert is a truly scandalous work, but first and foremost a work of great depth and freedom.... A book that reinvents the seduction of literature."—Abdellah Taïa, author of Salvation Army

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).

Novelist, translator, and essayist Bruce Benderson is the author of a memoir, The Romanian: Story of an Obsession, winner of France's prestigious Prix de Flore in French translation, and Pacific Agony (Semiotext(e), 2009.)

File under: Tony Duvert Bruce Benderson Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles Fiction / Poetry Transgressive / Visceral / Abject Eros LGBTQ+

The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington
by Leonora Carrington

2017, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 14 x 17.5 cm
Published by Dorothy Project / St. Louis

$38.00 - Out of stock

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"Her delirious fantasy reveals to us a little of the secret magic of her paintings" - Luis Buñuel

Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a master of the macabre, of gorgeous tableaus, biting satire, roguish comedy, and brilliant, effortless flights of the imagination. Nowhere are these qualities more ingeniously brought together than in the works of short fiction she wrote throughout her life.

Published to coincide with the centennial of her birth, THE COMPLETE STORIES OF LEONORA CARRINGTON collects for the first time all of her stories, including several never before seen in print. With a startling range of styles, subjects, and even languages (several of the stories are translated from French or Spanish), THE COMPLETE STORIES captures the genius and irrepressible spirit of an amazing artist's life.

File under: Leonora Carrington Leonora Carrington Dorothy Project / St. Louis Surrealism Art Painting Fiction / Poetry Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction

If You're A Girl (Revised and Expanded Edition)
by Ann Rower

2024, English
Softcover, 384 pages, 20.32 x 13.34 cm
Published by Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles

$38.00 - In stock -

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The trailblazing book that influenced a generation of writers, and proves that mature reflection needn't be lacking in attitude.

In the beginning when everything was very sexual we talked about our fantasies. She thought about having a guy for some of it. She thought about having a gun. I had gone through a lot to get away from guys so I admit that the thought of going back to them, even for a little adventure, was surprising and disconcerting ...

Ann Rower's first book, If You're a Girl, published by Semiotext(e)'s Native Agents series in 1991 in tandem with Cookie Mueller's Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, cemented her reputation as the Eve Babitz of lower Manhattan.

Rower was fifty-three years old at the time. Her stories-urtexts of female autofiction-had long been circulating within the poetry and postpunk music scenes. They were unlike anyone else's- disarming, embarrassing, psuedoconfessional tales of everyday life dizzily told and laced with dry humor. In If You're a Girl, she recounts her adventures as Timothy Leary's babysitter, her artistic romance with actor Ron Vawter, and her attempts to evade a schizophrenic stalker.

Rower went on to publish two novels-Armed Response (1995) and Lee & Elaine (2002). After the 2002 suicide of her partner, the writer Heather Lewis, Rower stopped writing for almost two decades. And then she picked up where If You're a Girl left off. No longer a girl, she produced dozens of stories from her life in New York as an octogenarian.

This new, expanded edition includes most of the original book, together with selections from both her novels and her recent writings. If You're a Girl is a trailblazing book that manifests Rower's influence on a generation of writers, and proves that mature reflection needn't be lacking in attitude.

File under: Ann Rower Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles Fiction / Poetry LGBTQ+

Notice
by Heather Lewis

2024, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 20.32 x 13.97 cm
Published by Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles

$38.00 - In stock -

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A classic queer text of trauma, written by one of the most talented novelists of her generation.

"The reason it's never just once is the same reason money's only a part of it. Most anyone can take or leave that, though they don't think they can. The cover story of all time, that's what money is. The excuse of excuses no one will question because they so much need to use it themselves."

Published by Doubleday in 1994, Heather Lewis's chilling debut novel took place on the northeastern equestrian show-riding circuit, to which Lewis herself belonged in her teens. Expelled from boarding school, its fifteen-year-old narrator moves numbly through a world of motel rooms, heroin, dyke love, and doped horses. Kirkus Reviews found it "brutal, sensual, honest, seductive ... a powerful debut," while the New York Times found the book "grating and troublesome ... it's difficult to imagine a more passive specimen."

Almost immediately, Lewis began writing Notice, a novel that moves even further into dark territory. The teenaged narrator Nina begins turning tricks in the parking lot of the train station near the Westchester County home of her absent parents. She soon falls into a sadomasochistic relationship with a couple. Arrested, she's saved by a counselor and admitted to a psychiatric facility. But these soft forms of control turn out to be even worse. Writing in the register of an emotional fugue state, Notice's helpless but all-knowing narrator is as smooth and sharp as a knife.

Rejected by every publisher who read it during Lewis's life, Notice was eventually published by Serpent's Tail in 2004, two years after her death. The book, long out of print, emerged as a classic queer text of trauma, written by one of the most talented novelists of her generation.

File under: Heather Lewis Melissa Febos Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles LGBTQ+ Fiction / Poetry Transgressive / Visceral / Abject

Story of the Eye
by Georges Bataille

2001, English
Softcover, 103 pages, 14 x 20.4 cm
Published by City Lights Books / San Francisco

$28.00 - Out of stock

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"The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster's horrible crowing." - G.B.

A masterpiece of transgressive, surrealist erotica, Bataille's first novel, published under the pseudonym 'Lord Auch', is still his most notorious work. Called a "metaphysician of evil, Bataille wrote the 1928 novella "Story of the Eye (French: L'histoire de l'œil) as a psychoanalytical task. In this explicit erotic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacrilegious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille's obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.

Georges Bataille (1897-1962), French essayist and novelist, was born in Billom, France. He converted to Catholicism, then later to Marxism, and was interested in psychoanalysis and mysticism, forming a secret society dedicated to glorifying human sacrifice. Leading a simple life as the curator of a municipal library, Bataille was involved on the fringes of Surrealism, founding the Surrealist magazine Documents in 1929, and editing the literary review Critique from 1946 until his death.

File under: Georges Bataille City Lights Books / San Francisco Eros Surrealism Fiction / Poetry Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction

Querelle of Brest
by Jean Genet

1972, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 320 pages, 22 x 14.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Faber & Faber / London

$65.00 - Out of stock

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1973 hardcover Faber & Faber edition of Genet's classic, translated from French by Gregory Streatham.

Jean Genet, French playwright, novelist and poet, turned the experiences in his life amongst pimps, whores, thugs and other fellow social outcasts into a poetic literature, with an honesty and explicitness unprecedented at the time. Widely considered an outstanding and unique figure in French literature, Genet wrote five novels between 1942 and 1947. Querelle of Brest is widely considered to be Jean Genet's most accomplished novel, which was made into a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1982. Querelle, a young sailor at large in the port of Brest, is an object of illicit desire to his diary-keeping superior officer, Lieutenant Seblon. He is coveted, too, by corrupt policeman Mario. He gives himself freely both to brothel-keeper Madame Lysiane and to her husband. But Querelle is a thief and a murderer -- not a man to be trusted or trifled with . . .

Jean Genet, (born Dec. 19, 1910, Paris, France-died April 15, 1986, Paris), French criminal and social outcast turned writer who, as a novelist, transformed erotic and often obscene subject matter into a poetic vision of the universe and, as a dramatist, became a leading figure in the avant-garde theatre, especially the Theatre of the Absurd.

VG copy in VG dust jacket, light wear and tear to extremities, price-clipped to inner front dj flap, old bookseller stamp to inner spine.

File under: Jean Genet Faber & Faber / London LGBTQ+ Out-of-print / Rare Fiction / Poetry

Literature and the Ethical Question (Yale French Studies, No. 79)
Edited by Claire Nouvet

1991, English
Softcover, 276 pages, 242 x‎ 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by Yale University Press / New Haven

$35.00 - In stock -

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Yale French Studies, Number 79, 1991, Edited by Claire Nouvet, featuring the essays of George Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, Cathy Caruth, and many more. Cover artwork by Artaud.

"How does ethics affect literature and literary analysis? In what ways do literature and literary analysis rethink questions that traditionally belong to the field of ethics? What role does the notion of ethics play in the writing process? How can we situate and reassess the return of ethics in contemporary theories? The contributors to this issue among them writers, philosophers, literary critics, and psychoanalysts-evaluate the relationship between ethics and literature. Their diverse approaches range from a discussion of notions of humanity and responsibility to a reading of the Holocaust as it is explored in the film Shoah."

Good copy, general wear.

File under: Antonin Artaud Antonin Artaud Claire Nouvet George Bataille Maurice Blanchot Jean-Luc Nancy Cathy Caruth Yale University Press / New Haven Theory / Essay Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Out-of-print / Rare Periodicals Philosophy

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