World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1994, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi), 240 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Bunyusha / Tokyo
$65.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 1994 edition of this gorgeous book-document of the life and work of acclaimed Japanese sci-fi author and countercultural icon, Izumi Suzuki, published by Bunyusha, Tokyo, and illustrated with Nobuyoshi Araki's photographs. "Towards the love of speed, told by people who were around. A record of an amazing life. Actress, writer, wife of Kaoru Abe"
Long out-of-print, this book portrait documents the singular, but tragically short, biography and bibliography of this Japanese sci-fi iconoclast who debuted as a writer at the age of 20, having written stories since her childhood. Edited by Tamami Nishimura and Kenichi Yamada, commemorative chapters on Suzuki by her friends, collaborators and colleagues trace her life on the stage (as a member of Shuji Terayama's underground theater troupe Tenjo Saijiki), the screen (as "pink" film actress), the image (as model and muse to photographer Nobuyoshi Araki), the page (as celebrated pop culture essayist and proto-cyberpunk author), through the life between with marriage to free jazz alto-saxophonist Kaoru Abe and suicide at age 36 — a life as adventurous and tumultuous as the art they made and the counterculture they inhabited. Illustrated throughout with Nobuyoshi Araki's intimate colour and b/w photographs of Suzuki. Includes comprehensive bibliography of Suzuki's writings, many magazine articles and works of fiction.
Izumi Suzuki was born in 1949. After dropping out of high school she worked in a factory before finding success and infamy as a model and actress. She was a member of Shuji Terayama's independent underground theater troupe Tenjo Saijiki, and acted in both "pink" films and classics of 1970s Japanese cinema. Izumi was the subject of many of Nobuyoshi Araki's most famous photographs and this photobook is one of his most sought after. When the father of her children, the jazz musician Kaoru Abe, died of an overdose, Suzuki’s creative output went into hyperdrive and she began producing the irreverent and punky short fiction, novels and essays that ensured her reputation would outstrip and outlast that of the men she had been associated with in her early career. She took her own life in 1986, leaving behind a decade’s worth of groundbreaking and influential writing.
Good copy in dust jacket and obi. Most complete copy, with some buckling.
2006, German / English
Softcover, 72 pages, 30 x 24 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Secession / Vienna
Walther König / Köln
Galerie im Taxispalais / Innsbruck
$200.00 - Out of stock
Rare 2006 catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Isa Genzken at Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck and Secession, Wien, by Walther Koenig. Profusely illustrated throughout with Genzken's works and installation views, accompanied by texts by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Manfred Hermes, Anette Freudenberger, Silvia Eiblmayr, and Barbara Holub in both English and German.
"For more than thirty years, Isa Genzken has been developing a versatile oeuvre, continually extending it by adding new aspects. Her settings, her unusual combinations of materials, and the fragile but monumental character of her constructions reflect the surrounding world and the fragility of human existence. Her work—which includes sculptures and installations as well as photography, collage, and film—explores the space between public claims and private artistic autonomy, thus defining an interface where the personal and the universal meet. The formal and conceptual rigor at the root of Isa Genzken’s approach is tempered by unrestricted freedom, producing works that can be interpreted and experienced on very different levels. A central role is played by the choice and combination of materials with different connotations which the artist finds at home depots, builders’ suppliers, and department stores: whereas in the past Genzken used wood, plaster, epoxy resins, and above all concrete, the material of Modernism, her main materials today are plastic, synthetics, and a wide range of mirrors, as well as everyday items and consumer goods such as chairs—design classics alongside cheap camping chairs—garments, and plastic dolls and animals.
For her exhibition in the Hauptraum at the Secession, Isa Genzken has devised an installation with new sculptures and pieces on the wall: wheelchairs and seats draped in various textiles, ribbons, and sheets, walking frames, anthropomorphic figures, and wall-filling collages made from mirrors, photos, and adhesive tape create a carefully arranged image. Warholesque baby dolls with their outsize glasses look like prematurely aged children or, conversely, like infantilized adults, waiting under tattered parasols on a Hollywood set for shooting to recommence. But less than this bizarre scene, what is disconcerting here is the cool precision with which, for all the piece’s figurativeness, no story is told. Dolls and animals form heterogeneous abstract surfaces, but they are not deployed to narrative ends, and neither are other materials such as the mirrors, plastic sheeting, or the paint dripped or sprayed over many of the sculptures.
The new works relate to Genzken’s recent Empire/Vampire series. But while these works were presented on plinths at eye level, at the Secession, the entire space turns into a kind of plinth and the visitors become part of this scenario that is both beguilingly beautiful and disturbing at the same time. The works turn an imaginary inner space outwards, but rather than being something merely invented, the space always refers to the real—a comparative moment against which all the pieces can be measured. In an interview with Wolfgang Tillmans, Isa Genzken describes the way she thinks a sculpture should look: “It must have a certain relation to reality. I mean, not airy-fairy, let alone fabricated, so aloof and polite. [...] Rather, a sculpture is really a photo – although it can be shifted, it must still always have an aspect that reality has too.”
Good copy, due to bumps/creases to corners and previous owners inscription to title page, otherwise a Very Good copy throughout.
2023, English
Fold-out, double-sided poster, 16 panels, 30 x 21 cm (folded)
Edition of 200,
Published by
Self-Published / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
TEMPLATES by Melbourne/Naarm based artists Rose Nolan and Augusta Vinall Richardson is a conversation and fold-out archive of artworks, published in an edition of 200, designed by Yanni Florence, text edited by Madeline Simm.
This publication was produced in conjunction with TEMPLATE/SKETCH, Augusta Vinall Richardson solo presentation at CAVES Gallery, Melbourne 20 October 11 November, 2023
2022, English
Softcover (thread-bound), 28 pages + A3 insert, 29.7 x 21 cm
Ed. of 100, hand-initialed and numbered.,
Published by
Rose Nolan / Melbourne
$50.00 - In stock -
Working Models For / From Someone's Life is a new artist's book by Melbourne-based artist Rose Nolan, published in a limited edition of 100 copies, each hand-numbered and initialed by Nolan, designed by the artist with Warren Taylor. The volume comprises photographic documentation by Christian Capurro of Nolan's "models", accompanied by text by Ingrid Periz. "Rose Nolan calls the constructions pictured here working models, taking the name of similar objects used in the architectural design process where they are used to check proportion, volume and shape. Occasionally this process of checking prompts a rethink, and a drawing is corrected. Unlike their namesakes, Nolan's models won't prompt any design rethink or correction.Theirs may be a harder task.As she tells me, electronically: "My small models don't have to function (in Real Life) in anyway, other than to stand up for themselves:""—from text by Periz.
"We can think of the models as Cubist "portraits" of fictitious buildings; they are additionally self-portraits of Rose Nolan, Rose Nolan the architect of the buildings and Rose Nolan the consumer, buyer of Apple products, fine French candles, Chanel, Marimekko and Fab, the laundry detergent."
Includes A3 insert of all models as folded poster / catalogue.
Rose Nolan (b. 1959) is an Australian visual artist based in Melbourne working across painting, installation, sculpture, photography, prints and book production. Her practice regularly oscillates between the discrete and the monumental and is informed by a strong interest in architecture, interior and graphic design – combining formal concerns with the legacies of modernism. Nolan’s practice is known for its investigation of the formal and linguistic qualities of words, directly using language to transform the architectural space they inhabit. By making language concrete in this way meaning is allowed to be approached differently.
Nolan employs a radically reduced palette of red and white, and simple utilitarian materials and methods, in an exploration of personal, playful and often self-effacing narratives. Each work describes a concern for economy; a desire to be responsive to site; an interest in seriality and repetition; and the importance of language, interactivity, and the experience of the viewer.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Eliza Hutchison 2002-2004 portraits from the series The Ancestors and The Entertainers were taken by hanging the subjects upside down.
“In this work, Hutchison explores the construction of the imagery solely through her subjects. Here we are confronted by the effect of a prop on a body. We do not see the prop in the portraits, but merely the uncanny effects on the subjects after they have been placed into this prop and then relocated in space. This is examined by Hutchison through the lens of a large format camera and recorded onto photographic plates, reminiscent of daguerreotype photography. Also evocative of this early photography is the stiff nature of Hutchinson’s portraiture (due in the early daguerreotype photography to the long exposures sitters had to endure).”
“…the theatricality is encapsulated in the forensic detail and through the performance undertaken in the production of each image. Once relocated in space, the staging of Hutchison’s sitters is further exaggerated, extending and relocating the boundaries of traditional portraiture. Ultimately, although the photographs are the product of careful, time-consuming staging, the experience of the sitter placed within the prop is fleeting and dangerous. Unlike early portraiture, the stakes are much higher and the effect more radical.”—Ruth Learner, The Ancestors, Un Magazine, 2005
Eliza Hutchison was born in Johannesburg, South Africa 1965 and currently lives and works in Naarm Naarm. Her interest is in exploring our complex and psychological relationship to the photographic image. Her image making practice has extend to use experimental in camera process to develop a biographical record of her life and creative practice. Hair in the Gate, a biograph, 2013 and Family Photos 2021, her first monograph where the biographical as point of departure was used to explore the broader social political context.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Stain Pictures features works from Jane Burton’s A Temptation to Ships, 2018, hand printed, toned and painted gelatin silver photograph, unique 1/1 and Devil’s Playground, 2015, hand printed, toned and painted gelatin silver photograph, unique 1/1
“But in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is nepenthe. In the supreme horror of that second I forgot what had horrified me, and the burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images. In a dream I fled from that haunted and accursed pile, and ran swiftly and silently in the moonlight. When I returned to the churchyard place of marble and went down the steps I found the stone trap-door immovable; but I was not sorry, for I had hated the antique castle and the trees. Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.”—H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), an excerpt from The Outsider (1921)
Jane Burton is an artist working with photography, film, and more recently, painting. Her work explores mortality, desire, and isolation and is often darkly ambiguous, enigmatic and provocative. Burton’s work is held in the collections of prominent state and publicly funded galleries, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Australia, Museum of Australian Photography, and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. She has been the recipient of artist residencies in Paris (School of Art, University of Tasmania; Art Gallery of New South Wales), London (Australia Council for the Arts), and Beijing (24HRArt). Two monographs of her photographs have been published by M.33, Melbourne: ‘It is Midnight, Dr. ’, in 2017, and ‘Other Stories’, in 2011.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - Out of stock
The paintings on interior design magazine photos developed after a hiatus from art making while immersed in family life and domesticity. Creative energies were subsumed into home living spaces, the inside and the garden. I looked at interior design magazines, photos of daydream spaces that were untroubled by the presence of humans; their/my containers of curated longings. Mise-en-sènes, often the realm of the English country house suffused with a collective and projected psychic energy. Rooms and furniture, dense with intangible latent energies that are now interacted with marks of paint, pen and pastel. Scribbling and smudging, tracing the imagined residue of projected desires while responding to the armature of the image in colour, shape and texture. These errant energies enlivened by paint make an intimate liminal interface between magazine and gaze. The emergent interactions are conversational, interventional and absurd. Aloof and amorphous, unconscious spaces become corporeal, thresholds are invaded with the scribbled and smudged paint, claiming a messy subjective presence of painterly process, interaction and decorative hijacking.
Amanda Florence is an artist born in Melbourne/Naarm. She studied BA Fine Arts Joint Hons at Camberwell College of Art, London, UK; Post grad at VCA, Melbourne and MA Creative Arts Therapy, LaTrobe University, Melbourne. She currently makes art at home, gardens and works as a Creative Arts Therapist.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
A collection of images I made on film, between 1999-2005, across Australia, Taiwan and Germany. In the photographs are: friends, animals, oceans, one Baxter Immigration Detention Centre protest image, one anti-Woolworths protest image, one lover, one river, one photographic experiment, some trees, and plants.
Katrin Koenning lives and works in Naarm, on unceded Wurundjeri Country.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Rose Nolan’s photographs taken in New York in 2010.
Rose Nolan is an artist based in Naarm / Melbourne working across painting, installation, sculpture, photography, prints and book production.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Taken in and around various locations on the Mornington Peninsula this zine of photographs by Emma Phillips reveals a curiosity of place, texture, light, and embodiment. The portraits were early forays into the domain of portraiture, and present as encounters in a skewed and slightly strange world. Just beyond the horizon lies a promise, if only we could reach out and touch it.
Emma Phillips b.1989 Sorrento, Australia Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia Represented by ReadingRoom.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
1990, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 30 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Janssen Verlag / Berlin
$200.00 - Out of stock
First 1990 edition of The Art of George Quaintance, the first comprehensive art book survey of George Quaintance's work. Profusely illustrated throughout with beautiful reproductions of Quaintance's stunning homo-erotic artworks and book illustrations, alongside many press clippings, magazine articles, advertisements for Studio Quaintance, texts in English and German by George Quaintance, Volker Janssen, and Tora Lillstrom. George Quaintance (1902—1957) was an important Arizonan American artist, famous for his "idealized, strongly homoerotic" depictions of men in mid-20th-century physique magazines, such as the influential Physique Pictorial. Using historical settings and folklore such as the Wild West, or the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome, George Quaintance distanced his subjects from modern society, his world of legends made glorious with muscular, semi-nude or nude male figures, helping establish the stereotype of the homosexual "macho stud". A pioneer of a gay aesthetic, George Quaintance's work would influence many later homoerotic artists, including, most notably Tom of Finland.
Very Good copy.
1996, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 70 pages, 33.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Janssen Verlag / Berlin
$80.00 - Out of stock
Rare first and only edition of Ed Cervone's Phantasies Of Gay Sex, published in an edition of 1500 copies in 1996 by Janssen Verlag in Berlin, and long out-of-print. Ed's fantastical, whimsical and always joyous colour depictions of homo-erotica fill this over-sized volume, "thirty-one brightly coloured paintings (plus a back cover image), printed on one side of heavy paper to assist pinning up, covering the gamut of the best gay fantasies imaginable. There is no text, just men enjoying each other, by the pool, on the bed, at the drive-in movie theater, on the football field."(—honesterotica)
Born in a refugee camp in Germany during the war's aftermath to a Latvian mother and German soldier, Edmund Cervone (1945 – 2001) and his mother soon found their way to the US. It was in New York City in the 1970's that Ed emerged as an erotic artist and achieved notoriety. Sometimes referred to as Ed of Manhattan, Ed disliked the moniker, an allusion to Tom of Finland. And indeed, his original voice displayed little of the bulked-up stylized figures. Instead, he headed out in another direction, one of more suppleness and litheness. His painterly approach and the motion in his artworks owed as much to his love of landscape painting as it did to the dynamic of the people he would see in the streets of Manhattan. Eschewing models, he would draw from memory from this wealth of characters, matching the joy of his erotic subjects with vibrant, fantastic use of colour. Internationally known as an illustrator for the male erotic press his artwork is part of the permanent collection at the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation in New York City.
Average—Good copy due to moisture rippling/marking to the bottom of the front cover and first book pages, lessening throughout. Light corner bumping, otherwise this would be a VG—Near Copy all other regards.
2023, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 20.2 x 13.7 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$36.00 - In stock -
A remarkable time capsule of Simi Valley, 1979, written before the author would become one of LA's most influential artists of subsequent decades.
When Sean DeLear died prematurely in Vienna in 2017, his friends discovered-among other treasures-an extensive diary kept at the age of fourteen. Still living with his Christian parents in the notoriously racist Los Angeles suburb of Simi Valley, Sean wrote almost every day about crushes and hustling, waterbeds, blackmail, Donna Summer, gloryholes, racism, and shoplifting gay porn.
DeLear would go on to become the frontman for the Los Angeles punk/powerpop band Glue. He was a punk musician, visual artist, intercontinental scenester, video vixen, party host, marijuana farmer, and sometime-collaborator of artists such as Kembra Pfahler and Vaginal Davis.
DeLear's forgotten diaries capture a moment in Los Angeles underground and queer history when, as his friend the writer Cesar Padilla notes, "It wasn't cool at all to be trans, gay, queer or whatever. Those words weren't even in the vocabulary." I Could Not Believe It, Padilla continues, "is a raw fearless innocent gay Black kid's journey coming out into life at an incredible pre-AIDS period. It's not cognizant of being literature. It's as naïve and forthcoming as it gets. It wasn't written with the desire to be published so Sean didn't hold back. Sean's goal was to be true to himself."
"What I love about this 'potent historical artifact of Black youth,' as Brontez Purnell describes it in his introduction, are its notes of uncertainty, lack of pretention and its persistent faith in tomorrow."—Andrew Durbin, Frieze
1974, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi), 112 pages, 26 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kodansha Int / Tokyo
$550.00 - Out of stock
Very rare first 1974 edition of acclaimed female Japanese photographer Ruiko Yoshida's powerful ode to Harlem. Born in Hokkaido in 1938, Yoshida witnessed discrimination against the Ainu, an indigenous peoples native to northern Japan, and much of her work since has been focused on discrimination in society around the world. Harlem : Black Angels is a collection of Yoshida's breath-taking photographs of Harlem in the late 1960s, one of the largest black communities in the world, where she settled after majoring in photojournalism at Columbia University. She married an African American man with whom she had a child. Their daily lives, and the community of Harlemites in the midst of cultural revolution, became the subject of her photographs. The images seem to show a complete assimilation into black culture that had not been depicted by non-black artists at the time and rarely since. Yoshida captures both the time and place with uncanny virtuosity, blurring the frontiers between a personal and an objective documentary of a uniquely vibrant era Harlem. From her touching pictures of the children, to the Vietnam protests, Angela Davis, the funeral of Malcolm X, the Jazz musicians (Coltrane, Davis, Gillespie, Coleman...), the street festivals, the markets, The Black Panthers, Yoshida's gravure images are captioned in both Japanese and English, evoking the powerful sentiments of the time and the spirit of the people.
"Ruiko Yoshida's photographs of Harlem in the early 1970s brilliantly capture various aspects of the culture and the times, showing a side of the U.S. that she felt her Japanese contemporaries knew little about. In the process she created a compelling work that offers an incisive critique of racial hierarchies in the U.S. that, despite its deeply felt humanism, is missing from Bruce Davidson's East 100th Street."—photo-eye
Little known in the West until a reprint in 2010, Harlem : Black Angels has become a jewel of Japanese photo-journalism and a testament to the great breadth of postwar Japanese photobooks. Pictures included in this book were part of the exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power”
Includes text in both Japanese and English by poet Hajime Kijima.
Very Good copy in original publishers plastic dust jacket and original BLUE obi-strip. Dust jacket with the usual shrinkage and wear due to age. Otherwise cover, obi and interior pages VG—NF, preserved by dust jacket all these years. A most complete copy.
1985 / 1993, Japanese
Softcover, 72 pages, 21 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Photographers' Association / Japan
$70.00 - Out of stock
First published in 1985 by the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Photographers' Association, Testament of The Atomic Bomb Survivor presents an unsettling and profound collection of photographs taken by the "hibakusha" (A-bomb survivors) to serve as a stark reminder of the devastation that befell the Japanese people when the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, killing between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians. Richly illustrated glossy b/w photo book, accompanied by captions in Japanese, introduction in Japanese and English, and further historical and biographical information in Japanese.
"The thermal rays and the blast force from the atomic bomb took the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed all the buildings in central Hiroshima in an instant, and turned most of them into ashes. In addition, those who were unharmed at the time of the explosion but exposed to the radiation suffered the symptoms of the A-bomb disease caused by the residual radioactivity, and died one after another. There are still many survivors all over Japan as well as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who are suffering the aftereffects of the bombing. That is something that should never happen again. But we are in danger of having new destruction be- fore the old wounds are healed, and we cannot simply disregard the threat of human extinction. We, the Association of the Photographers of the atomic (Bomb) Destruction of Hiroshima, published a collection of photographs taken by us entitled, "The Time of the Destruction of Hiroshima," in August 1981. As hibakusha (A-bomb survivors) we cannot help but feel indignant at the present situation of the ever continuing production, testing, and de- ployment of nuclear weapons. The forty years following the destruction by the atomic bomb have seen seven of the twenty photographers who survived the bombing die. Those remaining are getting old and the average age of our group is above seventy years. We get impatient at the fact that the atomic bomb is the great enemy of humanity, but the people who can bear witness to what happened are fading out. Hundreds of thousands of people died in bitterness. I intend to offer my short remaining life to keep on telling the story as a witness, lest the death of those people be in vain, while I pray for the repose of their souls.—Yoshito Matsushige, Representative of the Association of the Photographers of the Atomic (Bomb) Destruction of Hiroshima
Very Good—NF copy of 1993 reprint of the 1985 edition. Only light wear.
2023, English
Hardcover, 554 pages, 23 x 15.24 cm
Published by
Lightning Source / Tennessee
$69.00 - Out of stock
Dogra Magra is an unclassifiable, surreal and haunting novel by Japanese author Yumeno Kyūsaku, without any equivalents in the history of Japanese and world literature. First published in 1935, this extremely disturbing work remained totally unknown to the general public for almost thirty years, although it was considered a pure masterpiece by the philosopher Tsurumi Shunsuke who, in a landmark article, placed its author Yumeno Kyūsaku on par with the works of Kafka and Poe. It is a complex and enigmatic work that combines elements of mystery, horror, and philosophy, and has been hailed as a masterpiece of Japanese literature. It is available in English here for the first time.
"An astonishing, unclassifiable work, Dogra Magra is both an unparalleled writing performance and an extraordinary detective novel with a paradoxial program: novel where detectives are criminals. Or rather where the murderer is a victim. An amnesiac wakes up in the middle of the night in the room of a psychiatric hospital. We will see him struggling in the middle of a spider's web woven by the institution's doctors, searching for his identity and possible connection to a mysterious criminal case [...] A masterpiece of parody writing where the Buddhist doctrine of karma and the psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious rub shoulders, this disturbing novel to the extreme, published almost confidentially in 1935 was rediscovered in the sixties. Since then, it has become a cult book in Japan, and reviews and studies about it follow one another continuously. When we close the last page, we understand why it is now considered in his country as one for the major novels of the twentieth century."—back cover of book.
Translated from Japanese to French to English by Patrick Honnoré and Colton R. Auxier
2023, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 16.6 x 23 cm
Published by
Memo Review / Naarm
$35.00 - In stock -
Issue 1 of Memo’s first glossy annual magazine features an extended artist focus on Archie Moore, the 2024 Venice Biennale Australian Representative, with essays by Rex Butler, Tara Heffernan, Tristen Harwood, and Hilary Thurlow.
Audrey Schmidt unveils a covetous history of tall-poppy takedowns in the Melbourne art world. Philip Brophy rips into Hollywood’s shallow art-world playbook, while Cameron Hurst checks-in with the once-celebrated Spike magazine cultural critic, Dean Kissick, in his post-zenith era. The Manhattan Art Review’s Sean Tatol visits the Dutch artist group, KIRAC, reporting on their legal woes with French literature’s ageing enfant terrible, Michel Houellebecq.
We also have essays and reviews on art from all around Australia and the world. Amelia Winata turns up the heat on Melbourne’s public museums as Callum McGrath uncovers a typically Eurocentric failure at the heart of British art historian Claire Bishop’s recent Artforum essay on research-based art. Helen Hughes writes on Helen Johnson’s The Birth of an Institution (2022) and Chelsea Hopper and Shaune Lakin on Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993). Stars like Isa Genzken, Royal Academy graduates like Anna Higgins, cult-favourites like Jas H. Duke — Memo features all this and more.
Texts by Adam Ford, Aimee Dodds, Amelia Winata, Anastasia Murney, Andrew Harper, Audrey Schmidt, Callum McGrath, Cameron Hurst, Camille Orel, Chelsea Hopper, Darren Jorgensen, Gemma Topliss, Giles Fielke, Helen Hughes, Hilary Thurlow, Lévi McLean, Loren Kronemyer, Maraya Takoniatis, Paris Lettau, Philip Brophy, Rayleen Forester, Rebecca Edwards, Rex Butler, Sam Beard, Sean Tatol, Shaune Lakin, Susie Russell, Tara Heffernan, Tristen Harwood, Verónica Tello, Victoria Perin.
2005, English / Japanese
Softcover (in printed envelope), 32 pages, 26 x 18 cm (book) / 30 x 22 cm (envelope)
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Comme des Garçons / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
Issued in 2005 in conjunction with leading Japanese "Magazine for City Boys" Popeye, Comme des Garçons in Wonderland is a whimsical look-book of 2005 CdG menswear and accessories inspired by Alice in Wonderland. Young male models and headless mannequins roam the Tokyo streets, shot by Yasuo Kobayashi and Mark Segal. Concept and creation by Comme des Garçons. Comes in printed envelope (this copy unsealed, complete w. envelope).
Very Good copy.
2008, English
Flexi-cover, 120 pages, 25.8 x 19.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
MoMu / Antwerp
$380.00 - Out of stock
Now a very collectible book, this is first comprehensive book dedicated to Maison Martin Margiela was published on the occasion of Maison Martin Margiela ’20’ The Exhibition, a major touring show celebrating 20 years of work by the influential and enigmatic Belgian fashion designer.
Conceived in close collaboration with Margiela and curated by the Mode Museum (MoMu), Antwerp, the exhibition was later shown at Haus der Kunst, Munich, and Somerset House, London. This book is the catalogue which accompanied the original Antwerp exhibition, and captures Maison Martin Margiela’s deconstructivist, subversive, and often radical approach to fashion, through an examination of the themes and influences that have underpinned the fashion house since its creation. Through colour and black and white photography the book documents 20 years of Maison Martin Margiela collections, fashion shows, events, shop designs, and much more.
A graduate of Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Martin Margiela formerly worked as design assistant to Jean Paul Gaultier before showing his first collection under his own label in 1988. Employing a ‘deconstructivist’ approach - monochromatic palette, outsized garments, non-traditional fabrics, the use of recycled materials and exposing the construction of his clothes - Margiela displayed a radically new visual language that diametrically opposed the power dressing of the 1980s. In deciding to let his fashion speak for itself and remain anonymous, Margiela as a brand is driven by product and sheer invention rather than fad, hype and celebrity often linked to other fashion labels.
This multi-layered exhibition captured Margiela’s unique aesthetic and vision spanning 20 years, by incorporating installations, photography, video and film. It provided an opportunity to learn more about the brand and its philosophy through a visual examination of themes that underpin the essence of the fashion house since its creation - from its deconstructivist, subversive design aesthetic and avant-garde couture to its understated branding, unusual boutique interiors and ‘trompe-l’oeil’ or optical illusion and its couture atelier white coats. Various iconic pieces from both the women and menswear collections will be on display, such as the highly replicated ‘Tabi’ boots, as well as specially recreated garments for the exhibition.
Very Good copy with light wear.
2004, English
Hardcover (clothbound w. illustrated obi strip), 160 pages, 22 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Petit Gras / Japan
$220.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the long out-of-print 2004 hardcover monograph on the work of New York fashion designer/artist Susan Cianciolo. This extensive, profusely illustrated book features a photographic archive of Cianciolo's RUN collections, workshops, performances, exhibitions, collaborations and workshops from the mid 1990s into the early 2000s. An artist who expresses the DIY spirit in all mediums, this wonderful document is a must for any fan. Edited by Taka Kawauchi, includes texts by Aaron Rose.
For the past twenty years, Susan Cianciolo has moved between fields and formats including fashion, performance, installation and filmmaking. After working as an assistant for X-Girl led by Kim Gordon, she produced her critically acclaimed and commercially successful RUN collection (1995–2001), a fashion line of hand crafted clothing made from found or recycled garments and textiles. Cianciolo collections are regularly featured in museums and galleries internationally; her designs, artworks, and films have been included in recent solo exhibitions at Yale Union in Portland, Oregon, 356 Mission Road in Los Angeles, California, and Bridget Donahue in New York, as well as in group exhibitions at White Columns, Lisa Cooley, and MoMA PS1, among others. Cianciolo identifies as "a designer who also makes art, and a conceptual artist who occasionally designs clothes".
Very Good copy with original illustrated obi-strip, some light marking and wear to cloth and edges.
2008, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 912 pages, 13.84 x 20.96 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Farrar Straus & Giroux / New York
$80.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of the posthumous masterwork from "one of the greatest and most influential modern writers”—James Wood, The New York Times Book Review
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.
Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.
Fine in Fine dust jacket. First HC Ed. 2008.
2011, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 19.7 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
New Directions / New York
$65.00 - In stock -
Scarce first 2011 New Directions hardcover edition of The Secret of Evil, a one-of-a-kind collection from the prince of Latin American literature, Roberto Bolaño, internationally celebrated for his novels The Savage Detectives and 2666. Included is everything he was working on just before his death in 2003. A North American journalist in Paris is woken at 4 a.m. by a mysterious caller with urgent information. For V. S. Naipaul, the prevalence of sodomy in Argentina is a symptom of the nation's political ills. Daniela de Montecristo (of Nazi Literature in the Americas and 2666) recounts the loss of her virginity. Arturo Belano - Bolano's alter ego - returns to Mexico City and meets a band called The Asshole of Morelos. Belano's son Geronimo disappears in Berlin during the Days of Chaos in 2005. Memories of a return to the native land. Argentine writers as gangsters. Zombie schlock as allegory ...Opening The Secret of Evil is like being granted access to the Chilean master's personal files; it offers a final opportunity to read the work of an intense, brilliant and truly original writer.
Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. He is the author of The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize, and 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty.
Very Good—Near Fine copy, with Very Good dust jacket.
1986 / 1988, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
St. Martin's Press / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
"What is the postmodern scene? Baudrillard's vision of excremental culture par excellence or a final coming home to a mediascape which even as a 'body without organs' (Deleuze and Guattari), a 'negative space' (Krauss), a 'pure implosion' (Lyotard) or 'a symbolic experience' (Kristeva) is now first nature, and thus the terrain of a new political refusal?"
THE POSTMODERN SCENE is a series of major theorisations about key artistic and intellectual tendencies in the postmodern condition. A variety of texts, ranging from Nietzsche's The Will to Power, Serres' Hermes, Baudrillard's Precession of Simulacra, the visual art of Fischl, Hopper, Colville, and Magritte and recent performance art are used as probes of the human fate in the contemporary century. Here, theoretical reflection is viewed as a privileged artistic act: simultaneously a critical encounter with the 'shock of the real', and a meditation in the form of a lament over the 'intimations of deprival' which speak to us now of postmodern culture, art, and philosophy in ruins.
Arthur Kroker is the founding editor of the Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory. He teaches political science and the humanities at Concordia University, Montreal.
David Cook teaches political theory at Erindale College, University of Toronto.
Good copy, Second 1988 expanded edition. Light general wear, tanning to spine edge.
2013, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 336 pages, 20.8 x 13.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Verso / London
$60.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of Fredric Jameson's The Antinomies of Realism, a history of the nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it impossible to recreate. The works of Zola, Tolstoy, Perez Galdos, and George Eliot are in the most profound sense inimitable, yet continue to dominate the novel form to this day. Novels to emerge since struggle to reconcile the social conditions of their own creation with the history of this mode of writing: the so-called modernist novel is one attempted solution to this conflict, as is the ever-more impoverished variety of commercial narratives - what today's book reviewers dub "serious novels," which are an attempt at the impossible endeavor to roll back the past.
Fredric Jameson examines the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism, approaching the subject himself in terms of the social and historical preconditions for realism's emergence. The realist novel combined an attention to the body and its states of feeling with a focus on the quest for individual realization within the confines of history.
In contemporary writing, other forms of representation - for which the term "postmodern" is too glib - have become visible: for example, in the historical fiction of Hilary Mantel or the stylistic plurality of David Mitchell's novels. Contemporary fiction is shown to be conducting startling experiments in the representation of new realities of a global social totality, modern technological warfare, and historical developments that, although they saturate every corner of our lives, only become apparent on rare occasions and by way of the strangest formal and artistic devices.
In a coda, Jameson explains how "realistic" narratives survived the end of classical realism. In effect, he provides an argument for the serious study of popular fiction and mass culture that transcends lazy journalism and the easy platitudes of recent cultural studies.
"Fredric Jameson is America's leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction."—Terry Eagleton