World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
$.00 - Out of stock
The eternal clean out! New items weekly.
https://worldfoodbooks.com/category/sale
Published by World Food Books / Melbourne
$20.00 - In stock -
A World Food Books gift voucher is redeemable in our Melbourne bookshop or via our webshop (here). An e-voucher (printable pdf) will be sent to your purchase email address (please notify us if you wish to have the voucher sent to an alternate address and wish us to fill in the receiver's details on the card).
Gift vouchers can be purchased in increments of $20 (Australian Dollars) and the total amount can simply be added to by increasing the quantity in your shopping cart. eg. A quantity of 5 gift vouchers will result in an item total of $100 - a $100 gift voucher. Simply click "ADD TO CART" 5 times, or update your quantity in the shopping cart.
If you wish to purchase multiple, separate gift vouchers in one go, please just email us and we can personally prepare and email you a payment request.
Please note: Please select Pick-Up on gift voucher purchse to avoid any postage charges. Accidental postage charges will be refunded right away!
Thank you.
For any questions, please don't hesitate to email: [email protected]
2013, English
Softcover, 90 pages, 16.5 x 11.5 cm
Published by
AK Press / Edinburgh
$28.00 - Out of stock
First circulated on the streets of Greenwich Village in 1967, the SCUM Manifesto is a searing indictment of patriarchal culture in all its forms. Shifting fluidly between the worlds of satire and straightforward critique, this classic is a call to action--a radical feminist vision for a different world. This is an update of the essential AK Press edition, with a new foreword by Michelle Tea.
"To see the SCUM Manifesto's humor, to let it crack you up page after page, is not to read it as a joke. It's not. The truth of the world as seen though Valerie's eyes is patently absurd, a cosmic joke. Humor such as this is a muscle, a weapon... It was the truth, and the truth is so absurd it's painful."—Michelle Tea
"Unhampered by propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, 'morals', the respect of assholes, always funky, dirty, low-down SCUM gets around... You've got to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex, and SCUM's been through it all, and they're now ready for a new show; they want to crawl out from under the dock, move, take off, sink out."—Valerie Solanas
Valerie Solanas was a radical feminist playwright and social propagandist who was arrested in 1968 after her attempted assassination of Andy Warhol. Deemed a paranoid schizophrenic by the state, Solanas was immortalized in the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol.
1986 / 2005, English / Italian
Softcover, 96 pages, 12.2 x 16.1 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$34.00 - In stock -
The Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini was first and always a poet—the most important civil poet, according to Alberto Moravia, in Italy in the second half of this century. His poems were at once deeply personal and passionately engaged in the political turmoil of his country. In 1949, after his homosexuality led the Italian Communist Party to expel him on charges of "moral and political unworthiness," Pasolini fled to Rome. This selection of poems from his early impoverished days on the outskirts of Rome to his last (with a backward longing glance at his native Friuli) is at the center of his poetic and filmic vision of modern Italian life as an Inferno.
"From all these refusals, we know what Pasolini stood against—political ideologies of all kinds, the complacency inherent in the established social order, the corruption of the institutions of church and state. If Pasolini could be said to have stood for anything it was for the struggles of Italy's working class—both the rural peasants and those barracked in the urban slums at the edges of Italian cities—whose humanity he evoked with great eloquence and nuance. But it is his refusals that animate his legacy with an incandescent rage, a passionate and profound fury that did not, as Zigaina suggests, cry out for death—but for just the opposite." —Nathaniel Rich, The New York Review of Books
2018, English
Softcover, 184 pages, 13.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$38.00 - In stock -
Audio journals that document Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.
Edited by Lisa Darms and David O'Neill
Introduction by David Velasco
In these moments I hate language. I hate what words are like, I hate the idea of putting these preformed gestures on the tip of my tongue, or through my lips, or through the inside of my mouth, forming sounds to approximate something that's like a cyclone, or something that's like a flood, or something that's like a weather system that's out of control, that's dangerous, or alarming.... It just seems like sounds that have been uttered back and forth maybe now over centuries. And it always boils down to the same meaning within those sounds, unless you're more intense uttering them, or you precede them or accompany them with certain forms of violence.—from The Weight of the Earth
Artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) was an important figure in the downtown New York art scene. His art was preoccupied with sex, death, violence, and the limitations of language. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Wojnarowicz began keeping audio journals, returning to a practice he'd begun in his youth.The Weight of the Earth presents transcripts of these tapes, documenting Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.
In these taped diaries, Wojnarowicz talks about his frustrations with the art world, recounts his dreams, and describes his rage, fear, and confusion about his HIV diagnosis. Primarily spanning the years 1987 and 1989, recorded as Wojnarowicz took solitary road trips around the United States or ruminated in his New York loft, the audio journals are an intimate and affecting record of an artist facing death. By turns despairing, funny, exalted, and angry, this volume covers a period largely missing from Wojnarowicz's written journals, providing us with an essential new record of a singular American voice.
2025, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 320 pages, 22 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Scribner / New York
$54.00 - In stock -
First US hardcover edition.
“Chris Kraus reinvents the true-crime novel.” —The New Yorker
“The intelligence and honesty and total originality of Chris Kraus make her work not just great but indispensable…I read everything Chris Kraus writes; she softens despair with her brightness, and with incredible humor, too.” —Rachel Kushner, author of Creation Lake
An unforgettable new novel from the “powerfully original” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times) author of the cult classic I Love Dick—a stark, witty journey into a fractured, violent America, culminating in the investigation of a teenage murder on Minnesota’s Iron Range.
On the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, at the end of the last decade, three teenagers shot and killed an older acquaintance after spending the day with him. In a cold, depressed town, on the fringes of the so-called “meth community,” the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned.
At the time of the murder, Catt Greene and her husband, Paul Garcia, are living nearby in a house they’d bought years earlier as a summer escape from Los Angeles. Locked into a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota—between the art world and the urban poverty of Paul’s addiction therapist jobs, the rural poverty of the icy, depressed Iron Range—Catt turns away from her own life and towards the murder case, which soon becomes an obsession. In her attempt to pierce through the brutality and despair surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers’ lives, Catt is led back to the idiosyncratic, aspirational lives of her parents in the working-class Bronx and small-town, blue-collar Milford, Connecticut.
Written in three linked parts, The Four Spent the Day Together explores the tensions of unclaimed futures and unchosen circumstances in the age of social media, paralyzing interconnectedness, and the ever-widening gulf between the rich and poor.
2018, English
Hardcover, 480 pages, 17.4 x 23.2 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$74.00 - In stock -
Georges Bataille's secret society, long the stuff of legend, is now revealed in its texts, meditations, rules and prohibitions.
This book recounts what must be one of the most unusual intellectual journeys of modern times, in which the influential philosopher, cultural theorist and occasional pornographer Georges Bataille (1897-1962), having spent the early 1930s in far-left groups opposing the rise of fascism, abandoned that approach in order to transfer the struggle onto "the mythological plane."
In 1937, Bataille founded two groups in order to explore the combinations of power and the "sacred" at work in society. The first group, the College of Sociology, gave lectures that were intended to reveal the hidden undercurrents within a society on the verge of catastrophe. The second group was Acéphale, a genuine secret society and anti-religion whose emblem was a headless figure that, in part, represented the death of God. Until the discovery a few years ago of the group's internal papers (which include theoretical texts, meditations, minutes of meetings, rules and prohibitions and even a membership list), almost nothing was known of its activities.
This book is the first to collect a representative selection of the writings of Bataille, and of those close to him, in the years leading up to World War II. The texts published here comprise lectures given to the College of Sociology by Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris, essays from the Acéphale journal and a large cache of the internal papers from the secret society. A desperate narrative unfolds, wherein Bataille risked all in a wholly unreasonable quest--with a few fellow travelers, he undertook what he later described as a "journey out of this world."
Additional texts by Roger Caillois, Pierre Klossowski, Michel Leiris, and by Georges Ambrosino, Pierre Andler, Michel Carrouges, Jacques Chavy, Jean Dautry, Henri Dobier, Henri Dussat, Imre Kelemen, Jean Rollin, Patrick Waldberg.
And with drawings by André Masson
Highest recommendation!
2025, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 21.6 x 13.4 cm
Published by
Nightboat Books / New York
$39.00 - In stock -
Nova Scotia House takes us to the heart of a relationship, a community and an era, both a love story and a lament.
In this profound meditation on grief, Johnny looks back at his relationship with his life partner, Jerry, after his AIDS-related death. When they met, nearly thirty years ago, Johnny was 19, Jerry was 45. They made a life on their own terms in Jerry's flat: 1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny is still there today—but Jerry is gone, and so is the world they knew.
Intimate, visionary, and profoundly original--as well as raw, hot, and hilarious--Nova Scotia House marks the debut of a vibrant new voice in contemporary fiction.
"An extraordinary work of the imagination . . . There is so much heart and longing in it that fills my soul."—Hilton Als
"A softly inspiring book about lived history and time and, always, love."—Eileen Myles
"I truly think Charlie Porter is doing something new."—Olivia Laing
"An actual masterpiece."—Andrea Lawlor
"Just extraordinary. To read it is life-changing."—Chantal Joffe
"An enveloping work of genius that does what great literature does: frankly faces the impossible to make everything, anything possible."—Eliot Duncan
"Nova Scotia House recalls an era when gay liberation was an open, expansive, radical field of possibilities. It’s a bitter-sweet love letter to a lost era, seen through the eyes of a younger man, recalling his love for an older mentor and friend. As if that wasn’t enough, it’s also a book about cities, and the kind of life they used to afford, back when we could afford it."—McKenzie Wark
"I didn’t want to let this book go. The way it reveals its narrator, and its secrets—the pockets of emotion and memory that we half-hide from ourselves—is astonishing."—Nate Lippens
"Surely the tenderest of AIDS novels . . . It makes the always radical argument that play is more important than work. At heart, it’s a queer manifesto, proclaiming the value of queer experience and soul."—Robert Glück
"In fresh and vivid prose, Porter takes us right to the heart of a world filled with love, loss, and courage."—Neil Bartlett
"This book occupies the spaces, the lives in between, the connections we make, the memories still happening in our heads, our bodies’ responsibility to the state we put them in, growing, lusting, dying, reviving, sold on, the ruins of our lives, the communities of our past, another kind of economy, of sex and loss and weeds and words, this work of genius, Nova Scotia House."—Philip Hoare
"This is going to blow reader’s minds. Intense, physical, true."—Paul Flynn
1994, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 20.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$38.00 - In stock -
Andre Breton described Maldoror as "the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential." Little is known about its pseudonymous author, aside from his real name (Isidore Ducasse), birth in Uruguay (1846) and early death in Paris (1870). Lautreamont bewildered his contemporaries, but the Surrealists modeled their efforts after his black humor and poetic leaps of logic, exemplified by the oft-quoted line, "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." Maldoror's shocked first publisher refused to bind the sheets of the original edition--and perhaps no better invitation exists to this book, which warns the reader, "Only the few may relish this bitter fruit without danger."
This is the only complete annotated collection of Lautreamont's writings available in English, in Alexis Lykiard's superior translation. For this latest edition, Lykiard updates his introduction to include recent scholarship.
2025, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 20.3 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$38.00 - In stock -
A masterful study of the elusive French composer, on the centenary of his death.
Composer, pianist, and writer Erik Satie was one of the great figures of Belle Époque Paris. Known for his unvarying image of bowler hat, three-piece suit, and umbrella, Satie was a surrealist before surrealism and a conceptual artist before conceptual art. Friend of Cocteau and Debussy, Picabia and Picasso, Satie was always a few steps ahead of his peers at the apex of modernism. There's scarcely a turn in postwar music, both classical and popular, that Satie doesn't anticipate. Moving from the variety shows of Montmartre's Le Chat Noir to suburban Arcueil, from the Parisian demimonde to the artistic avant-garde, cult critic Ian Penman's masterful Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is an exhilarating and playful three-part study of this elusive and endlessly fascinating figure, published to mark the centenary of Satie's death.
1980, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 384 pages, 22 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rogner & Bernhard / Münich
$30.00 - In stock -
First 1980 German language hardcover edition of 'Man Ray - The Rigour of Imagination', a wonderful monographic study on Man Ray by Italian art historian, writer, curator and friend of Man Ray, Arturo Schwarz. This book, an intimate survey of Man Ray's life and works first issued in 1977, was made in close collaboration with Man Ray until his death in 1976 and was the first to reveal Man Ray's real name, Emmanuel Radnitzky. Profusely illustrated in colour and monochrome with Man Ray's diverse breadth of paintings, drawings, photography, film, sculptural objects, publications, editions, exhibition and studio documentation, as well as personal photography.
Arturo Schwarz (1924 – 2021) was an Italian scholar, art historian, poet, writer, lecturer, art consultant and curator of international art exhibitions. He lived in Milan, where he amassed a large collection of Dada and Surrealist art, including many works by personal friends such as Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Man Ray, and Jean Arp.
"Painter, creator of poetic objects, photographer, writer, filmmaker: Man Ray, born in Philadelphia in 1890, decisively shaped the cultural history of the 20th century with his genius. For the first time, this book, on which the artist actively collaborated until his death in 1976, presents and documents all aspects of his life and work.
Throughout his life, Man Ray performed pioneering work in all media; in all areas of the visual arts, photography, and film, he tirelessly searched for new means of expression that questioned everything established, usual, and taken for granted. His childlike curiosity, creative desire, and wit, which persisted well into old age, allowed him to take the most surprising paths and perform the most bewildering twists and turns. He transformed photography into art and placed it on a par with painting by "painting" his rayographs, photographs taken without a camera, or, in 1917, by being the first to create "paintings" with an airbrush, whose soft shading transferred the effects of photography to the canvas. He translated word games into optical puzzles and vice versa; he used objects and assemblages to develop highly idiosyncratic photographs; he set his inventions or rediscoveries in the field of photography in motion in the most fascinating examples of Dadaist and Surrealist film. Many of his works anticipate modern developments in art by decades.
Exhibitions of the European avant-garde around 1910 (Armory Show, Gallery 291 by Alfred Stieglitz, among others) had torn the young Man Ray from the academic waters of American art. As early as 1915/16, he placed himself at the forefront of the American avant-garde with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, who had fled into exile in America before the World War, and was present at the birth of New York Dada. The European Dadaists and Surrealists in Paris welcomed him into their midst with open arms in 1921 [...]"—from the jacket blurb
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
1970—1980,
Offset poster (82 x 48 cm)
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Galerie Alexandre Iolas / Paris
$280.00 - Out of stock
Gorgeous vintage Man Ray (1890—1976) exhibition poster from the 1970s of the artist at the legendary Galerie Alexandre Iolas, Paris, where the American artist spent much of his life as a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements. Issued by the gallery in a beautiful offset print on lovely wove paper featuring Man Ray's "Pêchage"Peaches"), 1969, painted wooden box, artificial peaches and cotton.
A stunning collector's item, ready to frame.
Dimensions : 82 x 48 cm
Very Good condition, well preserved.
2025, Englush
Softcover, 96 pages, 7.6 x 10.5 cm
Published by
Hanuman Editions / US
$36.00 - In stock -
I LOVE THE PAIN. I TELL HER HOW WONDERFUL PAIN CAN BE. HOW SHE SHOULD USE IT ON ME. I'M RAVING. I'M TRIPPING. I'M COMING.
Since his on-screen 'death' by erogenous torture device in Nine Inch Nails’ notorious 'Happiness in Slavery' music video, writer and artist Bob Flanagan has been a looming legend in domains of art, pain and sex. First published by Hanuman Books in 1987, Fuck Journal chronicles Flanagan’s liaisons with his beloved romantic and artistic partner Sheree Rose over the course of a year. Composed at Rose’s prompting and anticipating Flanagan’s extraordinary Pain Journal, the volume is so direct in its account of the couple’s conjugal life that the Indian authorities tossed its original print run into the ocean before the books could ship from Chennai to New York. By luck, 300 copies which had traveled with the editors to the US remained in circulation: an origin story that chimes with Flanagan’s aura of irreverence. Fuck Journal is characterised by a transfixing rhythm of total divulsion, a document of union amid, and through, pain with resonances in current discourses around sadomasochistic desire, crip experience, gender politics and beyond.
With a foreword by Sheree Rose
Introduction by Johanna Hedva
Based in Southern California, Bob Flanagan (1952-1996) was an provocateur of the highest order, known for poems and performances centreing on BDSM activity and living with cystic fibrosis. Famously featured in censored videos for Danzig and Nine Inch Nails, Flanagan achieved a unique pitch of sexual spectacle and tender expression through visceral collaborations with the photographer, artist and dominatrix Sheree Rose. Flanagan’s published writings include Pain Journal (1996) and the anthology Fun to be dead: The Poems of Bob Flanagan (2024), edited by Sabrina Tarasoff.
The steward of Flanagan’s legacy and an icon in her own right, the photographer and performance artist Sheree Rose has been a leading figure in Los Angeles underground culture since the 1980s. Through her partnership with Flanagan and ongoing projects, Rose has brought to the fore a new form of heterosexual politics, an erotics of intimacy as it intersects with the personal and social.
Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician from Los Angeles. Their most recent essay collection is How To Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom. They are also the author of the novels Your Love Is Not Good and On Hell. Their art has been exhibited internationally, and their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House and The Sun and the Moon.
2024, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 7.6 x 10.5 cm
Published by
Hanuman Editions / US
$36.00 - In stock -
Following the publication of Cookie Mueller’s Garden of Ashes in our first series, Hanuman are thrilled to reissue her first contribution to the Hanuman canon: Fan Mail, Frank Letters, and Crank Calls, an epistolary portrait of the absurdity of human connection. Her book also doubles as a shrine to channels of analogue communication between private and public personas that have since metastasised in our climate of microcelebrity ideation. Sexy and hilarious, Mueller’s text embraces the discomfiting nature of desire with empathy and trademark wit.
Cookie Mueller (1949–1989) was an American writer, actress, and advice columnist, best remembered as a regular cast member of some of the director John Waters' groundbreaking films, including Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living. She died from AIDS-related complications in 1989.
Second series redux of Hanuman Books, the legendary and cult series of chapbooks that were printed in southern India and published out of the storied Chelsea Hotel in New York City between 1986 and 1993. Founded by American curator Raymond Foye and artist Francesco Celemente, Hanuman Books was dedicated mainly to the extreme deconstructive edge of the countercultural poetic, musical, and artistic currents of the 1960s and 1970s, spanning the era of the Cold War, the AIDS crisis, the Harlem Ballroom scene, the Beats, Warhol's Factory etc. Hanuman Books sought to marry the folk-minimal-artisanal with the cutting edge, playfully marketing their books as ‘secret’ documents of an avant-garde subculture, meant to be passed on covertly at street corners just as millenarian chapbooks of medieval times were supposed to have been. Printed in India, the small format is meant to mimic the chapbook form of the Hanuman Chalisa (a folk compendium of chants to the Hindu god Hanuman, sold very cheaply in the bazaars of India) that made them perfect for slipping illicitly into any pocket. Redux editions edited by Shruti Belliappa and Joshua Rothes.
2023, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 10.5 x 8 cm
Published by
Hanuman Editions / US
$36.00 - In stock -
Garden of Ashes, Cookie Mueller's second entry into the Hanuman Books canon (following 1988's Fan Mail, Frank Letters, and Crank Calls) brings together ten stories, autobiographical accounts of her ascent to cult-cinema superstardom, with tales dedicated to several of her fellow Dreamlanders, including "Edith Massey: A Star" and "Divine".
Cookie Mueller (1949–1989) was an American writer, actress, and advice columnist, best remembered as a regular cast member of some of the director John Waters's groundbreaking films, including Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living. She died from AIDS-related complications in 1989.
From the first series redux of Hanuman Books, the legendary and cult series of chapbooks that were printed in southern India and published out of the storied Chelsea Hotel in New York City between 1986 and 1993. Founded by American curator Raymond Foye and artist Francesco Celemente, Hanuman Books was dedicated mainly to the extreme deconstructive edge of the countercultural poetic, musical, and artistic currents of the 1960s and 1970s, spanning the era of the Cold War, the AIDS crisis, the Harlem Ballroom scene, the Beats, Warhol's Factory etc. Hanuman Books sought to marry the folk-minimal-artisanal with the cutting edge, playfully marketing their books as ‘secret’ documents of an avant-garde subculture, meant to be passed on covertly at street corners just as millenarian chapbooks of medieval times were supposed to have been. Printed in India, the small format is meant to mimic the chapbook form of the Hanuman Chalisa (a folk compendium of chants to the Hindu god Hanuman, sold very cheaply in the bazaars of India) that made them perfect for slipping illicitly into any pocket. Redux editions edited by Shruti Belliappa and Joshua Rothes.
2024, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 7.6 x 10.5 cm
Published by
Hanuman Editions / US
$36.00 - In stock -
In my particular case, and following what I’ve been writing here in this diary, I would say that some of the heterogeneous elements that influenced me when I chose The Fortune Teller were: the kindness and genius of the underappreciated Cordovan painter; Nietzsche’s absence; a playing card frozen in the course of time; my activism on behalf of the Multiple; the landline phone; loose threads hanging from an homemade Odradek; the world as an infinite knot; and a fleeting glimpse of eternity on Earth.
From a mind once described as 'an endless labyrinth in which all forks lead to literature', Insistence as a Fine Art trades the ekphrastic form for passage through a hall of interlocutors, mirrors, and guides (Nietzsche, Gadda, Calvino, Orson Welles). Thus Enrique Vila-Matas’ study of an artwork, Romero de Torres’s La Buenaventura (The Fortune Teller) from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum’s permanent collection, swiftly becomes much more, spinning out with signature erudition into a whirlwind meditation on painting, history, and the opacity of the present tense. As one turn folds into another, voices rise and drift into a keenly elliptical flow.
Barcelonan writer Enrique Vila-Matas is among the most prominent contemporary Spanish authors, a renown that makes him no less avant-garde. He studied law and journalism, worked as an editor on the film journal Fotogramas, and lived in Paris between 1974 and 1976. Vila-Matas is the author of the prize-winning Dublinesque (2010), which along with his numerous short stories, essays, columns and articles, conveys a deeply intertextual commitment to the construction of writing. Vila-Matas’ work has been translated into 32 languages and awarded numerous prizes, including the 2001 Premio Rómulo Gallegos and the prestigious Prix Médicis for the best foreign novel in France, in 2003. The author belongs to the Orden del Finnegans, whose members are committed to veneration of Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses.
Translated by Kit Schluter.
Second series redux of Hanuman Books, the legendary and cult series of chapbooks that were printed in southern India and published out of the storied Chelsea Hotel in New York City between 1986 and 1993. Founded by American curator Raymond Foye and artist Francesco Celemente, Hanuman Books was dedicated mainly to the extreme deconstructive edge of the countercultural poetic, musical, and artistic currents of the 1960s and 1970s, spanning the era of the Cold War, the AIDS crisis, the Harlem Ballroom scene, the Beats, Warhol's Factory etc. Hanuman Books sought to marry the folk-minimal-artisanal with the cutting edge, playfully marketing their books as ‘secret’ documents of an avant-garde subculture, meant to be passed on covertly at street corners just as millenarian chapbooks of medieval times were supposed to have been. Printed in India, the small format is meant to mimic the chapbook form of the Hanuman Chalisa (a folk compendium of chants to the Hindu god Hanuman, sold very cheaply in the bazaars of India) that made them perfect for slipping illicitly into any pocket. Redux editions edited by Shruti Belliappa and Joshua Rothes.
2023, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 10.5 x 8 cm
Published by
Hanuman Editions / US
$36.00 - In stock -
In this brief, dense essay, Daumal bids us to resist the very notion of the truth, and to recognize it as an artistic and metaphysical dead-end.
René Daumal (1908-1944) was a French poet and writer often associated with surrealism (though he fought against the label), spiritualism, and 'pataphysics. He is perhaps best remembered for the posthumously published novel, Mount Analogue (1952).
From the first series redux of Hanuman Books, the legendary and cult series of chapbooks that were printed in southern India and published out of the storied Chelsea Hotel in New York City between 1986 and 1993. Founded by American curator Raymond Foye and artist Francesco Celemente, Hanuman Books was dedicated mainly to the extreme deconstructive edge of the countercultural poetic, musical, and artistic currents of the 1960s and 1970s, spanning the era of the Cold War, the AIDS crisis, the Harlem Ballroom scene, the Beats, Warhol's Factory etc. Hanuman Books sought to marry the folk-minimal-artisanal with the cutting edge, playfully marketing their books as ‘secret’ documents of an avant-garde subculture, meant to be passed on covertly at street corners just as millenarian chapbooks of medieval times were supposed to have been. Printed in India, the small format is meant to mimic the chapbook form of the Hanuman Chalisa (a folk compendium of chants to the Hindu god Hanuman, sold very cheaply in the bazaars of India) that made them perfect for slipping illicitly into any pocket. Redux editions edited by Shruti Belliappa and Joshua Rothes.
2023, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 10.5 x 8 cm
Published by
Hanuman Editions / US
$36.00 - In stock -
Compiled and edited by George Scrivani for Hanuman Books in 1988, On My Painting collects six texts from the pioneering German artist Max Beckmann, who fled Nazi Germany after his paintings—increasingly moody and reflective of the existential terror of the time—were labeled "degenerate". In addition to the titular essay, this volume contains short pieces "Creative Credo" and "The New Program", extracts from his Diaries, three "Letters to a Woman Painter", and the text of a speech given to the philosophy faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, shortly before his death in 1950.
Max Beckmann (1884-1950) was a German artist whose body of work includes painting and sculpture. A rising star during the Weimar era, Beckmann left Germany following the ascent of Adolf Hitler, living in self-imposed exile in Amsterdam before finally being granted a teaching position in the United States in 1947. He died of a heart attack in 1950. Though he eschewed the label of "Expressionism", he is often associated with the movement, and was heavily influential on the American offshoots that followed.
From the first series redux of Hanuman Books, the legendary and cult series of chapbooks that were printed in southern India and published out of the storied Chelsea Hotel in New York City between 1986 and 1993. Founded by American curator Raymond Foye and artist Francesco Celemente, Hanuman Books was dedicated mainly to the extreme deconstructive edge of the countercultural poetic, musical, and artistic currents of the 1960s and 1970s, spanning the era of the Cold War, the AIDS crisis, the Harlem Ballroom scene, the Beats, Warhol's Factory etc. Hanuman Books sought to marry the folk-minimal-artisanal with the cutting edge, playfully marketing their books as ‘secret’ documents of an avant-garde subculture, meant to be passed on covertly at street corners just as millenarian chapbooks of medieval times were supposed to have been. Printed in India, the small format is meant to mimic the chapbook form of the Hanuman Chalisa (a folk compendium of chants to the Hindu god Hanuman, sold very cheaply in the bazaars of India) that made them perfect for slipping illicitly into any pocket. Redux editions edited by Shruti Belliappa and Joshua Rothes.
2013, English
Softcover, 118 pages (colour & bw ill.), 16 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Raven Row / London
$55.00 - In stock -
Now long out-of-print, this catalog accompanied the first posthumous retrospective of the work of Czech artist Běla Kolářová (1923–2010), presented by Raven Row. The show is both the first solo exhibition of the artist in the UK and the first major survey of her work outside the Czech Republic. It contains an artist's statement originally written in 1963, but suppressed by the Czech authorities. This heavily illustrated monographic catalogue presents a vast catalogue of works reproduced mostly in full-colour, alongside further texts by Alice Motard, Marie Klimešová, Karel Císař, Matthew S. Witkovsky, plus an illustrated chronology.
From her trademark ‘artificial negatives’, ‘light drawings’ and ‘derealised portraits’ to her assemblages and collages, Běla Kolářová pioneered an art based on intimate objects often associated with domesticity and the feminine. The works on display will span Kolářová’s career to include documentary photographs from the late fifties, camera-less experiments, ‘arranged photographs’ of objects and hair and assemblages from the sixties, as well as make-up drawings and assemblages from the seventies and eighties.
Good copy. Only wear to covers and small coffee stain to black cover, spots to book edge.
2025, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 384 pages, 25 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Penguin Press / New York
$58.00 - In stock -
The new novel from Thomas Pynchon, bestselling and award-winning author of Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice. US hardcover first edition.
“A masterpiece.” —The Telegraph
“Bonkers and brilliant fun.” —The Washington Post
“Late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, Shadow Ticket capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open.” —Los Angeles Times
Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to Lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.
2025, English
Softcover, 460 pages, 26 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$85.00 - In stock -
Started in 1989 by designer and writer Robert Ford, THING magazine was the voice of the Queer Black music and art scene in the early 1990s. Ford and his editors were part of the burgeoning House music scene, which originated in Chicago’s Queer underground, and some of the top DJs and musicians from that time were featured in the magazine, including Frankie Knuckles, Gemini, Larry Heard, Rupaul, and Deee-Lite. THING published ten issues from 1989-1993, before it was cut short by Ford’s death from AIDS-related illness. All ten issues of THING are collected and published here for the first time.
As House music thrived, THING captured the multidisciplinary nature of the scene, opening its pages to a wide range of subjects: poetry and gossip, fiction and art, interviews and polemics. The HIV/AIDS crisis loomed large in its contents, particularly in the personal reflections and vital treatment resources that it published. An essay by poet Essex Hemphill was published alongside the gossip columnist Michael Musto and Rupaul dished wisdom alongside a diary from the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. Joan Jett Blakk’s revolutionary presidential campaign is contained in these pages, as are some of the most underground, influential literary voices of the time, such as Dennis Cooper, Vaginal Davis, Gary Indiana, Marlon Riggs, David Wojnarowicz, and even David Sedaris.
THING was very much in dialogue with the club kids in New York and other Queer publishing ventures, but in many ways, it fostered an entirely unique perspective—one with more serious ambitions. In a moment when the gay community was besieged by the HIV/AIDS crisis and a wantonly cruel government, the influence and significance of this cheaply-produced newsprint magazine vastly exceeded its humble means, presenting a beautiful portrait of the ball and club culture that existed in Chicago with deep intellectual reflections. THING was a publication by and for its community and understood the fleetingness of its moment. To reencounter this work today, is to reinstate the Black voices who were so central to the history of HIV/AIDS activism and Queer and club culture, but which were often sidelined by white Queer discourse. In many ways, THING offered a blueprint for the fundamental role a magazine plays in bringing together a community, its tagline summing up the bold stakes of this important venture: “She Knows Who She Is.”
The magazine included contributions from Trent D. Adkins, Joey Arias, Aaron Avant Garde, Ed Bailey, Freddie Bain, Basscut, Belasco, Joan Jett Blakk, Simone Bouyer, Lady Bunny, Bunny & Pussy, Derrick Carter, Fire Chick, Chicklet, Stephanie Coleman, Bill Coleman, Lee Collins, Gregory Conerly, Mark Contratto, Dennis Cooper, Dorian Corey, Ed Crosby, The Darva, Vaginal Davis, Deee-Lite, Tor Dettwiler, Riley Evans, Evil, The Fabulous Pop Tarts, Mark Farina, Larry Flick, Robert Ford, Scott Free, David Gandy, Gemini, Gabriel Gomez, Roy Gonsalves, Chuck Gonzales, Tony Greene, André Halmon, Lyle Ashton Harris, Larry Heard, Essex Hemphill, Kathryn Hixson, Sterling Houston, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Gary Indiana, Candy J, Jamoo, Jazzmun, Gant Johnson, Owen Keehnen, Lady Miss Kier, Spencer Kincy, Iris Kit, Erin Krystle, Steve LaFreniere, Larvetta Larvon, Marc Loveless, Lypsinka, Malone, Marjorie Marginal, Terry A. Martin, Rodney McCoy Jr., Alan Miller, Bobby Miller, Michael Musto, Ultra Naté, Willi Ninja, Scott “Spunk” O’Hara, DeAundra Peek, Earl Pleasure, Marlon Riggs, Robert Rodi, Todd Roulette, RuPaul, Chantay Savage, David Sedaris, Rosser Shymanski, Larry Tee, Voice Farm, Lawrence D. Warren, Martha Wash, LeRoy Whitfield, Stephen Winter, David Wojnarowicz, and Hector Xtravaganza.
Managing Editors: James Hoff and Sam Korman
Designer: Rick Myers
Copy Editor: Allison Dubinsky
2025, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24 pages, 20.32 × 12.7 cm
Published by
Filthy Loot / Ames
$10.00 - In stock -
Spur is the latest chapbook of poetry by Robbie Coburn, Australian poet and author of And I Could Not Have Hurt You, which was on Dennis Cooper’s Mine For Yours: Favorites of 2023 list.
Design by Ira Rat.
Born in 1994, Coburn grew up on his family's farm in Woodstock, Victoria.
He is currently based in Melbourne.
2024, English
Hardcover, 192 pages, 30.5 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Fulgur Press / UK
$110.00 - In stock -
Sultry and gothic, Slinger’s legendary 1970s photomontage project returns to print with unpublished archival photos and text from the artist.
First published in 1977 and long out of print, Slinger's classic photobook, An Exorcism: A Photo Romance, explores the feminine psyche. Developed from a visit to Lilford Hall in 1970, Slinger provides us with a series of haunting images that chart a process of self-discovery and awakening. This new edition from Fulgur Press has been expanded with new images from the original series held in the artist’s archive and offers a previously unpublished narrative by Slinger.
Penny Slinger is a Los Angeles–based artist whose work investigates the feminine, the magical and the erotic. While studying at Chelsea College of Art in the late 1960s, Slinger encountered Max Ernst’s Une semaine de bonté (1934), initiating an enduring involvement with both the Surrealist movement and the medium of collage. She has published three books of provocative photo collage: 50% The Visible Woman, An Exorcism and Mountain Ecstasy. Her work is in many international museum collections, including Tate Britain.
1982, English
Softcover, 218 pages, 22.5 x 15 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Columbia University Press / New York
$70.00 - In stock -
1982 Columbia classics re-print of Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (French: Pouvoirs de l'horreur. Essai sur l'abjection), a 1980 book by Julia Kristeva. The work is an extensive treatise on the subject of abjection, in which Kristeva draws on the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to examine horror, marginalization, castration, the phallic signifier, the "I/Not I" dichotomy, the Oedipal complex, exile, and other concepts appropriate to feminist criticism and queer theory.
According to Kristeva, the abject marks a "primal order" that escapes signification in the symbolic order; the term is used to refer to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object, or between the self and the other.
"Kristeva is one of the leading voices in contemporary French criticism, on a par with such names as Genette, Foucault, Greimas and others. ... [Powers of Horror is] an excellent introduction to an aspect of contemporary French literature which has been allowed to become somewhat neglected in the current emphasis on para-philosophical modes of discourse. The sections on Celine, for example, are indispensable reading for those interested in this writer and place him within a context that is both illuminating and of general interest."—Paul de Man
1982 English translation by Leon S. Roudiez. Single spine crease, light knocking/creasing to baord extremities, otherwise VG throughout.