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—SAT 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
Theory / Essay
Architecture / Interior
Graphic Design / Typography
Photography
Fashion
Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction / Horror
Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
Painting
Sculpture / Installation
Performance / Dance / Theater
Drawing
Sound / Music
Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
Periodicals
Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
Japanese Photography
Conceptual Art
Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
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.
1973, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24.8 x 19.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Herd Publishing / NSW
$70.00 - In stock -
" ... IS CHARIS, SO NAMED BY A FATHER WHO COLLECTED DEAD LANGUAGES. BORN IN STAWELL 1939, SPENT A DREAMY VICTORIAN GIRLHOOD, TRAINED AS NURSE AND MIDWIFE. WAS IN LOVE WITH JESUS TILL THE AGE OF 21 WHEN SHE DISCOVERED MEN. WENT LOOKING ELSEWHERE FOR HER BLUE PRINCE. HE CAME ACROSS HER IN ANDALUSIA. SPENT SOME YEARS THERE BEFORE TRAVELLING THE EAST AND THE AMERICAS. SETTLED IN AUSTRALIA 1969. COLLABORATES WITH HUSBAND SCHWARZ IN PRODUCING FILM, PHOTO, AND PROSE. IS TRUE SCORPIO, HAS ALWAYS DRAWN HERSELF OUT, HAS NO FORMAL ART TRAINING. IN EUROPE HER WORK IS DESCRIBED AS INDICATIVE OF 'PERFECTLY BALANCED SCHIZOPHRENIA'. HER AMBITION IS TO LIVE FROM THE FRUIT OF HER IMAGINATION."
Very rare sealed copies of Australian artist Charis (Schwarz)'s one and only book of erotic drawings, published by Herd Publications in Sydney, run by Gustav Herstik and his wife, who operated the Love Art sex shops. Herd Publishing was a publisher of a variety of pornographic magazines, including some of the earliest Australian-produced homosexual porn magazines, Stallion and Apollo. A rare early example of the decadent and sensuous artistic output of Charis, one of the last survivors of bohemian Kings Cross and a life-long collaborator with her husband, the late George Schwarz. Producers of poetic works of film, photography, print and prose, simultaneously erotic, taboo, progressive, liberated, too provocative/evocative for the Australian art establishment, Charis and George were the creators of the first Australian hardcore sex films to be passed by the censors (and also refused classification).
"We are witness to depictions of female desire not seen before in the history of Australian art. There are hints of mythologies and magic rituals. Everything is in flux, animals and humans merge and decouple. Mirror images double and distort, orifices, chakras and pleasure points are the keys to reading the images. [...] the gamut of human sexual expression. Amongst the bravura flourish of penmanship the images depict fetish, animalia, group, same sex and single sex desire. There are mythic lovers, imperious duenna, self-possessed and knowing schoolgirls. Hair, flowers, fans, mirrors, umbrellas and candles are recurring motifs. Seemingly simple but infinitely complex, these drawings are important because they reveal a hitherto hidden aspect of female experience and imagining. Within the reams of art history the drawings have echoes of the heady syncretism of Jan Toorop (1858-1928) and Alastair (Baron Hans Heming Voight) (1857-1969), but more importantly they reveal the zeitgeist that also informed other more well-known women artists of the period including Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) and Mary Beth Edelson (1933-2021)."—Craig Judd, from Power Paradise: The Art of George Schwarz & Charis
Highly recommended.
As New dead-stock, still sealed, but with varying degrees of age to stock and plastic bags, occasional small damages from insects or storage.
1974, English
Softcover, 335 pages, 22.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Random House / New York
$85.00 - In stock -
The first edition of Amos Vogel's seminal book, Film as a Subversive Art, one of the greatest books on cinema, published in 1974. Reprinted in 2005 by D.A.P./C.T. Editions, that edition also quickly went out of print and this landmark book has not been available since. According to Vogel--founder of Cinema 16, North America's legendary film society--the book details the "accelerating worldwide trend toward a more liberated cinema, in which subjects and forms hitherto considered unthinkable or forbidden are boldly explored."
So ahead of his time was Vogel that the ideas that he penned some 30 years ago for this classic volume are still relevant today. Accompanied by over 300 rare film stills, Film as a Subversive Art analyzes how aesthetic, sexual and ideological subversives use one of the most powerful art forms of our day to exchange or manipulate our conscious and unconscious, demystify visual taboos, destroy dated cinematic forms, and undermine existing value systems and institutions. This subversion of form, as well as of content, is placed within the context of the contemporary world view of science, philosophy, and modern art, and is illuminated by a detailed examination of over 500 films, including many banned, rarely seen, or never released works.
Includes Luis Buñuel, Dusan Makavejev, Luis Buñuel, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Connor, Roman Polanski, Vera Chytilova, Alfred Hitchcock, Carolee Schneemann, Peter Watkins, Tony Conrad, Jonas Mekas, Andrei Tarkovsky, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Bresson, Luchino Visconti, Chris Marker, Federico Fellini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kate Millett, John Cassavettes, Shuji Terayama, William Klein, Russ Meyers, Louis Malle, Woody Allen, Yoko Ono, Michelangelo Antonioni, Agnes Varda, Walerian Borowczyk, Andy Warhol, Ingmar Bergman, Jacques Rivette, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Ingmar Bergman, Lindsay Anderson, Roberto Rossellini, Marguerite Duras, Charlie Chaplin, Paul Morrissey, Joseph Losey, Otto Muehl, Hans Richter, Fritz Lang, Jean Genet, Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, Jean-Luc Godard, Frans Zwartjes, Arrabal, Jack Smith, Stan Vanderbeek, Werner Herzog, Morgan Fisher, Jean Renior, Michael Snow, Robert Frank, Jan Svankmajer, Sam Peckinpah, Paul Sharits, Akira Kurosawa, Yoko Ono, Orson Welles, Frederick Wiseman, Ken Jacobs, Martin Scorcese, Jean Cocteau, Manuel Octavio Gomez, Stanley Kubrick, Norman McLaren, Albert Maysles and David Maysles, to name only a few of the hundreds of film-makers whose works are featured in this essential film book.
VG copy, single crease to front cover edge, not other real damages, well preserved throughout. Image only a sample.
2005, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 15 x 21.1 cm
Published by
Grove Press / New York
$39.00 - In stock -
Set largely on the pages of a website where gay male escorts are reviewed by their clients, and told through the postings, emails, and conversations of several dozen unreliable narrators, The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth. Explicit, shocking, comical, and displaying the author's signature flair for blending structural complexity with direct, stylish, accessible language, The Sluts is Cooper's most transgressive novel since Frisk, and one of his most innovative works of fiction to date.
Dennis Cooper (born 1953) is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor and performance artist who grew up in the Southern California. In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr. Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.
Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.
"Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer"—William Burroughs
"Cooper’s language is at first intense, nearly minimal, then suddenly, it ascends into vision"—Kathy Acker
1993, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 220 pages, 13.6 cm x 19.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Seikyūsha / Tokyo
$110.00 - In stock -
New Tribalism In Sexual City, Prick Up, Rubbers, Gay Fetishism, Consensual SM, Modern Primitives, Pre-Tech Tattoo, Fakir Musafar, Ignore the White Culture, Body Manipulation, Hyper Pornography, Harrison Marks, Allen Jones, She-Male, Mannequin, Kinbaku, Seppuku, Kyoko Hamura, Rightbrain, Trevor Brown, Roman Slocombe, Medical Art, Forest Of Guts, Auto Erotic, J. P. Witkin, Anatomic Images, Discipline, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkoglar, Aktion, Meat Performance, Trans-Gender, Transmutation, John Gacy, Ed Gain, Death ...
First hardcover edition of "Terminal Body Play", written by Merzbow's Masami Akita and published only in Japan in 1993. Covering all the above subjects with b/w illustrations, "Terminal Body Play" explores a plethora of physical utopias, including a revived ancient culture of body decoration and manipulation, the pleasure of the body perverted by BDSM, the dematerialised body of performance art, the aesthetics of murder, medicine and anatomy, and so much more. Merzbow is a noise project created in Tokyo, Japan in 1979 under the direction of noise technician Masami Akita. As well as a legendary underground noise artist, Akita is a prolific writer in Japan and frequently writes on the arts, music, erotica, esoterica, modern architecture, and animal rights, with articles on emerging subcultures and underground extreme cultures appearing in publications like SM Sniper, Studio Voice and Fool's Mate. His development of the Merzbow aesthetic ran parallel with a series of investigative books in which he catalogued and introduced a vast amount of hermetic types of music, sexual practices and autonomous creativity to a fairly conservative (but not close-minded) Japanese audience. "Terminal Body Play" is one of these very books.
First edition, Japanese text, fine copy with fine "textured" and illustrated dust jacket.
1999, English
Softcover, 130 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sub Dee Industries / Melbourne
$50.00 - Out of stock
"This book contains surrogate fiction, gelatinous poetry, art that bites... It is amorphous, androgynous — as butch as a builder's jockstrap and as sour as a lemon. It considers the options, yet puts the foetus at risk, it takes the time for foreplay, yet loves a deep shag.
Amorphik probes the Outer Limits of Sexuality with raw wit and savage intelligence, and is determined to be banned in Queensland.
Just wait and see..."
Australian new erotica anthology edited, designed and published by Simon Sellars. Featuring the work of Samantha Bews.Symon Brandonatasha Cho, Rob Cover. Sasha Cunningham. Kieran Dell, Kristoph Eggleston, Sarah Endacott, Michael Haward. Hilaire. Kim Hunt, Tana Mccarthy, Garth Madsen, Matthew Firth, Scott Flaherty, Diana Harris, Vasilios Billy Mavreas, Erika Niesner, Ben Paradox, Tony Reck, Dee Rimbaud, Sarala, Peter Christmas Savieri, Bronwyn Scanlon, Simon Sellars, Dana Shavit, Dee Teflon, Der Teufel, Nick Umney, Tim Umney, Andres Vaccari.
Very Good copy with light wear/creasing to covers.
1993, English
Softcover , 96 pages, 28 x 22.23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
NBM / New York
$110.00 - Out of stock
First English 1993 edition of this classic work of erotica where the heroine is introduced to the pleasures of being administered—and administering—spankings! Legendary Italian comic book writer and artist Manara beautifully and abundantly illustrates the tongue-in-(ahem)-cheek text by Enard. Luxuriously presented trade paperback in sepia and black colours and with flaps. Originally published in France in 1991, translated into English by Elizabeth Bell for Eurotica, an imprint of NBM, New York. A favourite of Manara's collections, for obvious reasons.
VG copy.
1982, Japanese
Softcover, 180 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Flying '80 / Tokyo
$50.00 - In stock -
Issue no. 2 of only 3 issues ever published. SM Barbarella was launched in Tokyo in 1982 by Flying '80, who also published the SM and sex customs magazines Orange People, Fuuzoku Arts, and Monthly Secret. Wrapped in glossy illustrated covers, SM Barbarella embraced and devoted much of it's content to the secret worlds of its readers and amateur enthusiasts, with full-colour glossy spreads of SM parties, readers bondage photography, letters, classifieds, scene reports from Japan and abroad, etc. alongside professional glossy colour kinbaku shoots with pull-out spreads and illustrated articles on fetish culture, from the aesthetic of masks to rubber wear, ads, stories, illustrations, etc.
Near Fine copy.
1982, Japanese
Softcover, 182 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Flying '80 / Tokyo
$45.00 - In stock -
Issue no. 3 of only 3 issues ever published. SM Barbarella was launched in Tokyo in 1982 by Flying '80, who also published the SM and sex customs magazines Orange People, Fuuzoku Arts, and Monthly Secret. Wrapped in glossy illustrated covers, SM Barbarella embraced and devoted much of it's content to the secret worlds of its readers and amateur enthusiasts, with full-colour glossy spreads of SM parties, readers bondage photography, letters, classifieds, scene reports from Japan and abroad, etc. alongside professional glossy colour kinbaku shoots with pull-out spreads and illustrated articles on fetish culture, from the aesthetic of masks to rubber wear, ads, stories, illustrations, etc.
Near Fine copy.
?, Japanese
Softcover, 174 pages, 20.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Surugadai Shobo / Tokyo
$55.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of A Bizarre Pictorial, a one off, undated (looks to be late 1960s/very early 1970s) publication possibly affiliated with Erotica, Japan's erotic magazine for bibliophiles, published in the 1960s—1970s by Misaki Bookstore. A Bizarre Pictorial, published by Surugadai Bookstore, is "The Museum of Beauty, Mystery, and Perversion; The House of Pranks, The House of Cruelty, and The House of Nonsense". A books of Eros and Thantos — packed with heavily illustrated (colour and b/w) features, articles, photo and illustration galleries around the aforementioned chaptered themes, heavy with sadism, demonology, kinbaku, medieval perversions, history of misery, corpses, crime, possessions, black humour, Shunga artworks, and Japanese monsters (yokai). Essentially an illustrated book of weird and macabre world histories, phenomenons, perversions and customs, care of Kiyoshi Sumida, legendary bondage artist and editor Ueda Seishiro, artist Kawanabe Kyosai, and many more.
G—VG copy with light general edge-wear to covers and spine.
2004, French
Softcover, 48 pages, 17 x 10 cm
Numbered edition,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Editions Allia / Paris
$140.00 - In stock -
Lovely, rare, numbered pocketbook re-publication of "1929", the notorious French Dada-Surrealist "pornographic" book by Man Ray, Benjamin Péret and Louis Aragon, originally clandestinely published in 1929 in Brussels in an edition of only 215 copies and intended for private distribution, with most copies seized by customs at the French border. An extraordinarily audacious work, this ostensibly scandalous and blasphemous book features four sexually explicit photographs by Man Ray of himself and Alice Prin, 'Kiki de Montparnasse', a legendary figure in the Montparnasse of the day, accompanied by various pornographic pastiches of poems, old songs and nursery rhymes by Péret and Aragon, two pioneers of literary Surrealism. Were these originally not confiscated, the publication was intended to raise funds for the important Belgian periodical Variétés, published in 1929, featuring René Crevel, Paul Nougé, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, E. L. T. Mesens, Robert Desnos, André Breton, and others, featuring the first official mapping of the artistic movement.
A slice of underground erotica made momentarily accessible in it's original French language, although now also rare in this edition.
Louis Aragon (1897-1982), French poet, journalist and novelist, involved in the French Communist Party and a leading figure in the Dada and Surrealist movements. Author of Télémaque (1922), Le Paysan de Paris (1926). Man Ray (1890-1976), French painter, photographer and film director, leader of the Dada movement in New York and then of Surrealism in France. Benjamin Péret (1899-1959), French Surrealist writer. He wrote poems that combine humor, automatic writing and transgression.
VG—NF copy.
2024, English
Softcover, 14 pages, 13.8 x 8.5 cm
Published by
Jouissance / London
$24.00 - In stock -
In House of the Sleeping Beauty, a short story by Emily Wells (A Matter of Appearance), a young woman reflects on the experiences that led to her fetish for unconsciousness...
The erotic works of Anaïs Nin started out as a freelance job. To support their bohemian lifestyles, Nin and her writer friends earned a dollar a page writing pornography for an anonymous client. The writers hated The Collector, as they called him, for his repeated instructions to “Concentrate on sex. Leave out the poetry”.
The Collector, a new series of short stories published by jouissance, seeks to pay homage to writers, like Nin, who explored the erotic, the taboo and the connection between jouissance and the creative process. It also honours their chosen, but much maligned, genre. By commissioning some of our favourite female writers to compose erotic short stories, we begin what we hope will be an ever-growing collection of compelling and provocative fiction that will inspire conversation, debate and further creative expression.
Munken Pure 80gsm paper publication with red Singer Sewn binding.
Featuring an illustration by Emma Rose Schwartz.
2024, English
Softcover, 18 pages, 13.8 x 8.5 cm
Published by
Jouissance / London
$24.00 - In stock -
In The Rebound, a short story by author Natasha Stagg (Surveys, Artless), a young woman takes a work trip in the wake of a humiliating break-up, and agrees to be set up on a blind date...
The erotic works of Anaïs Nin started out as a freelance job. To support their bohemian lifestyles, Nin and her writer friends earned a dollar a page writing pornography for an anonymous client. The writers hated The Collector, as they called him, for his repeated instructions to “Concentrate on sex. Leave out the poetry”.
The Collector, a new series of short stories published by jouissance, seeks to pay homage to writers, like Nin, who explored the erotic, the taboo and the connection between jouissance and the creative process. It also honours their chosen, but much maligned, genre. By commissioning some of our favourite female writers to compose erotic short stories, we begin what we hope will be an ever-growing collection of compelling and provocative fiction that will inspire conversation, debate and further creative expression.
Munken Pure 80gsm paper publication with red Singer Sewn binding.
Featuring an illustration by Emma Rose Schwartz. 138 x 85 mm.
2024, English
Softcover, 14 pages, 13.8 x 8.5 cm
Published by
Jouissance / London
$24.00 - In stock -
In Holds, a short story by author Julia Armfield (salt slow, Private Rites), a woman engages in a fantasy at her local climbing wall...
The erotic works of Anaïs Nin started out as a freelance job. To support their bohemian lifestyles, Nin and her writer friends earned a dollar a page writing pornography for an anonymous client. The writers hated The Collector, as they called him, for his repeated instructions to “Concentrate on sex. Leave out the poetry”.
The Collector, a new series of short stories published by jouissance, seeks to pay homage to writers, like Nin, who explored the erotic, the taboo and the connection between jouissance and the creative process. It also honours their chosen, but much maligned, genre. By commissioning some of our favourite female writers to compose erotic short stories, we begin what we hope will be an ever-growing collection of compelling and provocative fiction that will inspire conversation, debate and further creative expression.
Munken Pure 80gsm paper publication with red Singer Sewn binding.
Featuring an illustration by Emma Rose Schwartz.
2024, English
Softcover, 22 pages, 13.8 x 8.5 cm
Published by
Jouissance / London
$24.00 - In stock -
In Les Mains Négatives by Susanna Davies-Crook, a woman goes on an erotic journey through her past, present and future.
The erotic works of Anaïs Nin started out as a freelance job. To support their bohemian lifestyles, Nin and her writer friends earned a dollar a page writing pornography for an anonymous client. The writers hated The Collector, as they called him, for his repeated instructions to “Concentrate on sex. Leave out the poetry”.
The Collector, a new series of short stories published by jouissance, seeks to pay homage to writers, like Nin, who explored the erotic, the taboo and the connection between jouissance and the creative process. It also honours their chosen, but much maligned, genre. By commissioning some of our favourite female writers to compose erotic short stories, we begin what we hope will be an ever-growing collection of compelling and provocative fiction that will inspire conversation, debate and further creative expression.
Munken Pure 80gsm paper publication with red Singer Sewn binding.
Featuring an illustration by Emma Rose Schwartz.
1992, Japanese
Hardcover (clothbound), 96 pages, 18 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Mole / Tokyo
$300.00 - Out of stock
Rare first edition of one of the greatest kinbaku photo books ever published, Bind by Akio Fuji. Published in 1992 by Mole Gallery, Tokyo, to accompany Fuji's exhibition of the same name, Bind is now a classic photo book of masterful aesthetic bondage photography, featuring the rope work of Chimo Nureki, gloriously reproduced in lush black and white plates bound in silver-foiled cloth hardcovers. Exquisite compositions capturing the two artists at the height of their powers, and an important book and exhibition for bringing the world of kinbaku to the recognition of the fine art world in Japan the 1990's.
Akio Fuji (b. 1959) is a pioneer of bondage photography in Japan, founding the legendary bondage enthusiast circle "Kinbiken" in Tokyo in 1985 with rope master Chimuo Nureki (who also produced the magazines Kitan Club and Uramado), developing into the cult kinbaku bulletin Kinbiken Communications, with core contributions by both Fuji and Nureki, Katsuya Kasui, Masami Akita (Merzbow), Yuri Sunohara, Asoji Muroi, Akira Minomura, and other members of the circle. The object of the group was to study the beauty of bondage, observing the techniques of master Nureki through a membership with one of the most distinctive facets of the club being that the bondage women participate as members themselves. Says Nureki, “One of the main reasons I started this circle was to provide a facility for masochistic women, who are often misunderstood and therefore despised.” Kinbiken Communications remain one of the most desirable kinbaku publications of this period, the photography from which is showcased here in Akio Fuji's debut collection, featured heavily in Masami Akita's compilation of the “History of Bondage Photography in Japan”.
Fine copy.
1982, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 60 pages, 39.1 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
JICC Publishing Bureau / Japan
$180.00 - In stock -
First 1982 edition of this wonderful, very early collection of artworks by Japanese artist Katsu Yoshida (1938—2002). Bold, expressionist and homo-erotically charged, Yoshida's illustration work defined the new wave of 1980's Tokyo. "Portfolio" is packed cover to cover with full-bleed, over-sized reproductions of his sensational, sensual colour brushwork that was to become iconic through the pages of Japanese underground magazines such as SM Sniper and through his collaborations in the world of fashion with Issey Miyake.
Good copy with some chipping to the spine edge of covers, tanning to extremities of newsprint stock.
1969, Japanese
Softcover, 108 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Mainichi Newspapers / Tokyo
$65.00 - In stock -
First edition of this 1969 collection of female nude photography from three of Japan's leading photographers — Tetsuya Ichimura, Eikoh Hosoe, and Shunji Okura. Lavishly printed in gloss and photo-gravure, in stark b/w contrasts and rich colour kodachrome, across different paper stocks, featuring many of the most iconic erotic images from Tokyo 1969! Lovely examples from all photographers, including some of Eikoh’s most famous work. Published by The Mainichi Newspapers.
Average—Good copy with foxing to covers and some page edges, some pinches to spine, general light wear as is common to old magazine-format books.
1998, English
Softcover, 334 pages, 24.5 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$80.00 - In stock -
First 1998 edition of Jack Hunter's essential "pink" film reference book and the first of its kind in English.
SEX: The history of "pink" movies, from Daydream to Ai No Corrida and beyond, including the pop avant-garde violence of Koji Wakamatsu: Violated Angels, The Embryo Hunts In Secret, Violent Virgin and others. Bondage and S/M from Moju and Captured For Sex to Kinbiken rope torture. The New Wave pink films of Hisayasu Sato: The Bedroom, Naked Blood, Private Torture Of Uniforms: Thrust It In!, and much more.
BLOOD: From Shogun Assassin and Psycho Junkie to the killing orgies of Guinea Pig and Atrocity; from the "pink horror" nightmare Entrails Of A Virgin to the post-punk yakuza bloodbaths of Kei Fujiwara's Organ and Takashi Miike's Fudoh.
MADNESS: Homicidal psychosis, hallucination, mutation: Tetsuo, Death Powder, the films of Shozin Fukui: Pinocchio 964, Rubber's Lover. Post-punk excess, nihilism, violence, suicide: Burst City, Labyrinth Of Dreams, Squareworld, Tokyo Crash.
Eros In Hell examines all these movies and many more besides, is profusely illustrated with rare and unusual photographs, and contains illuminating interviews with Japanese film-makers Koji Wakamatsu and Takao Nakano; comprising a unique guide to the most prolific, fascinating and controversial underground/alternative cinema in the world.
VG copy with bump to top corner, some light edge wear.
1996, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 24.5 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$55.00 - In stock -
First 1996 edition.
Twins George and Mike Kuchar were born in the Bronx in 1942. As teenage cinephiles, both began producing films based on their own version of Hollywood movies, going on to produce a string of low budget classics such as: 1 Was A Teenage Rumpot, Pussy On A Hot Tin Roof, Mike's Sins Of The Fleshapoids and George's infamous Hold Me While I'm Naked.
Baltimore-born John Waters was profoundly and irreversibly affected by the visionary, trashy aesthetic of the '60s underground, especially the Kuchars, who Waters insists "...made me want to make films. THEY are the reason". His films were also influenced by the low budget exploitation pictures of directors like Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis. Like his predecessors, Waters used a regular cast of friends, which included Divine, Edith Massey, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole and Cookie Mueller, all to become trash stars/icons. He is the director of such trash classics as Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living; his more recent films have included Hairspray and Serial Mom.
Camp America includes interviews not only with John Waters, but also with members of his notorious entourage; plus extensive interviews with George & Mike Kuchar and a comprehensive assessment of their career and influence as well as a unique feature on underground actress Marion Eaton, star of Curt McDowell's Thundercrack! The book has many rare photographs, plus a filmography and index, and not only documents a fascinating period of extreme underground film-making, but contextualises it firmly within the social fabric of the times, bringing the New York, Baltimore and San Francisco underground/sleaze film scenes of the '60s and '70s vividly to life.
Good copy with crease to back cover, wear to corners, thumb marking to block edge.
1989, English / German
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 392 pages, 24 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
$165.00 - Out of stock
Absolutely essential reference work on the artists associated with the Vienna Actionism group, the second volume of an exhaustive account of Viennese Actionism, this book covering the later years of the movement—1960 through 1971.
Viennese Actionism was the most extreme artistic project of the 1960s, mostly preceding and always surpassing the other performance art, body art and happenings in terms of sheer violent excess. Though never officially a group, Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler shared a similar reaction to the restrictive political and cultural climate of the Austrian art scene of the 1950s and 1960s. They established the body as a site of exploration, and its blood, sweat and excrement as art material: performance as the transgression of both social and religious taboo, and art itself as a violent, tragic recognition of brute fact.
Volume two of an exhaustive two-volume exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with show held at Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Wien, March—April 1989 that traveled to Museum Ludwig, Köln, August—September 1989. This handsome volume presents a vast collection of images and essays about Viennese Actionism between 1960—1971, focusing on work produced after 1964, particularly work involving process and performance. Includes essays by Hubert Klocker, entitled "The Dramaturgy of the Organic" and "The Shattered Mirror"; an essay by Konrad Oberhuber entitled "Thoughts on Viennese Actionism" ; biography, action chronology, and related images for artists Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler; bibliography.
Edited by Hubert Klocker.
Texts in both English and German.
Highly recommended.
Near Fine copy.
2003, English
Softcover, 138 pages, 21.5 x13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$80.00 - In stock -
First 2008 English-language print of The Lost Journals Of The Marquis De Sade.
The secret journal which the Marquis de Sade worked hard at maintaining, even when ill and ageing at Charenton asylum, reveals the shadowy life of an exceptional, strange man whose abuses are often legendary. The book takes us beyond the prisoner who once fled the Vincennes fortress; it also takes us beyond the prisoner of the Bastille whose imagination tortured him, both deliciously and cruelly, and who projected onto paper the burning and pitiable ghosts of his imagination with a desperate sensuality. This book contains the living, everyday presence of the old man, almost 67 years old when the "first notebook" begins of this once-lost journal.
He had seven years left to live in the "hospital-prison" of Charenton, where his days were slow and grim, full of everyday preoccupations, worries about money, nasty quarrels with the people around him - but were also lit up by the sordid, squalid episodes of a final erotic adventure: the last flames of his senile passion. At the Charenton asylum, where he was under a liberal regime of surveillance, Sade's death approached, darkening the colours of his life and tearing apart his feelings.
Only the first (1807-8) and fourth (1814) of these notebooks have been rediscovered, out of a series of four.
The Ghosts Of Sodom also includes a selection of Sade's letters from Charenton, as well as the working notes for his terminal novel "The Days At Florbelle" - a huge work deemed so pornographic that the only manuscript was burned by the police at the behest of Sade's own son.
1996, English
Softcover, 354 pages, 25.4 x 20.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cambridge University Press / Cambridge
$55.00 - In stock -
First 1996 edition.
This book examines the evolution of Dalí's art during the 1920s and 1930s when he was associated first with the Catalan avant-garde and then with the Surrealist group in Paris. During this period, Dalí's painting style changed radically, a phenomenon which has never been fully accounted for in the extensive literature on this subject. Haim Finkelstein demonstrates that Dalí's writing, in which he explicated theoretical systems such as Paranoia-Criticism and other ideas adopted from Freud, were important for the active and critical role that they played in his development as an artist and often controversial figure. His 1996 study examines these writings in detail as the foundation for the evolution of Dalí's unique artistic vision.
' … this exuberant, well-focused study charts the metamorphosis of an unsure, neurotic Catalan painter into a dynamic, neurotic internationally famous (ex)-Surrealist.' Art Newspaper
'… certainly one of the better books on Dalí I have encountered … the text is an excellent exposition of what was within Dalí's horizon of expectations almost moment by moment. In this respect, the book is exemplary, going well beyond the tendency towards generalisation apparent in almost every other book-length work on the artist.' British Journal of Aesthetics
VG copy, light wear to extremities.
1990, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$50.00 - In stock -
First 1990 edition of Shock Treatment, the collection of Karen Finley’s most provocative and acclaimed performance monologues, essays, and poems, with “The Constant State of Desire,” “We Keep Our Victims Ready,” “It's Only Art,” and “The Black Sheep.” Excoriating misogyny, homophobia, abusive families, greed, and state coercion of bodies and minds, Finley holds out hope for a world informed not by hate and fear, but by truth and unconditional love.
“If you haven’t read this book yet–buy it, take it home, and read it now! This is the work that made me get off my ass and actually do something, and it will inspire you, too.”–Kathleen Hanna, singer, Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin
“Finley’s Shock Treatment is more than just ‘art.’ It remains a searing and necessary indictment of America, a call to arms, a great protest against the injustices waged on queers and women during a time in recent American history where government intervention and recognition was so desperately needed. Twenty-five years on, Finley’s work continues to shock and provoke readers and audiences, demonstrating the powerful cultural and political impact her work has had on modern American art and performance art.”–Nathan Smith, Los Angeles Review of Books
No other artist captures the drama and fragility of the AIDS era as Karen Finley does in her 1990 classic book Shock Treatment. “The Black Sheep,” “We Keep Our Victims Ready,” “I Was Never Expected to Be Talented,”–these are some of the seminal works which excoriated homophobia and misogyny at a time when artists and writers were under attack for challenging the status quo. This twenty-fifth anniversary expanded edition features a new introduction in which Finley reflects on publishing her first book as she became internationally known for being denied an NEA grant because of perceived obscenity in her work. She traces her journey from art school to burlesque gigs to the San Francisco North Beach literary scene. A new poem reminds us of Finley’s disarming ability to respond to the era’s most challenging issues with grace and humor.
KAREN FINLEY’s raw and transgressive performances have long provoked controversy and debate. Karen Finley (b. 1956) is an American performance artist, musician, poet, and educator. Her raw and transgressive performances have long provoked controversy and debate. Her performance art, recordings, and books are used as forms of activism. Her work frequently uses nudity and profanity.Finley incorporates depictions of sexuality, abuse, and disenfranchisement in her work. She is a professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
VG copy.
1981, English
Softcover, 126 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$15.00 - In stock -
1981 Penguin paperback edition of Angela Carter's 1979 classic The Bloody Chamber, a feminist retelling of favourite fairy tales interwoven by a master of seductive, luminous storytelling.
From the lairs of the fantastical and fabular and from the domains of the unconscious's mysteries...
Lie the brides in the Bloody Chamber — Hunts unwillingly the Queen of the Vampires — Slips Red Riding Hood into the arms of the Wolf — Pimps our Puss-in-Boots for his lustful master...
In tales that glitter and haunt – strange nuggets from a writer whose wayward pen spills forth stylish, erotic, nightmarish jewels of prose – the old fairy stories live and breathe again, subtly altered, subtly changed.
"She writes a prose that lends itself to magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality...dreams, myths, fairy tales, metamorphoses, the unruly unconscious, epic journeys and a highly sensual celebration of sexuality in both its most joyous and darkest manifestations"—Ian McEwan, author of The Child in Time
"The boldest of English women writers"—Lorna Sage
"The most stylish English prose writer of her generation"—John Mortimer
Angela Olive Pearce (formerly Carter, 1940—1992), who published under the name Angela Carter, was an English novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. She is mainly known for her book The Bloody Chamber (1979). In 1984, her short story "The Company of Wolves" was adapted into a film of the same name. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945"
Very Good copy.