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
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 Fiction
Australian Science Fiction / Speculative Fiction
Australian Poetry
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
Philosophy
Psychoanalysis
Anthropology
Anarchism
Socialism / Anarchism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism / Women's Studies
Gender Studies / Sexuality
Anthropology
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.
2025, English
Softcover, 312 pages, 20.3 x 13.3 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$42.00 - In stock -
Joris-Karl Huysmans’s semi-autobiographical third novel, first published in French in 1881, signaled the beginning of his break from the naturalism of Émile Zola and his turn toward a “new naturalism” that laid out the negative consequences of determinism and embraced a disgust for human existence and an all-out war against respectability.
Domesticity tells the tale of novelist André Jayant and artist Cyprien Tibaille, two men struggling between the urges of their body and the urges of their soul—between the comforts of coupledom and the ideals of art—and with the failure of matrimony or the artistic endeavor to fulfill the needs of either. More than a psychological character study, though, Domesticity stands as one of the most memorable portraits of late-nineteenth-century Paris: its shops, its eateries, its apartments, and its sad, futile affairs of the heart.
Steeped in sardonic pessimism, this ode to sterility was one of the author’s own favorite novels of his career.
Earning a wage through the French civil service, Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) quietly explored the extremes of human nature and artifice through a series of books that influenced a number of literary movements: from the gray and grimy naturalism of Marthe and Downstream, to the cornerstones of the decadent movement, Against Nature and the Satanist classic Down There, to the dream-ridden surrealist favorite, Becalmed, and his Catholic novels, The Cathedral and The Oblate.
Translated, with an afterword, by George MacLennan.
English
Softcover,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gollancz / London
$20.00 - In stock -
"The corpus of science fiction written by Theodore Sturgeon is the single most important body of science fiction by an American to date"—Samuel R Delany
1986 British Gollancz edition of More Than Human, a 1953 science fiction fix-up novel by American writer Theodore Sturgeon, one of the godfathers of contemporary science fiction and dark fantasy. It is a revision and expansion of his 1952 novella Baby Is Three, which is bracketed by two additional parts written for the novel, "The Fabulous Idiot" and "Morality". It won the 1954 International Fantasy Award, as well as winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
In this genre-bending novel-among the first to have launched sci-fi into the arena of literature-one of the great imaginers of the twentieth century tells a story as mind-blowing as any controlled substance and as affecting as a glimpse into a stranger's soul.
There's Lone, the simpleton who can hear other people's thoughts and make a man blow his brains out just by looking at him. There's Janie, who moves things without touching them, and there are the teleporting twins, who can travel ten feet or ten miles. There's Baby, who invented an antigravity engine while still in the cradle, and Gerry, who has everything it takes to run the world except for a conscience. Separately, they are talented freaks. Together, they compose a single organism that may represent the next step in evolution, and the final chapter in the history of the human race.
As the protagonists of More Than Human struggle to find out who they are and whether they are meant to help humanity or destroy it, Theodore Sturgeon explores questions of power and morality, individuality and belonging, with suspense, pathos, and a lyricism rarely seen in science fiction.
"Sturgeon's caviar dish"—Brian Aldiss
"He brought things to science fiction that had never been there before: eloquence, passion, a love for life, and a fiery poetry that found its natural expression in prose"—Robert Silverberg
VG copy, general wear.
1973, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 21 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Farrar Straus & Giroux / New York
$300.00 - In stock -
First US hardcover edition of English author J.G. Ballard's Crash, published in 1973 by Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York, in hardcover with dust jacket illustrated by Lawrence Ratzkin and portrait of Ballard (verso).
Crash is a story about symphorophilia; specifically car-crash sexual fetishism: its protagonists become sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car-crashes. It was a highly controversial novel: one publisher's reader returned the verdict "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!". In 1996, the novel was made into a film of the same name by David Cronenberg.
Original jacket blurb :
"This brilliant, startlingly original novel opens with the narrator recovering in the hospital after a car crash in which he has killed the husband of a young woman doctor. In his pain-filled dreams he finds himself dominated by strange sexual fantasies, and he determines to find the real meaning of this horrific experience. When he leaves the hospital, he revisits the scene of the crash, and meets the woman doctor. During their affair they begin an exploration of the motorcar in all its forms, conducting a variety of sexual experiments on the motorways spreading around London. They meet a violent and aggressive figure called Vaughan, a "hoodlum scientist" who seems determined to die in a car crash with a famous film actress.
Terrified of Vaughan, and yet under his spell, the narrator joins his entourage of racing drivers, drug addicts, and airport prostitutes. They take part in stock-car races, watch test vehicles being crashed at the Road Research Laboratory, and all the time are being carried closer to the sinister climax of the novel, a disquieting vision of the future in which sex and technology form a nightmare marriage.
Violent and frightening, but always true to its subject, Crash is a visionary portrait of the brutal, erotic, and overlit future that beckons ever more powerfully from the margins of the technological landscape. Mr. Ballard has written a compulsively readable tour de force, as hypnotic and baleful in its own way as was A Clockwork Orange is."
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket some small chipping to spine tips, tiny closed tears. Tanning to cover edges, marking to book block edges, pages crisp and clean.
1967, English
Softcover, 506 pages, 17.5 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Panther / London
$15.00 - Out of stock
1967 Panther edition of Leduc's La Bâtarde, with preface by Simone de Beauvoir.
An obsessive and revealing self-portrait of a remarkable woman humiliated by the circumstances of her birth and by her physical appearance, La Bâtarde relates Violette Leduc's long search for her own identity through a series of agonising and passionate love affairs with both men and women. When first published, La Bâtarde earned Violette Leduc comparisons to Jean Genet for the frank depiction of her sexual escapades and immoral behaviour. A confession that contains portraits of several famous French authors, this book is more than just a scintillating memoir - like that of Henry Miller, Leduc's brilliant writing style and attention to language transform this autobiography into a work of art.
Average-Good copy w. general cover wear/creasing, toning to pages.
1972, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 138 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Jonathan Cape / London
$120.00 - Out of stock
Rare 1972 hardcover first edition of Georges Bataille's My Mother, published by Jonathan Cape, London, translated to English from the French by Austryn Wainhouse. Ma Mère was the first of Bataille's novels to appear in Britain. My Mother is a frank and intense depiction of a young man's sexual initiation and corruption by his mother, where the profane becomes sacred, and intense experience is shown as the only way to transcend the boundaries of society and morality. Georges Bataille was obsessed by the paradox contained in passion, the presence of joy in terror, pleasure in suffering and compulsion in repulsion. His dark and anguished study is a minor erotic masterpiece.
Georges Bataille (1897—1962) was a French philosopher, essayist and novelist, often called the "metaphysician of evil." Born in Billom, France, he converted to Catholicism, then later to Marxism. Bataille was involved on the fringes of Surrealism, f1972ounding the Surrealist magazine Documents in 1929, and editing the literary review Critique from 1946 until his death. Leading a simple life as the curator of a municipal library, Bataille wrote some of France's most famous forbidden books, and has become known as a forefather the "literature of transgression". Interested in sex, death, degradation, mysticism and the power and potential of the obscene, he rejected traditional literature and considered that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic, or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, transcendental act of communion. Fascinated by human sacrifice, he founded a secret society, Acéphale, alongside André Masson, Pierre Klossowski, Roger Caillois, and others. Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Philippe Sollers have all written enthusiastically about Bataille's work.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket with minor wear and tear.
2016, English
Softcover, 118 pages, 20.5 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Blue Sky Press / Texas
$39.00 - In stock -
The unearthed, previously unpublished collection of erotic fiction by Anaïs Nin that Amazon black-listed and attempted to censor upon release. Auletris is a recently discovered, previously lost collection of erotica by Anaïs Nin, consisting of two major sections: "Life in Provincetown" and "Marcel." A drastically cut version of "Marcel" appears in Nin's bestselling Delta of Venus, and "Life in Provincetown" has never been published until now. Written in the early 1940s for a collector at a dollar a page, the erotica was also given to agents to sell far and wide. Auletris was sold to Milton Lubovitsky in 1950; Lubovitsky typed up five copies and sold them under the imprint of Press of the Sunken Eye to private buyers under the table. One of these copies surfaced when it was being offered in an auction, and it was then discovered that this collection had been lost to the public for decades. Once the authorship was verified, it was readied for true publication.
"Life in Provincetown" is a collection of interwoven stories set in one of Nin's favorite haunts and is populated with bohemian characters who engage in tabooed sexual behavior, all described in Nin's classic poetic prose. "Marcel" is another set of stories set mostly in Paris and is largely autobiographical, with many of the characters and situations taken directly from Nin's diaries. It is three times longer than the version in Delta of Venus and contains many lengthy passages, stories even, that were cut and never before published. Auletris is the first new Anaïs Nin collection of erotica since Little Birds in 1979.
This edition with the cover artwork by Baron Hans Henning Voigt (1887–1969), better known as Alastair, an image from an erotic card from Nin’s personal collection that Amazon also tried to censor.
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) was a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica, born in Paris to a Catalan father and a Danish mother, who spent many of her early years with Cuban relatives. Later a naturalized American citizen, she lived and worked in Paris, New York and Los Angeles. Author of avant-garde novels in the French surrealistic style and collections of erotica, she is best known for her life and times in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volumes I-VII (1966-1980).
1977, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
Re-print,
Published by
Mariner Books / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
From influential feminist artist and essayist Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus is one of the most important works of modern female erotica.
In this story collection, Anaïs Nin pens a lush, magical world where the characters of her imagination possess the most universal of desires and exceptional of talents. Among these provocative stories, a Hungarian adventurer seduces wealthy women then vanishes with their money; a veiled woman selects strangers from a chic restaurant for private trysts; and a Parisian hatmaker named Mathilde leaves her husband for the opium dens of Peru. This is an extraordinarily rich and exotic collection from a master of erotic writing.
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) was a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica.
1979, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
Re-print,
Published by
Mariner Books / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
Evocative and superbly erotic, Little Birds is a powerful journey into the mysterious world of sex and sensuality. From the beach towns of Normandy to the streets of New Orleans, these thirteen vignettes introduce us to a covetous French painter, a sleepless wanderer of the night, a guitar-playing gypsy, and a host of others who yearn for and dive into the turbulent depths of romantic experience.
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) was a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica, born in Paris to a Catalan father and a Danish mother, who spent many of her early years with Cuban relatives. Later a naturalized American citizen, she lived and worked in Paris, New York and Los Angeles. Author of avant-garde novels in the French surrealistic style and collections of erotica, she is best known for her life and times in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volumes I-VII (1966-1980).
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
2009, English
Softcover, 196 pages, 13.9 x 20.9 cm
Published by
Graywolf Press / Minneapolis
$33.00 - In stock -
Fanny Howe’s richly contemplative Winter Sun is a memoir of unusual depth and insight by one of America’s most original contemporary poets. In it, Howe offers a rigorous exploration of her fascinating journey of intellectual, spiritual, and artistic development. Through a collage of reflections on people, places and times that have been part of her life, she shows the origins and requirements of a vocation that has no name.
Fanny Howe is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose. She has taught literature and writing for many years. She is currently Professor Emerita in Literature at the University of California at San Diego. She has mentored a generation of American poets, activists and scholars working at the intersection of experimental and metaphysical forms of thinking.
2018, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 23 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Northwestern University Press / Evanston
$35.00 - In stock -
Collected Stories is an authoritative new translation of the complete fiction of Bruno Schulz, whose work has influenced writers as various as Salman Rushdie, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Safran Foer, Philip Roth, Danilo Kis, and Roberto Bolano.
Schulz's prose is renowned for its originality. Set largely in a fictional counterpart of his hometown of Drohobycz, his stories merge the real and the surreal. The most ordinary objects—the wind, an article of clothing, a plate of fish—can suddenly appear unfathomably mysterious and capable of illuminating profound truths. As "Father," one of his most intriguing characters, declaims: "Matter has been granted infinite fecundity, an inexhaustible vital force, and at the same time, a seductive power of temptation that entices us to create forms."
This comprehensive volume includes all of The Cinnamon Shops, restoring the original Polish title to Schulz's most famous collection (sometimes titled The Street of Crocodiles in English), and Sanatorium under the Hourglass. Also included are four previously uncollected short stories that pay tribute to Schulz's enduring genius. Madeline G. Levine's masterful new translation shows contemporary readers how Schulz, often compared to Proust and Kafka, reveals the workings of memory and consciousness.
Bruno Schulz (1892—1942) was a Polish Jewish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher. He is regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. The author nurtured his extraordinary imagination in a swarm of identities and nationalities: a Jew who thought and wrote in Polish, was fluent in German, and immersed in Jewish culture though unfamiliar with the Yiddish language. Yet there was nothing cosmopolitan about him; his genius fed in solitude on specific local and ethnic sources. He preferred not to leave his provincial hometown, which over the course of his life belonged to four countries. His adult life was often perceived by outsiders as that of a hermit: uneventful and enclosed. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award. Several of Schulz's works were lost in the Holocaust, including short stories from the early 1940s and his final, unfinished novel The Messiah. Schulz was shot and killed by a German Nazi, a Gestapo officer, in 1942 while walking back home toward Drohobycz Ghetto with a loaf of bread.
1986 / 2023, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
$33.00 - In stock -
Named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time by the Modern Library. Anne Carson’s remarkable first book about the paradoxical nature of romantic love.
Since it was first published in 1986, Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson’s lyrical meditation on love in ancient Greek literature and philosophy, has established itself as a favourite among an unusually broad audience, including classicists, essayists, poets, and general readers. Beginning with the poet Sappho’s invention of the word “bittersweet” to describe Eros, Carson’s original and beautifully written book is a wide-ranging reflection on the conflicted nature of romantic love, which is both “miserable” and “one of the greatest pleasures we have.”
Originally published in 1986.
2015, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 13.5 x 20 cm
Published by
Vintage Books / New York
$32.00 - In stock -
The poetry and prose collected in Plainwater are a testament to the extraordinary imagination of Anne Carson, a writer described by Michael Ondaatje as "the most exciting poet writing in English today." Succinct and astonishingly beautiful, these pieces stretch the boundaries of language and literary form, while juxtaposing classical and modern traditions.
Carson envisions a present-day interview with a seventh-century BC poet, and offers miniature lectures on topics as varied as orchids and Ovid. She imagines the muse of a fifteenth-century painter attending a phenomenology conference in Italy. She constructs verbal photographs of a series of mysterious towns, and takes us on a pilgrimage in pursuit of the elusive and intimate anthropology of water. Blending the rhythm and vivid metaphor of poetry with the discursive nature of the essay, the writings in Plainwater dazzle us with their invention and enlighten us with their erudition.
ANNE CARSON was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.
2010, English
Softcover, 250 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$40.00 - Out of stock
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was a major cultural figure in post-WWII Italy, well-known as a poet, novelist, communist intellectual, and filmmaker. "In Danger" is the first anthology in English devoted to his political and literary essays, with a generous selection of his poetry. Against the backdrop of post-war Italy, and through the mid-'70s, Pasolini's writings provide a fascinating portrait of a Europe in which fascists and communists violently clashed for power and where journalists ran great risks. The controversial and openly gay Pasolini was murdered at the age of fifty-three; "In Danger" includes his final interview, conducted hours before his death.
Jack Hirschman (1933 – 2021) was an American poet and social activist who has written more than 50 volumes of poetry. Dismissed from teaching at UCLA for anti-war activities in 1966, he moved to San Francisco in 1973, and was the city's present poet laureate. Hirschman translated nine languages and edited The Artaud Anthology.
1986 / 2005, English / Italian
Softcover, 96 pages, 12.2 x 16.1 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$32.00 - Out of 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
2021, English
Hardcover, 192 pages, 17.2 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$50.00 - In stock -
Unica Zürn’s celebrated autobiography, plus the greatest of her short fictional texts, edited and in a revised by translation by Malcolm Green.
In the 25 years since Atlas Press first published this account by Unica Zürn of her long history of mental crises, she has come to be recognised as a great artist at least the equal of her partner, the Surrealist Hans Bellmer.
Yet her work is barely comprehensible without the texts printed here, in which she demonstrates how her familiarity with Surrealist conceptions of the psyche allowed her to welcome the most alarming experiences as offering her access to an inner existence that was the vital source for her artistic output. The introduction here was the first study to consider her life and work from this perspective.
Zürn’s initial mental collapse was initiated when she encountered her fantasy figure “the man of Jasmine” in the real world in the person of the writer Henri Michaux. Her meeting with him plunged her into a world of hallucination in which visions of her desires, anxieties and events from her unresolved past overwhelmed her present life. Her return to “reality” was constantly interrupted by alternate visionary and depressive periods, and her description of these episodes reveals how language itself formed a part of the “divinatory” method that could aid her recovery or predict a new crisis. Her compulsion for composing anagrams allowed her to dissect everyday language so as to release from it an astonishing flood of messages, threats and evocations. This method, if such it can be called, and Zürn’s eloquent yet direct style make this book a masterpiece of literature as well as providing an acute first-hand insight into extreme psychological states.
In 1970 Unica Zürn committed suicide by throwing herself from the sixth-floor apartment that she shared with Bellmer.
2015, English
Softcover, 55 pages, 11.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$29.00 - In stock -
This fierce fable of childbirth by German Surrealist Unica Zorn was written after she had already given birth to two children and undergone the self-induced abortion of another in Berlin in the 1950s. Beginning in the relatively straightforward, if disturbing, narrative of a young woman in a tower (with a bat in her hair and ravens for company) engaged in a psychic war with the parasitic son in her belly, The Trumpets of Jericho dissolves into a beautiful nightmare of hypnotic obsession and mythical language, stitched together with anagrams and private ruminations. Arguably Zorn's most extreme experiment in prose, and never before translated into English, this novella dramatizes the frontiers of the body -- its defensive walls as well as its cavities and thresholds -- animating a harrowing and painfully, twistedly honest depiction of motherhood as a breakdown in the distinction between self and other, transposed into the language of darkest fairy tales.
Unica Zorn (1916-70) was born in Grunewald, Germany. Toward the end of World War II, she discovered the realities of the Nazi concentration camps -- a revelation which was to haunt and unsettle her for the rest of her life. After meeting Hans Bellmer in 1953, she followed him to Paris, where she became acquainted with the Surrealists and developed the body of drawings and writings for which she is best remembered: a series of anagram poems, hallucinatory accounts and literary enactments of the mental breakdowns from which she would suffer until her suicide in 1970.
2011, English
Softcover, 108 pages, 22.9 x 15.3 cm
Published by
The Hedayat Foundation / Iran
$30.00 - In stock -
The definitive English translation of one of the most important, controversial Iranian novels. As inscrutable as it is universal, Blind Owl is the seminal work of Persian modernism, and one of the great novels of the twentieth century. This 75th anniversary edition, translated by award-winning writer Naveed Noori and published in conjunction with the Hedayat Foundation, is the first translation to use the definitive Bombay edition (Hedayat's handwritten text), and the only available English translation by a native Persian and English speaker.
Written by one of the greatest Iranian writers of the twentieth century, Blind Owl, Hedayat's masterpiece defies categorization. It tells a two-part story of an isolated narrator with a fragile relationship with time and reality. In first person, the narrator offers a string of hazy, dreamlike recollections fueled by opium and alcohol. He spends time painting the exact same scene on the covers of pen cases: an old man wearing a cape and turban sitting under a cypress tree, separated by a small stream from a beautiful woman in black who offers him a water lily. In a one-page transition, the reader finds the narrator covered in blood and waiting for the police to arrest him. In part two, readers glimpse the grim realities that unlock the mysteries of the first part. In a new translation that reflects Hedayat’s conversational, confessional tone, Blind Owl joins the ranks of classics by Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky that explore the dark recesses of the human psyche.
This 75th anniversary edition, translated by award-winning writer Naveed Noori and published in conjunction with the Hedayat Foundation, is notable for a number of firsts: The only translation endorsed by the Sadegh Hedayat Foundation The first translation to use the definitive Bombay edition (Hedayat's handwritten text) The only available English translation by a native Persian and English speaker The preface includes a detailed textual analysis of the Blind Owl Finally, by largely preserving the spirit as well as the structure of Hedayat's writing, this edition brings the English reader into the world of the Hedayat's Blind Owl as never before. Extensive footnotes (explaining Persian words, phrases, and customs ignored in previous translations) provide deeper understanding of this work for both the causal reader and the serious student of literature.
Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951) was an Iranian short-story writer, novelist, playwright, and essayist who introduced modernist techniques into Persian fiction. Hedayat was interested in Iranian folk-lore and was a central figure in Tehrān intellectual circles, belonging to the antimonarchical, anti-Islamic literary group known as the Four. Hedayat’s most famous novel, the haunting and profoundly pessimistic Būf-e Kūr (1937; The Blind Owl), tells of death, loss and psychosis, and is considered the most important work of literature to come out of Iran in the past century. A deeply melancholy man, he lived with a vision of the absurdity of human existence and his inability to effect a change for the good in Iran. He withdrew from his friends and began to seek escape from his sense of futility in drugs and alcohol. In 1951, overwhelmed by despair, he left Tehrān and went to Paris, where, on April 4, 1951, he took his own life by gassing himself. Dubbed the father of ‘psycho-fiction’, or the Iranian Franz Kafka, Sadeq Hedayat left behind an oeuvre that is mesmerising, puzzling, and petrifying.
1990 re-print, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 20.3 x 28 cm
Published by
RE/SEARCH / San Francisco
$48.00 - In stock -
Revised, Expanded, Illustrated, and Annotated Edition of the author’s classic, published by RE/Search in 1990. Original text supplemented with Annotations, Commentary, and Four Additional Stories by J.G. Ballard.
Contains beautifully shocking Illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner and Ana Barrado; design was conceived by V. Vale and executed at his typesetting shop. J.G. Ballard wrote the explanatory annotations for this RE/Search edition at Vale’s request.
Foreword by William S Burroughs, Introduction by V. Vale. First published in 1970 and widely regarded as a prophetic masterpiece, this is a groundbreaking experimental novel by the acclaimed author of “Crash” and “Super-Cannes”.
The 1970 First American Edition was banned by court order, forcing Doubleday to shred the entire print run. An experimental (rather than a conventional) novel, it has lost none of its awesome power to shock. Atrocity Exhibition is widely regarded as Ballard’s finest, most complex work…
The irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world is the subject of this extraordinary tour de force. The central character’s dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and car-crash victims as he traverses the screaming wastes of nervous breakdown. Seeking his sanity, he casts himself in a number of roles: H-bomber pilot, presidential assassin, crash victim, psychopath. Finally, through the black, perverse magic of violence he transcends his psychic turmoils to find the key to a bizarre new sexuality.
A “must-have” edition for J. G. Ballard collectors.
2025, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 21.6 x 13.9 cm
Published by
Divided Publishing / London
$36.00 - In stock -
"Underneath the sharp satire and hilarious sexual irreverence this is a deadly serious book: a brilliant novel of a seeker, like The Pilgrim’s Progress refracted by queer internet culture."—Torrey Peters
Darryl Cook is a cuckold, and that’s exactly how he likes it. He has an inheritance that spares him from work, a manageable and seemingly consequence-free drug habit, and a lovely wife called Mindy who’s generally game for anything—and for as much of it as she can get. But after an accidental overdose and some serious oversharing, Darryl’s world begins to crack up. Tormented by what seems to be the secret truth in sex, and less assured of that secret’s form, Darryl steps into what used to be called real life . . . Darryl is a disarmingly funny and unabashedly intelligent look at a community of people parsing masculinity, marriage, sex (and love) on their own terms.
"Running through it’s core is a torrent of wisdom at a fibre-optic pace with more power than even the most edited digital diatribe ... It’s a beautiful, genre-bending book — a jewel of the future that demands to be read, treasured, now."—Lucy Swan, BitterSweet Review
"Darryl crashes through the pieties of inclusive literature like a horny aurochs through an Apple Store. Jackie Ess’s vicious wit and humane soul refuse to settle for anything less than an enhanced interrogation of human frailty, here through the psychosexual evisceration of an ordinary, relatable guy who simply wants someone else to bang his wife. Who doesn’t? This book takes the raw power of the sentence seriously, which is the best way to be funny: Darryl is sprinting ahead of the reader, mooning, with knowledge they crave, and we must try our hardest to catch up. I was already breathless by page ten, my gut torn in half by horrified glee. I stayed awake all night reading and couldn’t work the next day. Jackie Ess is the best. Cuck rights!"—Harry Josephine Giles
"One of the best novels on the planet."—Kay Gabriel
"Ess is what I might call a burgeoning cult literary figure, armed with an unmistakable lyric deadpan and a taste for provocative subject matter."—Stephen Ira, Poetry Project
"What Darryl is looking for is a crisis of sufficient severity that it will cause him to feel real to himself."—Dominic Fox, Review 31
"Jackie Ess’s debut novel is a smart, unexpected and extremely funny take on marriage, masculinity and desire, written from the perspective of a loser extraordinaire."—Lucy Scholes, Prospect
2022, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 21.6 x 13.9 cm
Published by
Divided Publishing / London
$34.00 - In stock -
The story of failure asks one question only: What do people who lose do next? “Let the best one win.” War is one way. The other way is religion. Let me at the stakes. It’s so much a matter of patience. No fury, beyond all reason, no sequence broken, but diverted. Nothing seems to cooperate when you lose control. Blue becomes violet. Bend your head to the blank. The solution is so simple: don’t identify yourself with your description of yourself.
Fanny Howe is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose. She has taught literature and writing for many years. She is currently Professor Emerita in Literature at the University of California at San Diego. She has mentored a generation of American poets, activists and scholars working at the intersection of experimental and metaphysical forms of thinking.
“It feels we aren’t reading prose but language that oscillates between liturgy and prayer...” – Eugene Lim
“Untethered any longer to the mundanity of her capitalist exploitation, the narrator invokes an amorphous revolution, one which is “borderless. . . . anti-nationalist, a revolution based on an emotion, not an imperialist idea. . . . Resistance, abolition, eternity...” – Dennis Cooper
2020, English
Softcover, 126 pages, 13.9 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Divided Publishing / London
$34.00 - In stock -
Night Philosophy is collected around the figure of the child, the figure of the child not just as a little person under the tutelage of adults, but also the submerged one, who knows, who is without power, who doesn’t matter. The book proposes a minor politics that disperses all concentrations of power. Fanny Howe chronicles the weak and persistent, those who never assimilate at the cost of having another group to dominate. She explores the dynamics of the child as victim in a desensitized era, when transgression is the zeitgeist and the victim–perpetrator model controls citizens.
With an afterword by Chris Kraus.
Fanny Howe is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose. She has taught literature and writing for many years. She is currently Professor Emerita in Literature at the University of California at San Diego. She has mentored a generation of American poets, activists and scholars working at the intersection of experimental and metaphysical forms of thinking.
“Night Philosophy is sharp and precise. All the time, like a powerful undercurrent, a voltage charger, or Cordelia speaking, language itself exerts its primacy; it insists on remaining true not just to human hope, human feeling, or the questing spirit, but to some idea of a power beyond ourselves...” – Colm Tóibin
“The most important thing for you to understand is that Fanny Howe is a rebel, down to the cellular level. She walks with the prophets and with the unborn. There is no writer like her...” – Ariana Reines
2019, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 13.9 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Divided Publishing / London
$39.00 - In stock -
If winning can only occur in a competition between equal opponents, someone who isn’t equal will need to adopt a different strategy and let go of the promise, or the curse, of victory. Anna Zett takes up the challenge in this collection of personal science fiction, registering the traces systems of power leave in the body, in its locomotory, nervous and digestive systems. Zett’s voice appears in several textual guises, addressing authority, resistance, trauma and the physicality of language. Dedicated to the feminist revolution, the post-socialist subject of Artificial Gut Feeling questions logocentric and capitalist beliefs about the economy of meaning. This book gathers together fists, guts and brains to gain a deeper understanding of the non-verbal roots of dialogue.
Anna Zett (b. 1983, Leipzig) is an artist, writer and filmmaker. Her work combines historical analysis and poetic form with playful embodied practice. In 2014 she released two videos dealing with extinct animals as emblems of colonial capitalism in the West, which were screened widely in the context of contemporary art. In recent years, her research into the cosmology of scientific modernism has focused on post-communist trouble, industrialism and the German heritage of violence. Formally, her artistic emphasis moves towards listening, voice and the human body’s capacity to improvise verbal and non-verbal group communication. Zett has written and directed two experimental radio plays for German public radio and (co-)hosted participatory formats of storytelling, discourse and choreography. Artificial Gut Feeling is her first book. She lives in Berlin.
“This being is able to transform movement into speech. It winds itself about inside me like a thick snake and I have to use all my strength to let it spin and do what it does. When I wilfully try to stop it, it begins to whisper words to me and that is even more unpleasant. If I were to associate this gut feeling with an emotion, I would say disgust. But this disgust is not directly linked to your name...” — Anna Zett
2024, English
Softocver, 112 pages, 21.6 x 13.9 cm
Published by
Divided Publishing / London
$36.00 - Out of stock
Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer.
Marouane Bakhti is a writer and arts journalist. Born in Nantes, France to a Moroccan father and a French mother, he studied history and journalism at the Sorbonne. He writes criticism for Mouvement magazine and lives in Paris. How to Leave the World is his first novel.
Translated by Lara Vergnaud.
“A rare book that depicts the isolation and poetry of rural life...” – Annie Ernaux
“Visceral scenes and fragments of shame, desire and displacement crystallise as sentences that are felt before they are understood. Bakhti writes diaspora as distension, a condition of freezing and unfreezing through successive intimacies and encounters: ‘Voice, silence, voice, silence.’What it takes to imagine social and physical freedom is what it meant to keep reading this incredible book...” – Bhanu Kapil
“I was struck by its kaleidoscopic scope, despite its brevity – from the earthy and vital imagery of Bakhti’s childhood, through the transformational effects of grief and faith...” – Rose Cleary
“This is an astonishingly good debut book. I was immediately drawn in and adored the beautifully crafted prose. With sensitivity and nuance, Marouane Bakhti explores the complexities of family and cultural identity as a member of the Moroccan diaspora – and one who happens to be coming to terms with his sexuality. There is so much heart in this story, you can’t help but feel like it was a privilege to have been taken on this journey. Marouane Bakhti is without doubt a promising new writer and I am excited to see what he does next...” – Elias Jahshan, editor, This Arab Is Queer