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, Sat 12–5
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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Australian Art
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'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
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Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
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Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
<a href=http://wfb.public-office.info/artist/john-nixon>All titles by John Nixon
"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.
2026, English
Softcover, 68 pages, 20 x 14 cm
Numbered ed. of 40,
Published by
Hidden Door Records / Naarm-Melbourne
Ranch Pressing / Naarm-Melbourne
$45.00 - In stock -
A cough in the middle of a funeral. A protest chant erupting at a press conference. The deep throb of trance bass through the walls of NIMBY-ist suburbia. Sound is the great interrupter, uniquely capable of disrupting hierarchies, flipping power dynamics and amplifying the minor in the midst of the major. Sound reminds us of the bodily within the machine, the labour behind the outcome and the real within the enigmatic.
Hidden Door Issue 002 features contributions by Luke Patterson, Kristen Gallerneaux, Marcus McKenzie, Catherine Ryan, Doug Skinner, and Josephine Mead.
Edited by Lewis Gittus, Sarah Jones, and Sarah Walker.
Hidden Door Journal is a sound-studies publication with a focus on horror, Gothic, and the weird. We are interested in possible/impossible intersections between artistic practice, music, literature, philosophy, and theory-fiction. Hidden Door Journal publishes essays, short stories, poetry, artist statements, exhibition and book reviews, phono-texts, and illustrations.
2026, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 27.2 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Cushion Works / US
$66.00 - In stock -
A jewelry collection designed for punk vampires in attendance at the Grand Ole Opry: McCormack's first foray into art and object-making is characteristically both absurd and obscene.
Derek McCormack's devilish blend of art and fiction imagines a world in which Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren are vampires, designing punk-influenced jewelry for other vampires visiting the Grand Ole Opry, the mother church of country music. From safety pin fangs to punk Minnie Pearl pearl necklaces, The Shithole Opry Collector's Guide showcases all manner of star-studded shit from McCormack's "Hillbilly Heaven Collection," which he has been documenting on his instagram page @thegrandholeopry since early 2024. The project is a riff on Westwood and McLaren's work of the 1970s, which reimagined American rockabilly and rocker gear; it's also a perversion of the clean-cut Christian facade of country music. Most of all, it's a parody of the way fashion designers pirate the past for inspiration, as it poses the question: What if the past stole from fashion the way fashion steals from the past? The Shithole Opry Collector's Guide combines McCormack's novel art-objects with his most original writing to date: the result is spectacular and sinister, sidesplitting and spine-chilling.
Canadian artist and writer Derek McCormack (born 1969) is a cult figure born in Peterborough, Ontario, and currently based in Toronto. His work is characterized by its extreme brevity, absurdity and dark, often obscene humor. His 2004 novel The Haunted Hillbilly (Soft Skull) was named a "Best Book of the Year" by both The Village Voice and The Globe and Mail, and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. His recent novels include The Well-Dressed Wound (2015) and Castle Faggot (2020), both published by Semiotext(e), and Judy Blame's Obituary: Writings on Fashion and Death (2021), published by Pilot Press.
"The Jean Schlumberger of shit, the Elsa Peretti of safety pins and poo, Derek McCormack croons another rhinestone jingle to jangle the nerves of the complacent, lazy, and dim. His bijoux punk any natural order of beauty with gags and faggotry until the fun climbs out of our behinds. As Scabbie Hoffman Ouija’d me last night: Stool, this book!"–Bruce Hainley, author of 'Correctomundo,' 'Under the Sign of [sic]: Sturtevant’s Volte-Face,' 'Foul Mouth,' and 'Really, No Biggie,' among other things
1978, English
Softcover (w. poster), 194 pages, 21 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
LIP / Melbourne
$70.00 - In stock -
The incredible book-sized 1978-79 edition of Melbourne's great LIP journal, complete with the original insert SONGWORDS poster and 'Make Your Own Teaset' artwork insert by Mary Newsome! Published out of Carlton between 1976-1984, LIP encapsulated Australian feminist artistic practice of the period, publishing articles and interviews by women on women in film, sound, theatre, painting, photography, poetry, criticism, activism, journalism, publishing, sculpture, design, education, and much more.
In this issue: Art Sense and Sensibility: Women's Art and Feminist Criticism - Janine Burke; Aboriginal Women: Ritual and Culture - Diane Bell interviewed by Lesley Dumbrell; Map of Transition: Performance - Jillian Orr; Jane Sutherland - Frances Lindsay; Sybil Craig - Mary Eagle; Make Your Own Teaset - Mary Newsome; Women's Images of Women - Barbara Hall; In Search of Old Mistresses - Patricia Symons; Women Ceramacists; Olive Bishop interviewed by Julie Ewington; Margaret Dodd Talking with Julie Ewington; Lorrain Jenyns; Wendy Stavrianos interviewed by Pauline Petrus; The Development of a Political View: A Conversation Between Two Women Artists - Jennifer Barwell and Vivienne Binns; Micky Allan interviewed by Suzanne Davies; Photographs - Jacqueline Mitelman; From the Ground Up - Photographs - Virginia Coventry; Survey of Women's Art Theory Courses and Feminine Sensibility - Janine Burke; The Women's Art Register Extension Project - Bonita Ely; Sisterhood ― For Whom? Jude Adams and Jenny Barber; Posters by Women in the Earthworks Poster Collective; Film - Margaret Fink and Her Brilliant Career - Frida Freiberg; Following My Star - Elsa Chauvel; Monique Schwarz interviewed by Christine Johnston; A Dialogue between Toni Robertson, a Feminist Poster Maker, and Jeni Thornley, a Feminist Film-maker; Nina Claditz interviewed by Annette Blonski; Introducing Helmer Sanders - Frida Freiberg; Reviews: Shopping in Hearbreak Arcade - Meredith Nolte; Me and Daphne - Linda Rubinstein; Feminine Focus at the Festival - Frida Freiberg; Supplement: Australian Women in Music - Australian Women in Music - Terry Radic; Margaret Sutherland - Helen Coles; May Brahe: Composer - Mimi Colligan; Dr. Ruby Davy - Silvia O’Toole; Four Women Composers: Helen Gifford, Ann Boyd, Ann Carr-Boyd and Peggy Glanville-Hicks - Marcia Ruff; Esther Rofe interviewed by Pauline Petrus; Talking with Linda Phillips by Kerry Murphy; Mary Nemet interviewed by Jeanette Fenelon; The Women's Electric Band interviewed by Jeannette Fenelon; Robyn Archer interviewed by Jeannette Fenelon; The Shameless Hussie A.C.R.; Jane Clifton and Celeste Howden interviewed by Jeannette Fenelon; Janie Conway and Marnie Sheehan - Virginia Fraser; Theatre - The Women's Theatre Group: A Selection of Scripts, Interviews and Comments Kerry Dwyer, Jenny Walsh and Suzanne Spunner; Roma: A One Woman Play - Jan Macdonald and the Roma cast; Tongue to Lip - Valerie Kirwan; And Women Must Wait: Savage Sepia - Suzanne Spunner; Dance and Movement - Marilyn Jones interviewed by Roseanne Hull-Brown; Betty Pounder interviewed by Roseanne Hull-Brown; Yum Wing Chun: Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman - Karen Armstrong; Media - An Open Letter - Shere Hite; Feminism and Publishing: Interviews with Women Publishers - Cathy Peake; Two Early Melbourne Journalists - Lurline Stewart; Sydney Women Writers’ Workshop - Anna Couani and Pamela Brown; The Australian Women's Weekly ― The Case of the Bald Cockatoo - Cathy Peake, Maree Conway and Sue Parvaris.
LIP Collective members: Annette Blonski, Janine Burke, Isabel Davies, Suzanne Davies, Lesley Dumbrell, Jeannette Fenelon, Freda Freiberg, Christine Johnston, Elizabeth Owen, Cathy Peake, Meredith Rogers, Suzanne Spunner, Lynne Wilkinson.
This copy includes the original fold–out SONGWORDS poster and the 1978 etching "Make Your Own Teaset" insert by Mary Newsome. A most complete copy. Both Fine.
NF copy.
2025, English
Hardcover, 88 pages, 17.8 x 12.1 cm
Published by
Further Reading Library / New York
$50.00 - In stock -
While Charles Fort has received sustained attention over the years, 'Research' is the first book to delve into his methodology and source material for his investigations into paranormal phenomena. In addition to Fort's famously small notes that are extensively reproduced here for the first time, the book includes Fort’s remarkable letters soliciting information on a wide variety of inexplicable phenomena that appeared in newspapers worldwide, as well as the responses he received. From frogs falling from the sky to sea monsters who inhabit our oceans, it is all here in his inimitable style, along with an appreciation by acclaimed experimental filmmaker and self-proclaimed Fortean Peggy Ahwesh.
Charles Fort (1874–1932) was a true iconoclast who embodied the idea of the “cult writer” in every sense of the term with his wildly entertaining prose and confounding research into the unknown. His early admirers formed the Fortean Society during his lifetime, in 1931, to elevate his work. Since that time, Fort’s name has been synonymous with the strange, in large part due to the 'Fortean Times', published since 1973.
THE FURTHER READING LIBRARY is an ongoing series of books dedicated to forgotten ideas, overlooked accomplishments, and idiosyncratic world views. Each book explores — through a collection of original documents, photographs, and primary source material — a body of work, a specific topic, or an individual. Modeled on the size and range of topics of the King Penguin and Insel-Bücherei series, The Further Reading Library is edited by Christine Burgin and Andrew Lampert.
Christine Burgin is a publisher and former gallerist. Her publications include books by Hilma af Klint, Robert Walser, Emily Dickinson, and Susan Howe and projects with artists Rodney Graham, Matt Mullican, and Allen Ruppersberg.
christineburgin.com
Andrew Lampert is an artist, writer, and curator. His moving-image, photo, and performance works have been widely exhibited at international venues, and he has edited books on Tony Conrad, George Kuchar, and Harry Smith, among others. The former Curator of Collections at Anthology Film Archives, Lampert is co-author with Howie Chen of the advice columns Hard Truths and Hard Choices for Art in America.
2017 / 2022, English
Softcover, 600 pages, 15.2 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Nightboat Books / New York
$58.00 - In stock -
At last a major anthology of New Narrative, the movement fueled by punk, pop, porn, French theory, and social struggle to change writing forever.
Impossible to get for years, now finally back in print, and back in stock!
In the twenty years that followed America’s bicentennial, narrative writing was re-formed, reflecting new political and sexual realities. With the publication of this anthology, the New Narrative era bounds back to life, ripe with dramatic propulsion and infused with the twin strains of poetry and continental theory. The reader will discover classic New Narrative texts, from Robert Glück to Kathy Acker, as well as rare supplemental materials, including period interviews, essays, and talks, which form a new map of late 20th century creative rebellion.
"Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian’s edited anthology, Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997, takes an expansive view. A monumental tome decades in the making, it contains the work of forty-two recognised and little-known authors… Published, unpublished, and long-forgotten works, interviews, illustrations, and ephemera are all included, and each piece is accompanied by an invaluable note by Bellamy and Killian offering context and contributing to a sense of an exceptionally large, diverse, and exciting writing scene. Proof that nothing sticks a scene together like bodily fluids, the editors’ notes are also heavy on gossip and innuendo. Like New Narrative prose itself, which often used salacious, intimate asides to establish a conspiratorial relationship with its reader, Bellamy and Killian’s reminiscences seem designed to make their reader feel included or at least momentarily implicated in their community." — Diarmuid Hester, Critical Quarterly
Includes the writings of : Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Robert Glück, Kathy Acker, Edith A. Jenkins, Carla Harryman, David O. Steinberg, Michael Amnasan, Judy Grahn, John Norton, Marsha Campbell, Brad Gooch, Camille Roy, Sam D'Allesandro, Bruce Boone, Dennis Cooper, Kathe Burkhart, Roberto Bedoya, Steve Abbott, Gabrielle Daniels, Gary Indiana, Leslie Dick, Scott Watson, Gail Scott, Richard Hawkins, Kevin Killian, Matias Viegener, R. Zamora Linmark, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Rebecca Brown, Nayland Blake, Lynne Tillman, Bruce Benderson, Cecilia Dougherty, Eileen Myles, Sarah Schulman, Laurie Weeks, Bob Flanagan, Lawrence Braithwaite, Chris Kraus.
2026, English
Softcover, 110 pages. 19.7 x 13.3 cm
Published by
Magic Hour Press / New York
$43.00 - In stock -
Hervé Guibert’s novel 'The Gangsters' (1988) opens at the front door of a Paris townhouse inhabited by the narrator's elderly great-aunts, Suzanne and Louise. The narrator, distracted by a health crisis and his pursuit of an ambivalent lover, arrives to find suspicious renovation work taking place. But even after the great-aunts confess to being intimidated and extorted, neither he nor the incompetent police can stop the ongoing larceny. This new edition boasts an original translation & a new foreword.Readers of Guibert's writing may already recognise the narrator (also named Hervé) and his great-aunts from the groundbreaking photo-novel 'Suzanne and Louise' (1980). Like his other books, 'The Gangsters' is a work of autofiction. Here, he uses the crime-novel format to explore universal motifs, such as cruelty, desire and mortality. "When I disappear," Guibert continued, "I will have said it all. I will have striven to reduce this distance between the truths of experience and writing."
Originally published in 1988, 'The Gangsters' was his first book to be translated into English. This new edition from Magic Hour features Iain White's original translation and a new afterword by Janique Vigier.
Astoundingly prolific, the French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert (1955–91) authored 25 books and published numerous texts on photography. Memorialised as a leading exponent of French autofiction, Guibert rose to acclaim for his bestselling AIDS novel, 'To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life' (1990).
1979, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 127 pages, 13.5 x 22 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Marion Boyars / London
$190.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful first English hardcover edition of George Bataille's Story of the Eye, published by Marion Boyars, London, in 1979. Translated by Joachim Neugroschal with accompanying essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes.
"The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster's horrible crowing." - G.B.
A masterpiece of transgressive, surrealist erotica, Bataille's first novel, published under the pseudonym 'Lord Auch', is still his most notorious work. Called a "metaphysician of evil, Bataille wrote the 1928 novella "Story of the Eye (French: L'histoire de l'œil) as a psychoanalytical task. In this explicit erotic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacrilegious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille's obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.
This edition also includes Susan Sontag's superb study of pornography as art, 'The Pornographic Imagination', as well as Roland Barthes' essay 'The Metaphor of the Eye', which was first published in Bataille's own journal Critique, shortly after Bataille's death in 1962. Barthes' analysis focuses on the centrality of the eye to this series of vignettes, and notices that it is interchangeable with eggs, bulls' testicles and other ovular objects within the narrative. He also traces a second series of liquid metaphors within the text, which flow through tears, cat's milk, egg yolks, frequent urination scenes, blood and semen.
Georges Bataille (1897-1962), French essayist and novelist, was born in Billom, France. He converted to Catholicism, then later to Marxism, and was interested in psychoanalysis and mysticism, forming a secret society dedicated to glorifying human sacrifice. Leading a simple life as the curator of a municipal library, Bataille was involved on the fringes of Surrealism, founding the Surrealist magazine Documents in 1929, and editing the literary review Critique from 1946 until his death.
Good—VG ex-libris copy with light library wear to end blanks, small stamp to colophon in original G—VG dust jacket, no library markings, preserved under mylar wrap. Scarce in this edition with dust jacket present. General reading wear and tanning with age. There is a fierce feminist critique of Susan Sontag's essay in the margins that is an isolated attack Sontag. The rest is left unscathed.
1975, —
Softcover (staple-bound + obi), 16 pages, 10.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
De Harmonie / Amsterdam
$100.00 - In stock -
Rare 1975 edition of the mysterious artist's book and "Fluxus" classic conceived in 1971 by Roland Topor. All sentences were scratched, making this "Fluxus" book unreadable and therefore "unsaleable".
In 1971, the artist was talking with publisher Jaco Groot in a Paris cafe. The conversation was about illegible books. "I made a book like that," said Topor, "tomorrow, same time, same cafe, I'll bring it." When Groot saw the book the next day, he said to Topor's stupid astonishment: "We'll publish it!"
Three years after, Topor was interviewed by Adriaan van Dis in his book program. Van Dis handed Topor the illegible book and asked him to read a piece. Topor, unprepared for this, spontaneously put a hand to his mouth and began to read, muttering and incomprehensible.
Roland Topor (1938—1997) was one of the most unique and versatile French artists of the second half of the 20th century, working prolifically as a provocative and spirited illustrator, author, humorist, satirist, poet, painter, performer, sculptor, playwright, film and TV writer, filmmaker and actor, and much more. A founder of the Panic Movement, an art collective formed by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Roland Topor in Paris in 1962, Topor was known for the surreal and absurdist nature of his work.
Very Good copy with edge tanning, rusted staples. Original obi band with light tanning.
1974, English
Softcover, 218 pages, 18.4 x 13.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Village Press / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
First Village Press 1974 edition of All or Nothing (1960) by Welsh author John Cowper Powys, a highly eccentric, metaphysical novel. It explores the deep philosophical and cosmic battle between absolute being and absolute nothingness through the perspective of a young boy and his journey into the mystic.
Powys was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar. His mother was descended from the poet William Cowper, hence his middle name. His two younger brothers, Llewelyn Powys and Theodore Francis Powys, also became well-known writers. Other brothers and sisters also became prominent in the arts.
John studied at Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and became a teacher and lecturer; as lecturer, he worked first in England, then in continental Europe and finally in the USA, where he lived in the years 1904-1934. While in the United States, his work was championed by author Theodore Dreiser. He engaged in public debate with Bertrand Russell and the philosopher and historian Will Durant: he was called for the defence in the first obscenity trial for the James Joyce novel, Ulysses, and was mentioned with approval in the autobiography of US feminist and anarchist, Emma Goldman.
He made his name as a poet and essayist, moving on to produce a series of acclaimed novels distinguished by their uniquely detailed and intensely sensual recreation of time, place and character. They also describe heightened states of awareness resulting from mystic revelation, or from the experience of extreme pleasure or pain. The best known of these distinctive novels are A Glastonbury Romance and Wolf Solent. He also wrote some works of philosophy and literary criticism, including a pioneering tribute to Dorothy Richardson.
Having returned to the UK, he lived in England for a brief time, then moved to Corwen in Wales, where he wrote historical romances (including two set in Wales) and magical fantasies. He later moved to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he remained until his death in 1963.
Good copy with some wear/marking to boards/extremities/light spine creases/tanning.
1974, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 18.4 x 13.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Village Press / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
First Village Press 1974 edition of Up and Out & The Mountains of the Moon (1957) by Welsh author John Cowper Powys, a collection of two surreal, philosophical fantasy novellas. First published in 1957, these visionary works dive into existential themes, mysticism, and alternate realities.
"Underlying both these stories, is that there is nothing in the universe devoid of some mysterious element of consciousness, however small, queer, ridiculous, or whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, such a thing may be?"–John Cowper Powy
Powys was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar. His mother was descended from the poet William Cowper, hence his middle name. His two younger brothers, Llewelyn Powys and Theodore Francis Powys, also became well-known writers. Other brothers and sisters also became prominent in the arts.
John studied at Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and became a teacher and lecturer; as lecturer, he worked first in England, then in continental Europe and finally in the USA, where he lived in the years 1904-1934. While in the United States, his work was championed by author Theodore Dreiser. He engaged in public debate with Bertrand Russell and the philosopher and historian Will Durant: he was called for the defence in the first obscenity trial for the James Joyce novel, Ulysses, and was mentioned with approval in the autobiography of US feminist and anarchist, Emma Goldman.
He made his name as a poet and essayist, moving on to produce a series of acclaimed novels distinguished by their uniquely detailed and intensely sensual recreation of time, place and character. They also describe heightened states of awareness resulting from mystic revelation, or from the experience of extreme pleasure or pain. The best known of these distinctive novels are A Glastonbury Romance and Wolf Solent. He also wrote some works of philosophy and literary criticism, including a pioneering tribute to Dorothy Richardson.
Having returned to the UK, he lived in England for a brief time, then moved to Corwen in Wales, where he wrote historical romances (including two set in Wales) and magical fantasies. He later moved to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he remained until his death in 1963.
Good copy with some wear/marking to boards/extremities.
1994, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 20.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$38.00 - In stock -
Andre Breton described Maldoror as "the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential." Little is known about its pseudonymous author, aside from his real name (Isidore Ducasse), birth in Uruguay (1846) and early death in Paris (1870). Lautreamont bewildered his contemporaries, but the Surrealists modeled their efforts after his black humor and poetic leaps of logic, exemplified by the oft-quoted line, "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." Maldoror's shocked first publisher refused to bind the sheets of the original edition--and perhaps no better invitation exists to this book, which warns the reader, "Only the few may relish this bitter fruit without danger."
This is the only complete annotated collection of Lautreamont's writings available in English, in Alexis Lykiard's superior translation. For this latest edition, Lykiard updates his introduction to include recent scholarship.
1984, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 320 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Academy Chicago Publishers / Chicago
$20.00 - Out of stock
First 1984 US hardcover edition, published by Academy Chicago Publishers.
This is the first historical anthology of Australian science fiction. It offers a good selection of exciting recent works and also reveals a long history of science fiction in Australia, providing a comprehensive chronological sampling of the various styles, attitudes and ideas of Australian science fiction writers from 1845 to the present.
The selection includes excepts from the utopian and anti-utopian novels of the 1800s and 1890s, social criticism from a feminist romance of 1901, and social despair from an anti-socialist novel of 1911. "Lost civilization" romances of 1847 and 1898 offer mystery, excitement and high adventure, and an account of a Japanese invasion of Sydney gives a dire warning of racial fear.
Major contemporary writers represented are Damen Broderick, Frank Bryning, Peter Carey, A. Bertram Changler, Lee Harding, David J. Lake, Dal Stivens, George Turner, Wynne N. Whiteford, Michael Wilding and Jack Woodhams.
Australian science fiction has undergone a renaissance since 1975. Writers such as George Turner and Lee Harding have produced award-winning novels, Peter Carey's speculative short stories have attracted international interest, and films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and Mad Max have won worldwide acclaim.
In his introduction Van Ikin traces the development of SF in Australia showing its preoccupation with the Australian emptiness and discussing its reflection of the conflict between conservative and visionary social attitudes.
Dr. Ikin holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney and currently teaches Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia. He is editor and publisher of the magazine Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature, has published articles and reviews in the Australian literary journals and has published his own stories in a number of magazines and anthologies.
Includes 30-page History of Australian SF, notes, bibliography.
VG clean copy in Good—VG dust jacket with a few small chips/wear to edges, general light wear. Preserved in mylar wrap.
1994, English
Softcover, 166 pages, 20 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Dedalus / Cambs
$30.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first 1994 Dedalus edition. Translated by Mike Mitchell.
The White Dominican is Meyrink's most esoteric novel, and draws on the wisdom of a number of mystical traditions, the most important of which is Tao. It is set in a mystical version of the Bavarian town of Wasserburg, which sits on a promontory surrounded on three sides by the River Inn.
The novel describes the spiritual journey of the simple hero, who, guided by a number of figures, (his eccentric father, the spirit of a distant ancestor, the protecting presence of his dead lover and the mysterious figure of the White Dominican), escapes the Medusa's head' of the world to a transfiguration, through which he joins the living chain that stretches to infinity!
This is the novel which has been eagerly awaited by those who see Meyrink as not just a novelist, but as a mystic visionary who can tell them what lies on the Other Side.
Gustav Meyrink (I868-1932) found worldwide critical and commercial acclaim with his first novel The Golem (1915) It established his reputation as the master of the occult and the grotesque.(He was the German translator of Dickens).
VG copy.
1994, English
Softcover, 222 pages, 20 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Dedalus / Cambs
$35.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first 1994 Dedalus edition. Translated by Maurice Raraty
"Meyrink's short stories epitomised the non-plus-ultra of all modern writing. Their magnificent colour, their spine-chilling and bizarre inventiveness, their aggression, their succinctness of style, their overwhelming originality of ideas, which is so evident in every sentence and phrase that there seem to be no lacunae: all this captivated me, and seemed to me to provide the proper antidote to all the adjectival prose and shallow, false romanticism of the immediate preceding generation."–Max Brod
"Gustav Meyrink's stories recall Gogol in their black, humorous vigour."–Kathy O'Shaugnessy in The European
Gustav Meyrink (I868-1932) found worldwide critical and commercial acclaim with his first novel The Golem (1915) It established his reputation as the master of the occult and the grotesque.(He was the German translator of Dickens).
VG copy.
2009, French / English
Hardcover (w. audio CD), 90 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Ed. of 350, hand-numbered,
Published by
Alga Marghen / Milan
$60.00 - In stock -
Limited edition book and CD presentation of Bernard Heidsieck's Poème-Partition "X", bound in hardcover in a hand-numbered edition of 350 copies. Recorded 1960, this publication of the work plus CD of the original 1960 recording and later 1962 performance (accompanied by saxophone improvisation by American painter Larry Rivers) were issued in this deluxe volume in 2009 by Alga Marghen, Milan. Heidsieck (1928—2014) was one of the greatest French poets of the 20th century and an originator of the sound poetry movement.
Bernard Heidseick (1928-2014) was a French sound poet, associated with various movements throughout a long career: including Beat, Fluxus, and minimalism. Heidseick decided in the mid-1950s to break off from written poetry, and to bring it outside of books. He opposed passive poetry to active poetry, to an “on its feet” poetry, in his own words. Starting in 1955 he was one of the founders of Sound Poetry, and in 1962 of Action Poetry. As early as 1959 he used a tape recorder as an additional means for writing and retransmitting, opening his research to new experimental fields. While remaining concerned with semantics, Bernard Heidseick became increasingly independent from the constraints of language. He explored all its formal aspects, either by spatializing the text in his written scores, or by the presence of his body in space. He gave sound a formal dimension, notably through an exceptional diction based as much on breathing as on articulating perfectly or on constantly renewing the inflections of his voice. As the years went by he reinvented his writing in order to render our daily life more accurately. Our social, political or economical universe, through its main events, as well as through its extreme ordinariness. In 1955 he developed his first Score-Poems. He then worked continuously on series, with the 13 Biopsies between 1966 and 1969. From 1969 to 1980, he created the 29 Passe-Partout (Catch-alls). From 1978 to 1986, he wrote Derviche/Le Robert (Dervish/Le Robert) composed of 26 sound poems. Then, beginning in 1988, Respirations et brèves rencontres ( Respiration and Brief Encounters) (60 poems created from the archives of recordings of artists' breathing). He organised the first international festival of sound poetry in 1976 and the event Rencontres Internationales 1980 de poésie sonore which took place in Rennes, in Le Havre and at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
As New.
2001, French
Softcover (w. audio CD + print insert), 64 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Ed. of 500,
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Le Corridor Bleu / Nîmes
$50.00 - In stock -
Limited edition book and CD presentation of Bernard Heidsieck's Poème-Partition "F" with print insert. Written 1957 and recorded 1960, this publication was issued in an edition of 500 in 2001 by Le Corridor Bleu, Nîmes. Includes an additional introduction by Heidsieck (1928—2014) himself, one of the greatest French poets of the 20th century, and an originator of the sound poetry movement.
Bernard Heidseick (1928-2014) was a French sound poet, associated with various movements throughout a long career: including Beat, Fluxus, and minimalism. Heidseick decided in the mid-1950s to break off from written poetry, and to bring it outside of books. He opposed passive poetry to active poetry, to an “on its feet” poetry, in his own words. Starting in 1955 he was one of the founders of Sound Poetry, and in 1962 of Action Poetry. As early as 1959 he used a tape recorder as an additional means for writing and retransmitting, opening his research to new experimental fields. While remaining concerned with semantics, Bernard Heidseick became increasingly independent from the constraints of language. He explored all its formal aspects, either by spatializing the text in his written scores, or by the presence of his body in space. He gave sound a formal dimension, notably through an exceptional diction based as much on breathing as on articulating perfectly or on constantly renewing the inflections of his voice. As the years went by he reinvented his writing in order to render our daily life more accurately. Our social, political or economical universe, through its main events, as well as through its extreme ordinariness. In 1955 he developed his first Score-Poems. He then worked continuously on series, with the 13 Biopsies between 1966 and 1969. From 1969 to 1980, he created the 29 Passe-Partout (Catch-alls). From 1978 to 1986, he wrote Derviche/Le Robert (Dervish/Le Robert) composed of 26 sound poems. Then, beginning in 1988, Respirations et brèves rencontres ( Respiration and Brief Encounters) (60 poems created from the archives of recordings of artists' breathing). He organised the first international festival of sound poetry in 1976 and the event Rencontres Internationales 1980 de poésie sonore which took place in Rennes, in Le Havre and at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
As New with tiny little coffee drip mark to cover.
2026, English
Softcover, 76 pages, 18.5 x 11.4 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$34.00 - Out of stock
Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop
"I am supposed to tell you some of the words I heard deep down in the sea where there is much silence and so much happens."
So begins the first text in this indispensable volume, which includes: "Edgar Jene and the Dream about the Dream," "Backlight," "The Meridian," and the piece which Celan himself deemed his most important, "Conversation in the Mountains."
George Steiner wrote in The New Yorker that Celan's prose was "transforming the landscape of poetic theory and of the philosophy of language." This collection of essays, speeches, letters, as well as notes on Alexander Blok and Osip Mandelstam is a great gift to readers and to anyone who wishes to understand the twentieth century.
As the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote, "Paul Celan's poems reach us, but we miss them." Perhaps through these rare prose texts we may find the key to what we missed.
2022, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by
First To Knock / Michigan
$40.00 - In stock -
“Have I understood the philosophy of The Solar Circus correctly? One must savor life in a few fevered grasps, as one might squeeze all of the juice and all of the beauty from a fruit, before casting aside its useless skin.” — Albert Mockel
“Henceforth, The Solar Circus shall be one of the two or three novels that I savor during the quiet hours of dream and melancholy, when the soul surrenders to the painful nostalgia of infinity and the beyond.” — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
The Solar Circus is the great forgotten masterpiece of French Symbolist literature. Written by Gustave Kahn—the man whom Stéphane Mallarmé and Jules Laforgue credited as inventing free verse poetry—the novel drips in decadent images of pastoral vistas, exotic gemstones, merfolk, and a phantasmagoric menagerie. Inverting day for night and reality for a dazzling dream, The Solar Circus tells the story of a solipsistic, isolated Bavarian count who falls in love with the star of a traveling circus. Their relationship, in both love and jealousy, dramatizes that great tension between the inner life of contemplation and the dynamic beauty of the external world. And as they set out from the count’s castle, the couple examines this duality while encountering a world in transformation: peasants in rebellion, the bright lights of London’s Orpheum theater, and even an ether-swilling Jack the Ripper who analyzes humanity through a fog of opium.
Best known as a poet and member of the Symbolist movement, The Solar Circus showcases Kahn’s talents as a narrative writer and bears the hallmarks of many of the poetic endeavors unique to late 19th century. Indeed, in the same way that the novel’s circus coaxes the count out of oppressive isolation, so too does Kahn’s prose lead the reader in new and fantastic directions. The Solar Circus is a text unlike any other, one that vacillates effortlessly between imagistic poetry and obliquely philosophical prose, prefiguring those seminal 20th century works of Modernist literature which would appear more than two decades later.
This publication marks not only the novel’s first appearance in English but also its first independent reissue since it was published in 1898. The Solar Circus has been newly translated by Sam Kunkel, a scholar of 19th century Symbolist literature. Kunkel has also provided translations for the First To Knock collection Echoes of a Natural World—Tales of the Strange & Estranged (2020) as well as A Beam of Sunlight in the Deep Forest—Mystical Prose Works by Édouard Schuré (2021).
“It is a tale that is lucid, transparent, crystalline, but also enveloped in, and thick with, legend and dream. Is it an adventure or a daydream?... [A] blend of novel and legend, of poetry and prose: this transient world, dotted with figures who are painted with disarming clarity and soft style give to The Solar Circus its enigmatic and persistent charm. This novel is a true dream, drained and exhausted by the vigor of logic and thought.” — Léon Blum
“[With The Solar Circus,] Kahn is perhaps the only Symbolist to have successfully composed a novel free from the Naturalist mindset still perceptible in Against Nature.” — Sophie Basch, professor of 19th century French literature at the Sorbonne
2024, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
Published by
Ↄalamari / Earth
$55.00 - In stock -
2024 redux edition of the long out-of-print 2002 cyberpunk cult classic
"A Finnegans Wake for the postdigital millennium, Kenji Siratori’s Blood Electric is probably the foundational text of the language-horror sub-genre: an evasive, esoteric and ultraexperimental writing style produced by the convergence of poetics and methods borrowed from avantgarde literature, electronic/noise music, synthetic abstract image generation, and severe—yet delicate—syntactic deconstruction. Siratori’s unique writing technique results in a hardcore-cyberpunk material account of a bio-techno singularity network in which flesh-code wetware and silicon-thriving software infold together into wave-multitudes of text-organisms. While most contemporary authors exploring the possibility of the blending of humans and machines focus on the extrapolation of logical and transcendental interactions (as in classical cyberpunk, from which Blood Electric initiates a radical breakup), Siratori’s language emanates directly from the contingent, rhizomatic, non-teleological, reciprocal disruption of several unstable and immanent modes of embodied (in)existence. In Blood Electric the text becomes an incantation demanding full abandonment, generating its own unpredictable rhythms as it enraptures you beyond reading, beyond yourself, like when participating in a rave."—Germán Sierra
"… Blood Electric is unreadable in anything other than short, migraine-inducing bursts."—The Guardian
"Following the publication of Kenji Siratori's Blood Electric, the Japanese cyberpunk writer perhaps pioneered a movement among all non-English speaking writers whose languages are radically dissociated from the dominant Latin-Anglo-Franco-German linguistic germ-line on the one hand, and are, on the other, enthusiastically seeking to contribute to the diversification of the English language whose centrality has already been sabotaged in the wake of emerging cyber-societies."—Reza Negarestani, in 3:AM Magazine
"Kenji is making rather more sense than usual. Perhaps the lad is finally coming into his own as the literary avatar of our times."—Bruce Sterling
"Kenji is a madman for sure, but if you scan his hallucinatory textual mashups in just the right frame of mind, they begin to make sense. And that's the scary part."—Douglas Rushkoff
"Contemporary Japan is exploding in slow-motion, and Kenji Siratori arranges the blood- and semen-encrusted deris with the finesse of a berserk Issey Miyake. Rendering English-language cyberpunk instantly redundant with his relenteless, murderous prose-drive, Siratori transmits his authentic, category-A hallucinogenic product direct to this reader’s cerebellum. A virulently warped amalgam of Tetsuo and cut-up era William Burroughs."—Stephen Barber (author of Tokyo Vertigo)
"Blood Electric is the black reverb of soft machine seppuku, a molten unspooling of sheet metal entrails and crucified memory banks into the howling void of violence. It is a cyborg crash nightmare of the new flesh, a final dispatch from mutant Hell where the embryo hunts in secret."—Jack Hunter (author of Eros in Hell)
"Siratori’s hypermodern project articulates the nonarticulation that currently dominates the substratum of much current discourse. Without the intense atomization of the individual, Siratori’s work does not resound. Yet, if we take pause, Siratori’s work resonates at a fever pitch, blaring at the limitless informational realm of our minds as it bursts the parameters of the skull. As a kind of accelerationist aesthetic, Siratori critiques technology by pushing it beyond its sensible potentiality; he cultivates alien cognitions where alternatives thrive, where semantic derangement is revolt, where epistemology uncoils. Ultimately, he uncompromisingly forces us to pause on the chaos of the glitch, to claim the instance where embodying the unquantifiable amounts to insurgency."—Andrew C. Wenaus, Author of The Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature
2002, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 2002 edition of Kenji Siratori's cyberpunk cult classic, published by Creation Books, London.
A fatal collusion of drag embryos and DNA angels in Cadaver City ignites the circuitry of the ADAM Doll... dogs of zero waging gene war in Placenta World, chaos unleashed by the digital vampires of Sato Corporation, nano-junk virus pandemic. On the pink ash planet EVOL, ADAM and ANTI-ADAM clash in terminal zodiac burn... enter robo-succubus Super Cherry 666, hunting for the grotesque nova skulls of Sato Corporation napalm torture victims.
Vividly evoking the coming to consciousness of an artificial intelligence Blood Electric is a devastating loop of language from the Japanese avant-garde which breaks with all existing writing traditions. With unparalleled stylistic terrorism fully embracing the image mayhem of the internet/multimedia/digital age, Kenji Siratori unleashes his first literary Sarin attack.
"Contemporary Japan is exploding in slow-motion, and Kenji Siratori arranges the blood- and semen-encrusted debris with the finesse of a berserk Issey Miyake. Rendering English-language cyberpunk instantly redundant with his relentless, murderous prose-drive, Siratori transmits his authentic, category-A hallucinogenic product direct to his reader's cerebellum. A virulently warped amalgam of Tetsuo and cut-up era William Burroughs."–Stephen Barber (author, Tokyo Vertigo)
"Blood Electric is the black reverb of soft machine seppuku, a molten unspooling of sheet metal entrails and crucified memory banks into the howling void of violence. It is a cyborg crash nightmare of the new flesh, a final dispatch from mutant Hell where the embryo hunts in secret."–Jack Hunter (author, Eros In Hell)
"A Finnegans Wake for the postdigital millennium, Kenji Siratori’s Blood Electric is probably the foundational text of the language-horror sub-genre: an evasive, esoteric and ultraexperimental writing style produced by the convergence of poetics and methods borrowed from avantgarde literature, electronic/noise music, synthetic abstract image generation, and severe—yet delicate—syntactic deconstruction. Siratori’s unique writing technique results in a hardcore-cyberpunk material account of a bio-techno singularity network in which flesh-code wetware and silicon-thriving software infold together into wave-multitudes of text-organisms. While most contemporary authors exploring the possibility of the blending of humans and machines focus on the extrapolation of logical and transcendental interactions (as in classical cyberpunk, from which Blood Electric initiates a radical breakup), Siratori’s language emanates directly from the contingent, rhizomatic, non-teleological, reciprocal disruption of several unstable and immanent modes of embodied (in)existence. In Blood Electric the text becomes an incantation demanding full abandonment, generating its own unpredictable rhythms as it enraptures you beyond reading, beyond yourself, like when participating in a rave."—Germán Sierra
"… Blood Electric is unreadable in anything other than short, migraine-inducing bursts."—The Guardian
"Following the publication of Kenji Siratori's Blood Electric, the Japanese cyberpunk writer perhaps pioneered a movement among all non-English speaking writers whose languages are radically dissociated from the dominant Latin-Anglo-Franco-German linguistic germ-line on the one hand, and are, on the other, enthusiastically seeking to contribute to the diversification of the English language whose centrality has already been sabotaged in the wake of emerging cyber-societies."—Reza Negarestani, in 3:AM Magazine
"Kenji is making rather more sense than usual. Perhaps the lad is finally coming into his own as the literary avatar of our times."—Bruce Sterling
"Kenji is a madman for sure, but if you scan his hallucinatory textual mashups in just the right frame of mind, they begin to make sense. And that's the scary part."—Douglas Rushkoff
"Siratori’s hypermodern project articulates the nonarticulation that currently dominates the substratum of much current discourse. Without the intense atomization of the individual, Siratori’s work does not resound. Yet, if we take pause, Siratori’s work resonates at a fever pitch, blaring at the limitless informational realm of our minds as it bursts the parameters of the skull. As a kind of accelerationist aesthetic, Siratori critiques technology by pushing it beyond its sensible potentiality; he cultivates alien cognitions where alternatives thrive, where semantic derangement is revolt, where epistemology uncoils. Ultimately, he uncompromisingly forces us to pause on the chaos of the glitch, to claim the instance where embodying the unquantifiable amounts to insurgency."—Andrew C. Wenaus, Author of The Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature
Very Good copy. Light edge wear to boards, some foxing to block edges. No spine creases, overall a great copy.
1998, English
Softcover, 188 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - In stock -
Very rare first 1999 Creation Books paperback edition of Cows, the cult classic first book by British–born, Australian–based novelist Matthew Stokoe. One of the most polarizing books of transgressive fiction from the end of the end of the 20th century.
"...enormously disturbing and transcendently clever, Cows, a literally eviscerating portrait of life among the British lower classes, is revered internationally as one of the most daring English-language novels of the past few decades."–Dennis Cooper
"Stokoe's vision of Hell is a carnivore's nightmare. A powerful and all-too-possibly prophetic work."–Kathy Acker
"Underground literary shock-rocker Stokoe slaps his readers in the face with this bloody, truly disgusting diatribe against normalcy. On the bright side, there’s absolutely no pretense about what the book is aiming for..."–Kirkus Review
"If we had to name the most bloody, unpleasant piece of fiction we've read, COWS would be near the top of the list. That's a compliment."–Bizarre
"Forget Bret Easton Ellis, Poppy Z Brite, and Dennis Cooper. That's kid's stuff. If you want something truly repellent, try this."– Gay Times
"The word is out that COWS is every bit as dark and deranged as lain Banks' classic 'The Wasp Factory. It's not: it's even more so. Possibly the most visceral novel ever written."–Billy Chainsaw, Kerrang!
Very Good copy with some sun discolouration to spine edge of cover boards.
2003, English
Softcover, 310 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 2003 English Edition of Antonin Artaud’s evil simulacrum of The Monk, the only work of sustained fiction by the infamous literary provocateur. Taking Matthew Gregory Lewis's gothic novel of 1794 as the raw material for an astonishing exploration of the far edges of death, sexuality, terror, language and the body, Artaud conducted an aberrant evisceration of the original novel, discarding entire chapters, recreating others and stamping his own distinctive identity on the work in his avowed aim to accentuate the story's violence and atrocity to the maximal degree.
In Artaud's The Monk, sexual obsession is irrepressibly crushed together with murder, cruelty and blasphemy. The result is a searing narrative of massacred nuns, raped virgins and satanic retribution which will leave the reader simultaneously ensnared, gratified and abused.
Best known for his Theatre of Cruelty manifestoes, experimental film projects and corporeal poetry, Artaud created The Monk in France in 1930, to the acclaim of such figures as Jean Cocteau, at a time when Artaud's explicit purpose in his work was to cancel out all existing social and moral systems. This is the first time ever that the book has appeared in English. With an introduction by Stephen Barber.
"A great masterpiece of fantastic literature... marvels burst out at the reader, burning with a thousand fires... the spirit of the supernatural inflames this book to the very core"—André Breton
Very Good—NF copy.
2003, English
Softcover, 310 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 2003 English Edition of Artaud's Heliogabalus, published by Creation Books.
Translated into English for the first time, this novelized biography of the 3rd-century Roman Emperor Heliogabalus is simultaneously Artaud’s most accessible and his most extreme book. Written in 1933, at the time when Artaud was preparing to stage his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, Heliogabalus is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence. Reflecting its author’s preoccupations with the occult, magic, Satan, and a range of esoteric religions, this account of Heliogabalus’ reign invents incidents in the Emperor’s life in order to make the print of the author’s own passionate denunciations of modern existence.
Heliogabalus is Artaud’s greatest and most revolutionary masterpiece: an incendiary work that reveals both the divine cruelty of the Roman Emperor and that of Artaud himself.–Stephen Barber
Very Good copy.
2003, English
Softcover, 164 pages, 14 x 21.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
Rare 2003 English edition of Eden, Eden, Eden - Pierre Guyotat's masterpiece of atrocity and obscenity.
The most subversive French novelist of the later 20th century, Pierre Guyotat (b. 1940) was the uncompromising heir of De Sade, Artaud, Rimbaud and Genet. Published in France in 1970 by Gallimard, with a preface by Michel Leiris, Roland Barthes and Philippe Sollers, Eden, Eden, Eden was greeted by both furore and acclaim. The book was immediately banned by the French government as pornographic. A campaign of international support for the book was signed by the like of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Boulez, Joseph Beuys, Pierre Dac, Jean Genet, Simone de Beauvoir, Joseph Kessel, Maurice Blanchot, Max Ernst, Italo Calvino, Jacques Monod, and Nathalie Sarraute. François Mitterrand and Georges Pompidou tried to get the ban lifted but failed until 11 years later when a newly elected President Mitterrand personally intervened to lift the ban in 1981.
Today Eden, Eden, Eden is recognised as one of the major works of the last century. In literally a single sentence, a desert-like, polluted, apocalyptic landscape of unending civil war unfolds without any morality (and therefore also without evil). This delirious, lacerating novel of startling innovation brings scenes of brutal carnage into intimate collision with relentless acts of prostitutional sex and humiliation.
'a new landmark and starting-point for new writing'—Roland Barthes
'I have never read anything like it in any stream of literature'—Michel Foucault
Good–Very Good copy. Some light general wear, board wear and some scratching to the middle of the back cover. Sample images only.