World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1973, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 208 pages, 20 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Jonathan Cape / London
$400.00 - In stock -
Rare elusive first 1973 hardcover edition of the Jonathan Cape edition of Ballard's Vermilion Sands, which is considered the complete collection, adding an additional story, "The Singing Statues", to the original Berkley paperback edition from 1971, and a preface, both only available in the British edition.
Vermilion Sands is a collection of surreal science fiction short stories by Ballard, one of his finest, all set in an imaginary vacation resort called Vermilion Sands which suggests, among other places, a latter-day Palm Springs. Vermillion Sands is a fully automated desert resort designed to fulfil the most exotic whims of the idle rich. But now it languishes in uneasy decay, populated only by forgotten movie stars, solitary impresarios, parasites, and artistic and literary failures, a place where love and lust pall before the stronger pull of evil. It is a lair for malice and hate and envy — and the more cancerous forms of madness; a place where sensitive pigments paint portraits for their masters in a grotesque parody of art; where poets press the buttons of mechanical versifiers; where sculptures grow like funguses, and plants respond to music; where psychosensitive houses are driven mad by their owners' neuroses; where love and affection, and even lust, are effete madrigals played in a minor and discordant key.
From the dark recesses of a superb imagination, J. G. Ballard has conjured up an elegant nightmare of decadence, a portrait of a future Gomorrah where a Nero might play an automated violin.
"Ballard is one of the brightest stars in post-war science fiction."—Kingsley Amis
"Collection of stories first published in magazines between 1956 and 1970 "about a decaying artists' colony in the near future, set against surrealistic desert landscapes. With their motifs of singing flowers and statues, living clothes, cloud-sculpting and psychotropic houses, the tale are not conventionally linked, and have differing characters. All marvelously original, with unforgettable imagery. One of Ballard's most brilliant books ..." —Pringle, The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction, second edition (1995), p. 401.
Good ex-libris copy in Very Good dust jacket (well preserved but for but for small internal price-clipping). Book has some light general aging/light spotting to block edges. Paste-in to first blank page from "South Australian Railways Institute Library", otherwise only very mild marking to blanks.
2024, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 23.5 x 14.61 cm
Published by
Wave / Washington
$38.00 - In stock -
Following their book AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (winner of the PEN and the Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry), CAConrad's Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return shifts its attention from the previous book’s focus on communing with animals who are extinct toward communicating and caring for animals still living among us.
Recalling the historical and symbolic significance of the boomerang as an instrument of return, these poems emerged from a (soma)tic poetry ritual in which the author wrote with animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, resulting in sculptural poems that are uninhibited and mysterious as they emerge organically from the bottom of each page. Guided by the urge “to/desire/the world/as it is/not as/it was,” CAConrad writes from an ecopoetics that is generous and galvanizing, reminding us of how our present attentions collectively shape a future humanity.
2010, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 13.3 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Wave / Washington
$38.00 - In stock -
Winner of the 2009 Gil Ott Book Award, this expanded edition of The Book of Frank features additional "Frank" poems and an essay by Eileen Myles.
Praised by poet Anne Waldman as a "voyeuresque surreal portrait," The Book of Frank is also, in the words of poet-critic Alan Gilbert, a "candid portrayal of human cruelty and its resultant fantasies of escape."
CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021). The Book of Frank is now available in nine different languages. Other titles include While Standing in Line for Death, ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tic for the Future Wilderness, and A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics. They received a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Magazine Book Award. With Robert Dewhurst and Joshua Beckman, they co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners. In 2022 Augusto Cascales made a film of their play The Obituary Show. They recently had their first solo exhibition at Fluent Gallery in Santander, Spain, titled 13 Moons: Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. They teach at Columbia University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam.
2000, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 14 x 21.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
Out-of-print English edition of the erotic masterpiece Philosophy in the Bedroom (La philosophie dans le boudoir), a 1795 book by the Marquis de Sade written in the form of a dramatic dialogue. Though initially considered a work of pornography, the book has come to be considered a socio-political drama and perhaps the most representative of the Marquis de Sade's work and philosophy on religion and morality. Dedicated to "voluptuaries of all ages, of every sex", it tells of a young virgin ruthlessly stripped of virtue and schooled in the ways of sexual perversion and libertine philosophy. This revised adn expanded edition is coupled with The Lusts of the Libertines, a brand new, unexpurgated and explicit translation of the 447 complex, criminal and murderous lusts of the Libertines as documented by de Sade in his accursed atrocity Bible The 120 Days of Sodom, a catalogue of debaucheries, cruelties and perversions as yet unequalled in print.
Taken from the forward by James Havoc: The Marquis de Sade (1740 - 1814) was a self-proclaimed libertine. His doctrine of libertinage as expounded in "Philosophy in the Boudoir" - his masterpiece - now reads like a blueprint for those manifestos drawn up will over a century later by Andre Breton; indeed "Philosophy in the Boudoir" has often been regarded as being amongst the first Surrealist texts - the others also being works by De Sade. In the course of this book - erotic, comical, and terrifyingly bleak in turn - he contrives to heap scorn on Christianity, God, and the Church, religion in general, history, marriage and the nuclear family, morality, all love other than sexual love, faith, hope and charity, parenthood, vaginal sex; i.e. all forms of humanity and virtue. At the same time, he advocates atheism, murder and reflexive crimes, torture, cruelty, abortion, all kind of sexual perversion, incest, adultery, self-abuse, ad infinitum; his sexually violent visions mark him as a precursor of modern psychology.
The modern imagination starts here.
VG copy with light wear.
1999, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 24 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Creation Books / London
The Tears Corporation / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) remains the most inspirational, provocative and challenging figure in world-wide contemporary culture. His trajectory extends from the Surrealist movement, to the Theatre of Cruelty, to the lunatic asylums of France, and finally back to Paris and the most astonishing period of his work.
For the first time, the book gives a full and authoritative account of Artaud's film projects, and his conception of Surrealist cinema. It examines his unique series of drawings of the fragmented human body, begun in the ward of a lunatic asylum and finished in a state of furious liberation. Finally, the book captures Artaud's ultimate experiment with the screaming body in the form of his censored recording To Have Done With The Judgement Of God - an experiment which is unprecedented in the history of art, and which ultimately decimates that history.
The Screaming Body is an essential resource and inspiration for those engaged in creating the definitive culture of our time, in film, art, music and writing.
Good copy, some wear to cover otherwise VG throughout rest.
2025, English
Hardcover, 176 pages, 22.2 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$55.00 - In stock -
DRIVING THROUGH FAMINE ZONES IS NOTHING SHORT OF EUPHORIC.
'There is a young woman writing in London who really doesn't care what you think. Her name is Audrey Szasz. She is easily the wildest writer going. Her prose is direct, fast, witty, hot, horny, and furiously honest. Insofar as I can see, she's the dark horse on the literary scene, a true thoroughbred in the stable of nags. Not for fame, but for influence. Originality. Sheer voice. Nerve.'
Her novels have been described as everything from abject filth to pure 21st century post-Sadeian feminism. Her poetic narratives are both political and personal - violent but triumphant - ghostly yet crystal clear - caustic streams of consciousness and gleeful perversity.
TELEPLASM charts the eerie emergence of a hostile new culture, where psychic liberation is the key.
2022, English
Hardcover, 214 pages, 22.5 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$60.00 - In stock -
A major novel of perversity and pleasure from a richly exciting new literary talent. Apparently orphaned in a foreign land engulfed by civil war, Tamara finds herself in an isolated and notoriously mismanaged home for abandoned children.
Initially unable to comprehend the local language, she attempts to communicate nonverbally, having seemingly lost the faculty of speech. Unaware of her parents’ true whereabouts – or whether in fact they are even alive – Tamara struggles to make herself understood and to survive in this alien environment where chaos reigns and brutality – or sheer indifference – unfortunately appears to be the norm.
A sinister cast of characters duly appears, including the glamorous but corrupt Director, her overbearingly sadistic partner the Doctor, not to mention the Father – a perverse cleric with a penchant for cruelty – amongst other unsavoury and remorseless individuals, all enforcing a strict hierarchy between the adults and the children (and thus the perpetrators and the victims of institutionalised violence).
Meanwhile, a number of different voices or alters jostle for psychic dominance over Tamara’s internal narrative; through various temporal shifts, rotations and leaps in chronological perspective our heroine’s journey – both geographical and psychological – is described in a disintegrating arc of obscure recollections, fragmented diary entries and increasingly obscene erotic fantasies.
Conversely, these kaleidoscopic projections, delirious daydreams and compulsive diatribes gradually accumulate to articulate a traumatised inner topography that mirrors the devasted and desolate external landscape of a perpetual war zone….
2023, English
Hardcover, 386 pages, 22.5 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$60.00 - In stock -
The long-awaited 3rd novel from a truly untamed literary talent.
Exquisitely printed with colour & b&w illustrations. First edition. Limited numbers.
Audrey Szasz’s epic third novel is her most ambitious trip yet. A 400-page psychic assault course journeying through the delirious present and harrowed hellscapes of futures past. This truly encyclopaedic outsider vision of ecstasy and, until now, unimaginable horror will surely warp your pretty little mind forever.
File under: Sex (Deviant). Violence (Frequent). Psychology (Experimental). Literature (Radical). Counter (Illumination).
We can confidently say you will have never read anything remotely like this before.
No spoilers: the complete Zutka Reconstruction Kit.
CAUTION: Adult Themes throughout
2017, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 44 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$30.00 - In stock -
Gabi Losoncy is a young woman from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who makes various decisions with outer consequences based on how she feels, and to the end of expressing how she feels.
Generally working in unlayered, linear audio since her time as a member of Good Area, she expands her practice on a case-by-case basis, making great effort not to do anything unnecessary.
She has released and has relationships with Alien Passengers, c a d u c., Impulsive Habitat, Recital, and Kye, and her book, Second Person, is now available & was recently described as a "self-help book from hell".
2022, English
Softcover, 294 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$55.00 - In stock -
A forensic survey embracing the cinematic delirium of Tobe Hooper. A heady and queer collation of confession, ultraviolence and countless paraphilias. Radical in every way.
2025, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 15.2 x 10.2 cm
Published by
Filthy Loot / Ames
$20.00 - In stock -
“Latex, Texas is a gripping, gorgeous portrait of purgatory. It fucked me up: I swore the words on the page were getting bigger and bigger, like the font had become infected, like the cut-up sentences had gotten sick and swollen. What a ride.” —Derek McCormack (author, Castle Faggot)
I see Houston on the TV It is not New York It is not Chicago It is not Washington
with its high population its surplus child sacrifice further foolish activities the great city stands
2022, English
Softcover, 190 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$52.00 - In stock -
An hallucinatory SF novel painted in overloaded electronic prose and absolute poetic mayhem. Imagine William S. Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade contemplating the end of the world from a flophouse on 42nd Street. A bruising love letter to language and lysergic lycanthropy. AS SF is here.
Seismic shocks throughout the bigger cities of Earth. A plane crash in San Francisco. Sexology as detailed by American nymphomaniacs. Drugs manufactured from Hindu guidelines. Outdoor furniture burning on the lawns of Indianapolis. I take a deep breath. My filthy hand full of numerous ideas. They administer the medical treatments to Madhab. His skin smells burnt ... he is stabbed by unknown substances ... all rubber shuffling upon him. Tropical fruit eaten around campfires. Coyotes constructed from human bones. Carnal worlds involving shampoo and soiled beds. We strangle in the stairwells at night. We strangle in hotel rooms and on patios ... beneath bed sheets or brown paper. We invite the hotel staff to join us. The brutal lunge of a foam head. Soda bubbles as the blood drools. Index finger in the red mist. Dark-haired soldier with an unidentifiable accent. Madhab wears dark glasses and hangs out with big drug users. Madhab thinks that obedience is an adrenaline rush. He likes tugging off relief workers and U.N. peacekeepers in the toilet facilities. When I was fifteen I use to give back massages on East 14th Street. I’d lick the oil smells from Madhab’s underarms. Memories of the cool night air at the open swimming pavilion. The red lacquer corner pillars by the change rooms. Madhab gets me back to the hotel room. White shirt tight against his chest. I burn up. He opens his mouth. Moss and plaque. Dry toothpaste on lip. Dangerous gang members flood tribal areas. SWAT team in Kandahar. The gorgeous mountains of Afghanistan. Toadlike fingers over the strategic footholds. Negative forces infiltrate Madhab’s psychic energy. Machine guns against the dark blue sky. White stabs of lightning. The electrical world. Kidnappings and suicide bombings. Super-computers cancelling gene therapy programs. It is an early morning in Manhattan ...
Illustrated by Steven Purtill.
2025, English
Softcover, 172 pages, 17.8 x 11.4 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$33.00 - In stock -
An unnamed adolescent drifter wanders through an unnamed country at an unspecified point in time in search of warmth and comfort. He finds it at a farm engaged in festivities but is immediately forced to flee the next morning after coveting the mysterious lady of the estate. Now a fugitive, the vagabond encounters and joins with another, a wry middle-aged man tasked with delivering a message sealed in a tube. The two pursue a dreamlike chain of clues and horror in their mission, encountering—as well as perpetrating—crime and cruelty, until the boy’s former aimlessness develops into an unexpected destiny.
An at times unsettling narrative of initiation, the torments of desire, and the death of youth, The Messengers is an oneiric exploration of a realm that embodies the parables of Kafka and the atmosphere of Alain-Fournier.
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud (1947– ) is a French novelist and short-story author whose poetic universe is infused with a dream logic and an exploration of the fantastic. He has been the recipient of the Prix Renaudot, Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle, Prix Giono, Prix Valéry Larbaud, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire.
“He is an original, and though his vision is highly personal, it is also highly attuned to the way the real seeps into the surreal, the way the everyday, given just the right push, can collapse into the extraordinary.”—Brian Evenson
Translated, with an introduction, by Edward Gauvin.
2025, English
Softcover, 144 pages,15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$39.00 - In stock -
A searing disavowal of identity and inheritance, which completes Constace Debré's acclaimed trilogy.
I have a political agenda. I am in favor of the elimination of inheritance, the requirement that ancestors sustain their descendants, I am for the elimination of parental authority, I am for the abolition of marriage, I am in favor of children getting some distance from their parents at as young an age as possible, I am for the abolition of filiation, and for the abolition of the family name, I am against guardianship, minority, I am against patrimony, I am against having a domicile, a nationality … I am for eliminating the family, I am in favor of eliminating childhood as well, if we can.
Name, the third novel in Constance Debré's acclaimed trilogy, is at once a manifesto, an ecstatic poem, and a political pamphlet. By rejecting the notion of given identity, her narrator approaches the heart of the radical emptiness that the earlier books were pursuing.
Newly single, and having recently come out as a lesbian, the narrator of Debré's first two novels embarked on a monastic regime of exercise, sex, and writing. Using the facts of her own life as impersonal “material” for literature, Playboy and Love Me Tender epitomized what Debré (after Thomas Bernhard) has called “antiautobiography.” They introduced French and American readers to her fiercely spare prose, distilled from influences as disparate as Saint Augustine, Albert Camus, and Guillaume Dustan. “Minimalist and at times even desolate,” wrote the New York Review of Books, these works defied “the expectations of personal growth that animate much feminist literature.”
Name is Debré's most intense novel yet. Set partly in the narrator's childhood, it rejects Proustian notions of “regaining” the past. Instead, its narrator seeks a state of profound disownment: “We have to get rid of the idea of origins, once and for all, I'm not holding onto the corpses. … Being free has nothing to do with that clutter, with having suffered or not, being free is the void.” To achieve true freedom, she dares to enter this “void”—that is, dares to accept the pain, loss, and violence of life. Brilliant and searing, Name affirms and extends Debré's radical project.
1989, English
Softcover, 214 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Marion Boyars / London
$55.00 - Out of stock
Scarce 1989 softcover edition of the English edition of Roberte Ce Soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, published by Marion Boyars, London/New York. Together these two novels comprise the most fascinating, obsessive, and erotic works of contemporary French fiction. Like the works of Georges Bataille, and those of the Marquis de Sade before him, Klossowski's fiction explores the connections between the mind and the body through a lens of sexuality. Both of these novels feature Octave, an elderly cleric; his striking young wife Roberte; and their nephew, Antoine in a series of sexual situations. But Klossowski's books are about theology as well, and this merging of the sexual with the religious makes this book one of the most painstakingly baroque and intellectual novels of our time.
Pierre Klossowski (1905, Paris—2001, Paris) was a French writer, translator and artist. He was the eldest son of the artists Erich Klossowski and Baladine Klossowska, and his younger brother was the painter Balthus. As a writer, Pierre Klossowski wrote full length volumes on the Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche, a number of essays on literary and philosophical figures, and five novels. Roberte Ce Soir (Roberte in the Evening) provoked controversy due to its graphic depiction of sexuality. He translated several important texts (by Virgil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, Nietzsche, and Walter Benjamin) into French, worked on films and was also an artist, illustrating many of the scenes from his novels. Klossowski participated in most issues of George Bataille's review, Acéphale, in the late 1930s. His 1969 book, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, greatly influenced French philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard.
Very Good copy, sun discolouration to cover boards and spine.
2006, English
Softcover, 366 pages,
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Snowbooks / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
'History follows a trail of sputtering desire, often calling upon the delusions of lovers to generate the sparks. If it weren't for us, the world would suffer from a dismal lack of stories.'
In this brutally candid memoir, writer, translator and journalist Bruce Benderson recounts his unrequited love for an impoverished Romanian whom he meets while on a journalism assignment in Eastern Europe. Rather than retreat, Benderson absorbs everything he can about Romania, its culture and its history and discovers a mirror in it for his own turmoil: the wild affairs of its last king, Carol II. Free of bitterness, nastiness, or any desire to protect himself, he is sustained throughout by little white codeine pills, a poetic self-awareness, a sense of humor, and an unwavering belief in the perfect romance, even as wild dogs chase him down Romanian streets.
"Bruce Benderson's harrowingly autobiographical The Romanian (Snowbooks) is one of the most devastating and unsparing accounts of amour fou I have ever read, providing at the same time an extraordinary glimpse into Romania's past and present. [...] More than just a memoir, The Romanian is also a fascinating travelogue of a country dense with mystical traces and decay...A grand, if disturbing adventure."—Joy Press, The Village Voice
Good copy, light edge wear, some foxing to block edges.
1991, English
Softcover, 155 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Marion Boyars / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
First 1991 English edition.
Set against the backdrop of Europe's slide into Fascism, Blue of Noon is one of Bataille's most overtly political works, exploring the ambiguity of sex as a subversive force and synthesizing the fetishes of violence, power and death that mesmerized an age. In this classic of twentieth century eroticism, the reader is taken on a dark journey through the psyche of the prewar French intel- ligentsia, torn between identification with the victims of history and the glamour of its victors.
"The writing is superlative... daringly imaginative, intended only for those awake and aware of the possibilities of excess in literature and life. Along with Céline and Breton, Bataille writes as if he were dropping a bomb; in a fore-flash he creates a world of demented funereal sexuality."—Detroit Free Press
"Bataille is one of the most important writers of this century. He broke with traditional narrative to tell us what has never been told before."—Michel Foucault
"Bataille denudes himself, exposes himself, his exhibitionism aims at destroying all literature. He has a holocaust of words. Bataille speaks about man's condition, not his nature. His tone recalls the scornful aggressiveness of the surrealist. Bataille has survived the death of God. In him reality is conflict."—Jean-Paul Sartre
Very Good copy with light wear, light bumping to card covers.
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.
1969, English
Softcover, 206 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Dover / New York
$28.00 - Out of stock
Full, unabridged Dover 1969 English paperback edition of Huysmans' famous "A Rebours" from 1884, with Huysmans' original 1903 preface and introduction by Havelock Ellis.
"Because of his extreme sensitivity to the absurd and grotesque in human affairs, the protagonist of this masterpiece of decadence has estranged himself from society and savors the most bizarre aspects of human existence in his quest for novelty. This landmark novel is filled with weird images and biting wit."
Infamous as the inspiration for the novel which slowly corrupts Oscar Wilde's "Dorian Gray", Joris-Karl Huysmans' A Rebours ("Against The Grain" or "Against Nature") is the original handbook of decadence. A wildly original fin-de-siecle novel, Against Nature contains only one character. Des Esseintes is a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. Against Nature, in the words of the author, exploded 'like a grenade' and has enjoyed a cult following to this day.
Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) is now recognized as one of the most challenging and innovative figures in European literature and an acknowledged principal architect of the fin-de-siecle imagination. He was a career civil servant who wrote ten novels, most notably "A Rebours and La-Bas". Huysmans died in 1907.
Good copy, light wear.
2024, English
Softcover, 228 pages, 19.8 x 12.9 cm
Published by
Muswell Press / UK
$36.00 - Out of stock
The '90s New York cult classic!
A Queer Classic re-published for the first time in 27 years, by the author of The Romanian, winner of the Prix de France. A New York City hustler with a special gift for reeling in customers, Apollo, "a pale skinned mulatto with a mournful mouth" strips at a gay sex theater in Times Square. He is one of the most seductive and disturbing creations in recent American fiction.
Unflinchingly describing the lives of hustlers, pimps, drug-addicts and transsexuals in 1990s Times Square, User speaks with the authentic voice of characters from the edge. This is a world filled with stark, hypnotic eroticism and mined with terrors peculiar to the subterranean city in the hours after midnight.
1991, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 13.2 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Vintage Books / New York
$38.00 - Out of stock
In Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz gives us an important and timely document: a collection of creative essays -- a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous and honest personal testimony to the Fear of Diversity in America. From the author's violent childhood in suburbia to eventual homelessness on the streets and piers of New York City, to recognition as one of the most provocative artists of his generation -- Close to the Knives is his powerful and iconoclastic memoir. Street life, drugs, art and nature, family, AIDS, politics, friendship and acceptance: Wojnarowicz challenges us to examine our lives -- politically, socially, emotionally, and aesthetically.
'Everyone should read Close To The Knives to understand the overall political agenda behind suffering, whether that suffering occurs because of a dysfunctional family, religion, or government. Wojnarowicz explores all of his painful life experiences as a plea for all of us to become more compassionate and caring human beings. This isn't just David's story, it's our story, our nation's story.'
"David Wojnarowicz is brilliantly attuned to American talk and responsive to the moods and innovations of society's truants. He also has the best conscience of any writer I know. This fierce, erotic, haunting, truthful book should be given to every teenager immediately." — Dennis Cooper
David Wojnarowicz authored five books. His artwork is in numerous private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, among other institutions. In addition to his artwork, Wojnarowicz attained national prominence as a writer and advocate for AIDS awareness, and for his stance against censorship. He died from AIDS in 1992.
2025, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 20.98 x 14 cm
Published by
Graywolf Press / Minneapolis
$44.00 - In stock -
A career-spanning collection of inspiring, revelrous essays about art and artists
Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes, and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson’s passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide—from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker—but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression, and perversity; the roles of the critic and of language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making.
Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking, and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson’s own development, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.
“We have a sense, I think, of the false border sequestering art from theory. And so to remark on Maggie Nelson’s facility in mating the two is to say the least about how she does so—which is with a hurtling gusto that nonetheless invites us to pause and think.”—Lauren Michele Jackson, The New Yorker
2025, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
Published by
Graywolf Press / Minneapolis
$38.00 - In stock -
“Thrilling and harrowing, The Rose explores the contours of something essential, diving deep into pain and complexity and describing them in the most factual way. . . . Focused, intense The Rose offers a trail that leads, if not to madness, to something that goes beyond rational sense. It’s a great book.”—Chris Kraus
Fury is very lustful
A body concealing its heart’s desire
Has a certain texture
A tang or an edge if you will
That the openhearted cannot match
And when exactly does the deceitful
Heart open? At climax.
—from “The Hanged Man”
In The Rose, award-winning poet Ariana Reines navigates the intersection of power and surrender.
Drawing on the history of “romance” as the troubadours knew it and the titular flower’s ancient allegories for sexuality and mystery, Reines plunges into feminine archetypes to explore masculine pain: “I have always liked helpless / & terrible men because they break my mind.” In these poems, inherited ideologies of gender performance are replaced with bold vulnerability: paradoxes of power and surrender transmute the speaker’s understanding of suffering, desire, and the soul.
The voice in The Rose is wry and bare, approaching the connection between erotic love and spirituality with humor. Investigating war, maternity, violent sensuality, and the role of language in magical acts, Reines is unafraid to uncover the “secret / & terrible shovelings / Of love,” and the result is a bloody and pulsing, sexy and unabashed bloom.
2024, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 20.4 x 13.7 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$38.00 - In stock -
A cheeky how-to guide, as raunchy as it is heartfelt, from a bright new literary voice.
A bold and vulnerable collection from a new, young voice, How to Fuck Like a Girl is a daring mash-up of pillow book, grimoire, and manifesto by writer Vera Blossom. From hooking up to trans witchcraft, petty crime, capitalism, friendships, divorce, and survival, Blossom brings wit and melancholy, grandeur and smarts, debuting a bright literary voice as raunchy as it is heartfelt. A cheeky how-to guide that earnestly asks if it is possible to fuck oneself into girlhood, How to Fuck Like a Girl is a cult classic in the making.
"How To Fuck Like a Girl is the perfect book! Vera Blossom's stories gave me everything I could possibly want: hot airport sex, gender euphoria, community love, more hot airport sex. On every page, Blossom reminds us what makes life funny and beautiful without sparing readers hard truths about what it takes to survive under late stage capitalism. Tender and big-hearted and aspirationally slutty, you will laugh and tear up and be a better person after reading this."—Edgar Gomez, author of High Risk Homosexual