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.
2017, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 13.6 x 20.8 cm
Published by
Grove Press / New York
$32.00 - In stock -
Anniversary edition with introduction by Chris Kraus.
A masterpiece of surrealist fiction, steeped in controversy upon its first publication in 1984, Blood and Guts in High School is the book that established Kathy Acker as the preeminent voice of post-punk feminism. With 2017 marking the 70th anniversary of her birth, as well as the 10th year since her death this transgressive work of philosophical, political, and sexual insight--with a new introduction by Chris Kraus--continues to become more relevant than ever before. In the Mexican city of Merida, ten-year-old Janey lives with Johnny--her "boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father"--until he leaves her for another woman. Bereft, Janey travels to New York City, plunging into an underworld of gangs and prostitution. After escaping imprisonment, she flees to Tangiers where she meets Jean Genet, and they begin a torrid affair that will lead Janey to her demise. Fantastical, sensual, and fearlessly radical, this hallucinatory collage is both a comic and tragic portrait of erotic awakening.
Kathy Acker (1948 – 1997) was an influential postmodernist writer and performance artist, whose many books include Blood and Guts in High School; Don Quixote; Literal Madness; Empire of the Senseless; In Memoriam to Identity; My Mother: Demonology; Pussy, King of the Pirates; Portrait of an Eye; and Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective.
2002, English
Softcover, 335 pages, 14 x 21 cm
Published by
Grove Press / New York
$36.00 - In stock -
Kathy Acker pushed literary boundaries with a vigour and creative fire that made her one of America's preeminent experimental writers and her books cult classics. Now Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper have distilled the incredible variety of Acker's body of work into a single volume that reads like a communique from the front lines of late-twentieth-century America. Acker was a literary pirate whose prodigious output drew promiscuously from popular culture, the classics of Western civilization, current events, and the raw material of her own life. Her vision questions everything we take for granted -- the authority of parents, government, and the law; sexuality and the policing of desire -- and puts in its place a universe of polymorphous perversity and shameless, playful freakery. Spanning Acker's '70s punk interventions through more than a dozen major novels, Essential Acker is an indispensable overview of the work of this distinctive American writer and a reminder of her challenge to and influence on writers of the future.
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
2004, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
Published by
iUniverse / US
$32.00 - In stock -
EXTREME BIO-CYBERPUNK HORROR>>>insanity medium of the human body pill cruel emulator that was sucked to the emotional replicant of super-genomewarable abolition world-codemaniacs that was biocaptured a chemical=anthropoid acid of the soul/gram made of retro-ADAM is accelerated the virus:: clone-dive a trash sensor drug embryo rave on the DNA=channel of the cadaver feti=streaming_body encoder that was send back out to the acidHUMANIX infection archive genomics strategy circuit technojunkies' era respiration-byte nerve cells of the hyperreal HIV=scanner forms to the brain universe that was processed the data=mutant of her ultra=machinary tragedy-ROM creature system murder-gimmick of the cadaver city Blog.... I compress the insanity medium of the human body pill cruel emulator to the brain universe of the murder-protocol emotional replicant performance technojunkies' DNA=channel hacking the soul/gram made of retro-ADAM acidHUMANIX infection**the genomics strategy circuit of the abolition world-codemaniacs nerve cells that accelerates the virus of the artificial sun to the hunting for the grotesque WEB=joint end of the cadaver feti=streaming_body encoder that clone-dives a chemical=anthropoid mass of flesh-module vital to the era respiration-byte sending program murder game of her digital=vamp cold-blooded disease animals different of a trash sensor drug embryo-hyperreal HIV=scanners that were controlled plug-in....
1990, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 150 pages, 24 x 16 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$25.00 - In stock -
1990 English hardcover edition of "In Praise of the Stepmother', an erotic novel by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, about a sexually open couple whose fantasies lead them to the edge of morality. The book is dedicated to Spanish film director Luis García Berlanga. Mario Vargas Llosa, the internationally acclaimed author of The Storyteller, adds his own finely-tuned poetic polish to this erotic exploration of carnality in one family. He turns the proverbial romantic triangle on its ear to create this New York Times bestselling erotic novel. Illustrated in colour with six full-colour pages of classical artworks. Cover artwork by Andrzej Klimowski.
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa (b. 1936), more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, is a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist and former politician. Vargas Llosa is one of the Spanish language and Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." Many of Vargas Llosa's works are influenced by the writer's perception of Peruvian society and his own experiences as a native Peruvian. Increasingly, he has expanded his range, and tackled themes that arise from other parts of the world. In his essays, Vargas Llosa has made many criticisms of nationalism in different parts of the world.
VG in G dust jacket with wear to extremities.
1971, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 122 pages
Numbered Ed. of 700,
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Piscean Press / London
$55.00 - Out of stock
Lovely facsimile hardcover edition of Bibliotheca Arcana, published in 1971 in limited (hand-numbered) edition of 700 copies, originally published in 1885 by George Redway, London. This bibliography lists 630 titles, primarily of classic English and French erotica of the 18th and 19th centuries, with brief descriptions and notes, making it an important early resource heavily referenced throughout the history of esoteric antiquarian book-selling.
Very Good copy in Very Good dust jacket. Hand-numbered.
1999, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 23.2 x 16.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$40.00 - In stock -
Tyrus Miller breaks new ground in this study of early twentieth-century literary and artistic culture. Whereas modernism studies have generally concentrated on the vital early phases of the modernist revolt, Miller focuses on the turbulent later years of the 1920s and 1930s, tracking the dissolution of modernism in the interwar years.
In the post-World War I reconstruction and the worldwide crisis that followed, Miller argues, new technological media and the social forces of mass politics opened fault lines in individual and collective experience, undermining the cultural bases of the modernist movement. He shows how late modernists attempted to discover ways of occupying this new and often dangerous cultural space. In doing so they laid bare the ruin of the modernist aesthetic at the same time as they transcended its limits.
In his wide-ranging theoretical and historical discussion, Miller relates developments in literary culture to tendencies in the visual arts, cultural and political criticism, mass culture, and social history. He excavates Wyndham Lewis's hidden borrowings from Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer; situates Djuna Barnes between the imagery of haute couture and the intellectualism of Duchamp; uncovers Beckett's affinities with Giacometti's surrealist sculptures and the Bolshevik clowns Bim-Bom; and considers Mina Loy as both visionary writer and designer of decorative lampshades. Miller's lively and engaging readings of culture in this turbulent period reveal its surprising anticipation of our own postmodernity.
VG copy, first ed.
1992, English
Softcover, 302 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Cornell University Press / New York
$100.00 - In stock -
First 1992 edition.
"This brilliant and substantial study will be required reading for critics of Gothic literature and for feminist theorists. Unlike other psychoanalytic readers who localize the 'horror' in Gothic fiction by interpreting it as an effect of repressed anxiety about motherhood or genital sexuality, Massé regards the horror as systemic and actual, and for this reason her study is far more radical, comprehensive, and satisfying. In the Name of Love is challenging and engaging reading that opens out onto new critical territory all the way through." -Claudia L. Johnson, Marquette University
"Massé handles an important topic in a thorough, clear, and interesting fashion. I especially liked the book's combination of theoretical analysis and original readings of texts. In the Name of Love will make a significant contribution in all the areas it treats-feminism, psychoanalysis, and literature."-Shirley Nelson Garner, Department of English, University of Minnesota
The Gothic woman is taught to believe that self-abnegation will be rewarded by love; her experience clearly proves otherwise. Although Gothic fiction has characteristically been written by and for women, this sophisticated and venturesome book is one of the first to examine the contradictions of the Gothic pact in the light of contemporary feminist and psychoanalytic theory. Michelle A. Massé looks at selected British and American novels from the eighteenth century to the present, focusing on the theme of masochism as an element of women's identity. Approaching the Gothic novel by way of psychoanalysis, she also identifies a Gothic plot within psychoanalytic theory itself.
In fiction that ranges from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, and Daphne de Maurier's Rebecca to Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills, Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle, and Pauline Réage's Story of O, Massé explores the narrative of women being trained to embrace their own subordination. She begins by asserting that the stylistic and structural repetitions of the Gothic constitute both symptoms of this trauma and attempts to work it through. Massé delineates the pattern of women's ego formation in the courtship plot and discusses what she calls "marital Gothic." She then addresses the complicated issues raised by the classic beating fantasy in which the young girl must choose to accept the role of victim, aggressor, or spectator. In her conclusion, she con- siders modes of resistance to this triangular drama and to the related fantasy of romance.
In the Name of Love will be essential reading for scholars and students in the fields of gender studies, critical, psycho-analytic, and novel theory, as well as Victorian and contemporary fiction.
MICHELLE A. MASSÉ is Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. A graduate of Anna Maria College, she received her Ph.D. degree from Brown University.
Cover illustration: King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, by Edward Burne-Jones. Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York.
Good copy, light spine tanning/creasing, crease to front cover corner, light wear.
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, 228 pages, 14 x 21 cm
Published by
Seven Stories Press / New York
$45.00 - In stock -
"One of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche." —The Guardian
The novelist, cultural critic, and indie icon serves up sometimes bitchy, always generous, erudite, and joyful assessments from the last thirty-five years of cutting edge film, art, and literature.
Whether he's describing Tracy Emin or Warhol, the films of Barbet Schroeder ("Schroeder is well aware that life is not a narrative; that we impose form on the movements of chance, contingency, and impulse....") or the installations of Barbara Kruger ("Kruger compresses the telling exchanges of lived experience that betray how skewed our lives are..."), Indiana is never just describing. His writing is refreshing, erudite, joyful.
Indiana champions shining examples of literary and artistic merit regardless of whether the individual artist or writer is famous; asserts a standard of care and tradition that has nothing to do with the ivory tower establishment; is unafraid to deliver the coup de grâce when someone needs to say the emperor has no clothes; speaks in the same breath--in the same discerning, insolent, eloquent way--about high art and pop culture. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it's also political, plus it's a riot of fun on the page.
Here is Gary Indiana on Euro Disney resort park in Marne-la-Valée outside of Paris:
John Berger compares the art of Disney to that of Francis Bacon. He says that the same essential horror lurks in both, and that it springs from the viewer's imagining: There is nothing else. Even as a child, I understood how unbearable it would be to be trapped inside a cartoon frame.
Since 1987, Indiana has published novels, nonfiction, plays, short stories -- all with an unmistakable, sardonic voice embedded in the text ..." —Los Angeles Times
2018, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Seven Stories Press / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
“A novel too weird and perverted and frankly minacious to stay in print, too unforgettable not to be reissued.”—Sarah Nicole Prickett, from the introduction
The narrator of Gone Tomorrow is an actor who has been cast in an unlikely art film set in Colombia. But from the moment he arrives at the airport in Bogota, only to witness a policeman beat a beggar half to death for no apparent reason, it becomes clear that this will not be the story of gritty bohemians triumphing against the odds. The director, Paul Grasvenor, seems more interested in manipulating his cast than shooting film. The cult star, Irma Irma, is a vamp too bored and boring to draw blood. And the incomparably beautiful Michael Simard doesn't seem to be putting out. Meanwhile, the film's shady financier appears to be sleeping with his mother, and a serial killer is skulking around the area killing tourists. Everything comes to a head when the carnaval celebration comes to nearby Cali. But once the fiesta comes to an end, all that's left is the memory and the narrator's insistence on telling the tale. "Unlike the majority of pointedly AIDS-era novels," writes Dennis Cooper, "Gone Tomorrow is neither an amoral nostalgia fest nor a thinly veiled wake-up call hyping the religion of sobriety. It's a philosophical work devised by a writer who's both too intelligent to buy into the notion that a successful future requires the compromise of collective decision and too moral to accept bitterness as the consequence of an adventurous life."
“Horribly refreshing, like an ice-cold glass of acid on a sweltering summer day . . . Indiana writes with an art critic’s eye for detail and a poet’s ear for language.” –Philadelphia Inquirer
“A disturbing, vivid, and brutal novel that succeeds in its dizzy mix of genres and influences. Not for the prudish, though.” –Kirkus Reviews
“Amazingly perverse, savagely amusing, unflinchingly serious. It may be in fact be the first really serious work of the imagination to come out of the AIDS catastrophe.” –Michael Herr, author of Dispatches
2018, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 14 x 21.8 cm
Published by
Seven Stories Press / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
Introduction by Tobi Haslett
"This story, if it is one, deserves the closure of a suicide, perhaps even the magisterial finality of what is usually called a novel, but the remnants of that faraway time offer nothing more than a taste of damp ashes, a feeling of indeterminacy, and the obdurate inconclusiveness of passing time." So writes the unnamed narrator of Horse Crazy, looking back on a season of madness and desire. The first novel from the brilliant, protean Gary Indiana, Horse Crazy tells the story of a thirty-five-year-old writer for a New York arts and culture magazine whose life melts into a fever dream when he falls in love with the handsome, charming, possibly heroin-addicted, and almost certainly insane Gregory Burgess. In the derelict brownstones of the Lower East Side in the late eighties, among the coked out restauranteurs and art world impresarios of the supposed "downtown scene," the narrator wanders through the fog of passion. Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic is spreading through the city, and New York friendships sputter to an end. Here is a novel where the only moral is that thwarted passion is the truest passion, where love is a hallucination and the gravest illness is desire.
“Horse Crazy is a sad, insane journey of infatuation and love. Frustrating to the bitter end—where all that is left is truth.” – Tracey Emin
“An archetypical story, expertly told. Fascinating to every man, no matter what his sexual tastes—like the characters in Genet.” – William S. Burroughs
“Sex, hypocrisy, solitude, loss, the punitive affinities that swallow the self—these are Gary Indiana’s themes, jingling through his books like money in Balzac. But rumbling beneath the malice is a melancholy yearning, a mind groping vulnerably for a human link.” – Tobi Haslett, from the introduction
2011, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 14.7 x 22.4 cm
Published by
Graywolf Press / Washington
$38.00 - In stock -
Still later, when I was more in touch with
the world, they told me, "You have a future."
I thought that over. Even if I believed them,
what did my little future, whatever that was,
have to do with the real thing, whatever that is?
—from "Waiting"
In this second daring collection, Coming to That, the centenarian painter and poet Dorothea Tanning illuminates our understanding of creativity, the impulse to make, and the longevity of art. Her unique wit and candor radiate through every poem, every line, and her inquisitive mind is everywhere alive and restless. As she writes in one poem, "If Art would only talk it would, at last, reveal / itself for what it is, what we all burn to know."
"[Coming to That] is playful and unrestrained, each poem containing a spontaneous logic of its own. . . . Tanning's poems take the reader on unexpected journeys that stray far from their beginnings, moving with the momentum of sheer joy and restless artistic energy. Pulsing underneath are larger questions, sometimes almost bittersweet, sometimes daunting." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Tanning's poems are beautifully created, filled with rich rhythms and imagery. . . . Often ironic and often filled with wisdom and humor, a Tanning poem asks readers to believe in her artistic vision. These are poems of beginnings and choices, of marriage and aging, and of creation--poems still filled with wondering." —Library Journal
"Dorothea Tanning, who has had a long and marvelous life as a visual artist, is our most surprising new poet." —Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post Book World
"Dorothea Tanning's verbal wizardry is a constant surprise, an abiding delight." —J. D. McClatchy
2004, English
Softcover, 83 pages, 23 x 16 cm
Published by
Graywolf Press / Minneapolis
$38.00 - In stock -
The extraordinary first poetry collection by the renowned painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning
Finally, on second, in bras. Bras swarming everywhere,
giant pink moths at rest, their empty cups clamoring,
"Fill me."
—from "End of the Day on Second"
Dorothea Tanning is an exceptional visual artist, and now, in her nineties, she has become an exceptional poet. In A Table of Content, we are made to see more clearly the city landscape, the creative impulse, and the worlds of potential disaster and sensual erotics with a vision that survives taste, trend, and time.
"Some would call these poems collages, finery glued into dreamy images. But I prefer to call the whole of them a kaleidoscope-angled feelings and dappled ideas constantly shape-shifting into remarkable new patterns, by turns giddy and grave. And when you put the little device down, you realize you've all along been looking at your own life, grandly reimagined by a master. Dorothea Tanning's verbal wizardry is a constant surprise, an abiding delight, and readers who sit down to A Table of Content can expect to stand up more strangely themselves. She wears her soul on her sleeve, and it shines, it shines!"—J. D. McClatchy
Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) lived an extraordinary life as an artist and writer. She published two books of poetry, A Table of Content and Coming to That; two memoirs, Birthday and Between Lives: An Artist and Her World; and a novel, Chasm. In 2012, she died at the age of 101 at her home in New York City.
2025, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 256 pages, 19 x 12.5 cm
Published by
Mandylion Press / Connecticut
$48.00 - Out of stock
For fans of body horror, Everett pens the freakiest metaphysical thriller you've never heard of
Frances Bethune is desperate to lose weight before her husband's return from India--in just two weeks. On the advice of a bad-breathed spirit, Frances undertakes a slenderizing séance. While she succeeds in her quest for thinness, she is horrified to discover that her discarded weight has taken on a new life of its own. Of this chilling, revolting tale, H.P. Lovecraft raved that Everett "reaches singular heights of spiritual terror."
This new edition from Mandylion Press restores Everett's 1907 masterpiece. It features an original introduction written by Mandylion cofounder Madeline Porsella, as well as a glossary that provides visual, material and affective image footnotes.
Henrietta Dorothy Everett (1851-1923) was born in Kent, England. Between 1896 and 1920, she published 22 books under the pen name Theo Douglas. She was an influential figure in the early days of science fiction and fantasy writing, and was cited in H.P. Lovecraft's extended 1927 essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature."
1986, English
Softcover, 154 pages, 19.5 x13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$35.00 - In stock -
"Before her husband's death, Etsuko had already learnt that jealousy is useless unless it can be controlled.
So when she arrived as a young widow at her late husband's family farm near Osaka, Etsuko resolved to hold her emotions in check, silently tolerating the nocturnal embraces of her father-in-law as she nursed a new, secret passion. Saburo was only a simple farm hand, but she knew that her feelings for this beautiful, simple youth were the only real feelings she had. All that mattered was that she should convey their reality to him – and be answered. Jealousy, love, passion, hatred – she could control them all as long as there was hope...
But as that hope stretched thinner and thinner, Etsuko's frustrated desire gathered a momentum that could only be checked by an unspeakable act of violence."
YUKIO MISHIMA, one of the most spectacularly gifted writers in modern Japan, was born into a samurai family in 1925. Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai ("Shield Society"), an unarmed civilian militia. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. His works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Mishima's work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death", according to author Andrew Rankin. In November 1970 he and his Tatenokai forced their way into a Self-Defense Force headquarters in Tokyo, where Mishima, after reading out a proclamation, committed ritual suicide with a young follower in the commanding officer's room. On the morning of his death, the last volume of Mishima's tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility (The Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel) was delivered to his publisher.
Very Good copy.
1994, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Marion Boyars / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
Cortázar's stories are like small time-pieces, where each jewelled and polished part moves relentlessly on its own particular path, while wielding a crucial and perpetual influence on the mechanism as a whole. Situations double, slip by: moments jerk forward and retract, reflect and refract; an island at noon from an aeroplane an aeroplane at noon from an island; the living deceiving the dying and themselves about death; death by fire in an ancient Roman arena and in a modern city apartment. It is a world that is constantly shifting. upsetting our balance and our peace of mind. It is a world, writes one critic, that is like 'a Chirico landscape, outside of all time, in which mysterious thread-ends from the realm of the sub-conscious provoke responses of fascination and terror in the primordial depths of our psyches.'
'He is a man who has married surrealism to the kind of fiction we associate with Poe and Stevenson, who has persistently and brilliantly rewritten "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" in a manner which has nothing to do with psychology and everything to do with mystery. He is the apostle of the lives we have chosen not to live... Cortázar keeps our ghosts alive, and we need him.'—New York Times Book Review
'It is at its finest when characters see themselves only as flicked back and forth by the force of self-generated images by the echoes of vampirism, basilisks, resemblances of face and sound, which recur in differing forms in Vienna, Paris and London.'—New Statesman
Julio Cortázar, an Argentinian, was born in Brussels in 1914 and lived and worked in Paris from 1952 until his death in 1984. He first captivated the English-speaking world through Antonioni's film Blow-Up. Although he was best known as a novelist and short story writer, he was also a poet, a translator and an enthusiastic amateur musician.
Good copy with some marking to block edge and light wear to covers
2017, English
Softcover, 56 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$26.00 - Out of stock
District describes, in ten vignettes, the sad, sordid and sinister aspects of a section of an unnamed French city, and the manners in which the ghostlike human entities that live and wither within it are molded, moved and absorbed by its spaces. A noisy metro station, old tenements, buildings going up, along with the fixtures of French communal life: the open-air market, the public garden; the little shops and bars, the lively town square--the ugly and mundane, the coarse and unmentionable sit side by side with the occasionally burgeoning bit of beauty. With a sense of voyeuristic tension and queasy complicity, the reader is taken on an outcast's tour of city life—from construction site to metro, from bar to brothel—an analysis of communal living in the conditional tense from the perspective of the absolute exile. One of Duvert's last books, it is also one of his shortest: an unexpected return to the roving, fractured eye of the Nouveau Roman that had informed his earliest work.
Translated by S. C. Delaney and Agnès Potier, with an introduction, by S. C. Delaney.
Tony Duvert (1945–2008) earned a reputation as the “enfant terrible” of the generation of French authors known for defining the postwar Nouveau Roman. Expelled from school at the age of 12 for homosexuality (and then put through a psychoanalytic “cure” for his condition), Duvert declared war on family life and societal norms through a controversial series of novels and essays (whose frequent controversial depictions of child sexuality and pedophilia often lead his publisher to sell his works by subscription only). He won the Prix Medicis in 1973 for his novel Strange Landscape. His reputation faded in the 1980s, however, and he withdrew from society. He died in isolation in July 2008 in the commune of Thoré-la-Rochette in central France.
2017, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$26.00 - Out of stock
Odd Jobs by Tony Duvert is a series of 23 satirically scabrous short texts that introduce the reader to an imaginary French suburb via the strange, grotesque small-town occupations that defined a once reliable, now presumably vanished way of life. A catalogue of job descriptions that range from the disgusting functions of “The Snot-Remover” and “The Wiper” to the shockingly cruel dramas enacted by “The Skinner” and “The Snowman". Through these narratives somewhere between parody and prose poem, Duvert assaults parenthood, priesthood and neighbourhood in this mock handbook to suburban living; Leave It to Beaver as written by William Burroughs.
Duvert (1945-2008) earned a reputation as the “enfant terrible” of the generation of French authors known for defining the post-war Nouveau Roman. Expelled from school at the age of 12 for homosexuality (and then put through a psychoanalytic “cure” for his condition), Duvert declared war on family life and societal norms through a controversial series of novels and essays (whose frequent controversial depictions of child sexuality and pedophilia often led his publisher to sell his works by subscription only). He won the Prix Medicis in 1973 for his novel Strange Landscape. His reputation faded in the 1980s, however, and he withdrew from society. He died in 2008.
2023, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 21.5 x 13.9 cm
Published by
Dalkey Archive Press / US
$32.00 - In stock -
Originally published in 1968, The Secret Crypt is something of a cult classic in Mexican literature.
Elizondo’s impassioned, breathless prose launches the reader into a labyrinth that is also a hall of mirrors. Here, we find a small group of characters who are part of an underground sect called Urkreis, one of whose aims is to discover the identity of the sect’s founder, known only as “the Imagined.” The identities of narrator, author, and characters blur into one another as the narrative moves between the two worlds of the novel and the author writing the novel—an unclassifiable masterpiece containing initiation rites, sacrificial murder, conspiracy, and delirium.
Salvador Elizondo Alcalde (1932—2006) was a Mexican writer of the 60s Generation of Mexican literature. Regarded as one of the creators of the most influential cult noirè, experimental, intelligent style literature in Latin America, he wrote as a novelist, poet, critic, playwright, and journalist. His most famous novels are Farabeuf (1965) and El hipogeo Secreto (1968). He is also known for El grafógrafo (1972) which is a series of short texts based on linguistic abbreviatory experimentation. Some critics have highlighted his literary works as postmodern literature since it challenges fiction through autofiction, metafiction, metalepsis, and by intertwining possible fictional worlds. His works are associated with writers such as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Julio Cortázar, Juan Rulfo and Georges Bataille.
Translated to English by Joshua Pollock.
2025, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 17.5 x 115 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$30.00 - Out of stock
Translated, with an introduction, by W. C. Bamberger
Emil Szittya’s earliest known work of significance, The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards, was published in German in Budapest in 1916, yet it portrays the hallucinatory Paris the author had chosen for a temporary home at that time. It is a strange literary work as international and untethered as the author himself had been, a symbolic map of Montparnasse and memory that incorporates the visual world of the painters around him. It is a notational, hashish-infused dream diary in which Szittya plays with childhood legends and gender roles as he restlessly sifts through poverty and the underworld, splicing together and severing apart synesthetic sensations and visions.
Prose poems, for lack of a better word, Szittya’s “hashish films” were almost lost to time but can be recognized as sitting alongside the work of such contemporaries as Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire. They nevertheless read like an anomaly, reflecting the author’s lifelong refusal to ally himself with any literary or artistic movement.
Emil Szittya was the most established pseudonym of the Hungarian-born Adolf Schenk (1886–1964). A vagabond in both his writing and his practice, his life intersected with everyone throughout Europe in the years of high modernism, whether he was setting up a publishing house with Blaise Cendrars in Paris, crossing paths with Lenin and Trotsky in Zürich, seeing the birth of Dada in the Cabaret Voltaire with his friends Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, or writing the first books on artists such as Chaïm Soutine and Marc Chagall. Szittya settled in Paris later in life, fighting in the Resistance during the war and working at the café Les Deux Magots before dying of tuberculosis. His many works, in Hungarian, German, and French, include novels, essays, art criticism, and a history of suicide.
2025, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 320 pages, 21.7 x 15.1 cm
Published by
Soft Skull Press / New York
$46.00 - In stock -
From award-winning novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman, Thrilled to Death is a collection of selected stories across the career of America's most audacious writer.
Among the vanguard of American literary writers, Lynne Tillman's work has defied categorization throughout her legendary career-a singular body of work that both redefined and reimagined the short story form entirely.
Curated by the author, Thrilled to Death is the definitive entry point for both established fans and new readers alike. These selected stories collect a bold, playful, and eclectic ensemble of Tillman's Borgesian fictions that span decades and traverse themes of sex, death, memory, and anxiety.
With argumentative wit, Tillman's meditations and reflections on art, politics, and culture are animated by deliciously paradoxical characters who desire and fret in turn, and who are imbued with searing intelligence and dolorous ambivalence. Describing Tillman's writing, Colm Tóibín says — "Her style has both tone and undertone; it attempts to register the impossibility of saying very much, but it insists on the right to say a little. So what is essential is the voice itself, its ways of knowing and unknowing."
1991, English
Softcover, 318 pages, 24.2 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University Press of Colorado / Colorado
$40.00 - In stock -
"This latest book by recognized film and literature scholar Keith Cohen is a testimony to the powerful effect that cinema has played upon literature and other art forms, as well as upon nearly all aspects of life in the twentieth century. Writing in a Film Age features ten essays by some of the foremost writers of our time: Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Manuel Puig, Marguerite Duras, Alexander Kluge, Ronald Sukenick, Jonathan Baumbach, Ben Stoltzfus, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alain Robbe-Grillet.
In his Introduction, Keith Cohen synthesizes these author's attitudes toward popular culture, their ideas about literary and film technique, and their theories about the creative process. Cohen also provides biographical details on each author before his or her essay appears.
The formative years of the writers and filmmakers featured in this brilliant volume covers the period between the Great Wars, when movies were at their peak of popularity and artistic inventiveness. Established internationally as spokespersons for interart experimentation and the avant-garde, these individuals will be regarded by the year 2000 as principal figures of the postmodernist era.
Writing in a Film Age will be of great interest to all scholars interested in the relationship between literature and film.
Keith Cohen is associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His other publications include Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange (Yale University Press) and Natural Settings (Full Court Press)."
VG copy light wear.
1993, English
Softcover, 346 pages 21.5 x 13.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Northwestern University Press / Evanston
$50.00 - In stock -
In her seminal study, first published in 1981, Marjorie Perloff argues that the map of Modernist poetry needs to be redrawn to include a central tradition which cannot properly be situated within the Romantic-Symbolist tradition dominating the early twentieth century. She traces this tradition from its early "French connection" in the poetry of Rimbaud and Apollinaire as well as in Cubist, Dada, and early Surrealist painting; through its various manifestations in the work of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound; to such postmodern "landscapes without depth" as the French/English language constructions of Samuel Beckett, the elusive dreamscapes of John Ashbery, and the performance works of David Antin and John Cage.
Very Good copy of 1993 second edition.