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, 256 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$39.00 - In stock -
"The president of the republic of dreams"—Louis Aragon
"An intoxicating sui generis novel by the greatest mesmerist of modern times"—André Breton
"Genius in its pure state. The Proust of dreams."—Jean Cocteau
The wealthy scientist Martial Canterel guides a group of visitors through his expansive estate, Locus Solus, where he displays his various deranged inventions: a machine propelled by the weather, which constructs a mosaic out of varying hues of human teeth; a hairless cat charged with a powerful electric battery; a bizarre theater in which corpses are reanimated with a special serum to enact the most important movements of their past lives. Wondrously imaginative and narrated with Roussel’s deadpan wit, Locus Solus is unlike anything else ever written.
Translated from French by Rupert Copeland Cunningham
"[H]e was a seminal influence on surrealism, Dadaism, the nouveau roman, and the Oulipo….Roussel could have attempted to go the way of a popular writer like Rostand or of an avant-garde writer like Breton, but, both admirably and foolishly, he remained Roussel to the end."—Ryan Ruby, Lapham's Quarterly
"Raymond Roussel's works immediately absorbed me: I was taken by the prose style even before learning what was behind it—the process, the machines, the mechanisms—and no doubt when I discovered his process and his techniques, the obsessional side of me was seduced a second time by the shock of learning of the disparity between this methodically applied process, which was slightly naive, and the resulting intense poetry."—Michel Foucault
"There is hidden in Roussel something so strong, so ominous, and so pregnant with the darkness of the 'infinite spaces' that frightened Pascal, that one feels the need for some sort of protective equipment when one reads him."—John Ashbery
2025, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 384 pages, 25 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Penguin Press / New York
$58.00 - In stock -
The new novel from Thomas Pynchon, bestselling and award-winning author of Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice. US hardcover first edition.
“A masterpiece.” —The Telegraph
“Bonkers and brilliant fun.” —The Washington Post
“Late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, Shadow Ticket capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open.” —Los Angeles Times
Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to Lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.
1961 / 1965, English
Softcover, 252 pages, 20 x 13.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$55.00 - Out of stock
"I am the man," wrote Artaud, "who has best charted his inmost self." Antonin Artaud was a great poet who, like Poe, Holderlin, and Nerval, wanted to live in the infinite and asked that the human spirit burn in absolute freedom.
To society, he was a madman. Artaud, however, was not insane, but in luciferian pursuit of what society keeps hidden. The man who wrote Van Gogh the Man Suicided by Society raged against the insanity of social institutions with insight that proves more prescient with every passing year. Today, as Artaud's vatic thunder still crashes above the "larval confusion" he despised, what is most striking in his writings is an extravagant lucidity.
This collection gives us quintessential Artaud on the occult, magic, the theater, mind and body, the cosmos, rebellion, and revolution in its deepest sense.
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud (1896 – 1948), was a French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theatre director, widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century theatre and the European avant-garde.
Jack Hirschman (b. December 13, 1933, in New York, NY) is a poet and social activist who has written more than 50 volumes of poetry. Dismissed from teaching at UCLA for anti-war activities in 1966, he moved to San Francisco in 1973, and was the city's present poet laureate. Hirschman translates nine languages and edited The Artaud Anthology.
Very Good copy. 1965 (2nd revised) print.
1976, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Corgi / London
$30.00 - In stock -
Scarce Corgi UK 1976 paperback edition of The Skull of The Marquis de Sade, a collection of short stories by author Robert Bloch, master of the monstrous. This story collection contains: The Skull of the Marquis de Sade; A Quiet Funeral; The Weird Tailor; The Man Who Knew Women; Lizzie Borden Took an Axe.; The Devil's Ticket; and The Bogey Man Will Get You.
Robert Albert Bloch (1917-1994) was an American fiction writer, primarily of crime, psychological horror and fantasy, much of which has been dramatized for radio, cinema and television. He also wrote a relatively small amount of science fiction. He is best known for his best-selling book, Psycho, upon which Alfred Hitchcock based his classic film.
Very Good copy, light edge wear and cover wear/toning.
1991, English
Softcover, 88 pages, 23.5 x 15.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$50.00 - Out of stock
Scarce Creation Classics 1991 illustrated edition of Arthur Machen's first book, "The Great God Pan", once described by The Westminster Gazette as "An incoherent nightmare of sex..." upon its publication in 1894. An unwittingly complimentary description for one of the greatest works of weird horror and decadence, in which Machen unfurls with his singular eye for the bizarre and macabre the tale of a young girl cursed by her unnatural parentage to become a creature of shape-shifting polysexual demi-human evil. This special paperback edition with illustrations throughout by the great Austin Osman Spare. Includes bibliography and introduction by Iain S. Smith.
Good—VG copy with some cover wear.
1993, English
Softcover, 126 pages, 13.5 x 21.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$60.00 - Out of stock
"An incoherent nightmare of sex..." That was The Westminster Gazette's description of Arthur Machen's first book, The Great God Pan, upon its publication in 1894. An unwittingly complimentary description for one of the greatest works of weird horror and decadence, in which Machen unfurls with his singular eye for the bizarre and macabre the tale of a young girl cursed by her unnatural parentage to become a creature of shape-shifting polysexual demi-human evil.
Wonderful collectable 1993 Creation Books reprint, with illustrations throughout by the great Austin Osman Spare.
Arthur Machen (1863 – 1947) was a Welsh author and mystic of the 1890s and early 20th century. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan (1890; 1894) has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror, with Stephen King describing it as "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language."
Very Good copy.
2000, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 14 x 21.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$35.00 - 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.
1976, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 158 pages, 22 x 14.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
William Heinemann / Melbourne
$320.00 - In stock -
Very rare first 1976 hardcover edition of Gerald Murnane's second book, A Lifetime On Clouds, published by William Heinemann, Melbourne. Murnane's second novel is a hilarious excursion through the strange shadows of the sexual jungles of Catholic Australia in the 1950s. Adrian Sherd, the hero of the book, is an unforgettable creation, a character to compel helpless tears of laughter as he picks, unerringly, his bright-eyed innocent way through the razor grass of the tall thickets of Catholic sexual dogma. No matter what the impossible or bizarre sexual problem Adrian has a highly comical straightfacedly funny solution for it.
"Adrian Sherd is a teenager in Melbourne of the 1950s—the last years before television and the family car changed suburbia forever. Earnest and isolated, tormented by his hormones and his religious devotion, Adrian dreams of elaborate orgies with American film stars, and of marrying his sweetheart and fathering eleven children by her. He even dreams a history of the world as a chronicle of sexual frustration. A Lifetime on Clouds is funny, honest, and sweetly told: a less ribald, Catholic Australian Portnoy's Complaint."
"Gerald Murnane's humour is savage, subtle, outrageous and unmerciful. This is not only a wildly comical book full of storms of laughter, but a commentary on quite recent times, a provocative satirical revelation that has its own poetry and its own special brand of unobtrusive tragi-comedy."
Gerald Murnane (b. Coburg, 1939) is an Australian novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Perhaps best known for his 1982 novel The Plains, he has won acclaim for his distinctive prose and exploration of memory, identity and the Australian landscape, often blurring fiction and autobiography in the process. The New York Times described Murnane in 2018 as "the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of," and he is regularly tipped to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket. Light foxing to book block edges (mostly top edge), very light tanning, very small closed tears, light marking to jacket extremities, very light foxing to reverse of dust jacket. Tight and clean interior. A handsome copy with dj preserved in archival mylar wrap (removable).
1983, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 198 pages, 22 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Norstrilia Press / Brunswick
$150.00 - In stock -
Very rare first 1983 hardcover edition of Dreamworks: Strange New Stories, an anthology of speculative fiction from Australian writers, edited by David King and published by Norstrilia Press, Brunswick. Features Gerald Murnane, Greg Egan, George Turner, Russel Blackford, Lucy Sussex, Andrew Whitmore, Kevin McKay, Henry Gasko, David King, Bruse Gillespie, Damien Broderick, David J. Lake, dedicated to Philip K. Dick.
Norstrilia Press is a small press established in 1975 prior to Aussiecon, Australia's first world science fiction convention, by Rob Gerrand, Bruce Gillespie and Carey Handfield. Specialising in science fiction and speculative fiction, they published books by Gerald Murnane, Greg Egan, George Turner, Damien Broderick, Roger Zelazny, and many others.
Are you tired of sheepdip in your fiction and suntan oil in your reading matter?
Are you sick of the short stories you read today—even those which win prizes and make the bestseller lists?
What is the missing ingredient in the short story today?
Dreamworks provides the answer—the missing element in today's short stories. It's a radical new perception of what is 'real'.
This is not the old 'reality' which everybody around you accepts. This is the newer, more vivid reality of...
... an Australia colonised by the Spanish ('Life the Solitude')
an Australia which was never really colonised at all ('Land Deal')
... a next-door apartment in which lives God, who is just as threatened by the dangerous future as we are ('What God Said To Me When He Lived Next Door')
... a 'reality' where reality disappears altogether, only to re-emerge unexpectedly ('Feedback').
Dreamworks includes twelve stories which show radical shifts of perspective, surprising twists of fate, and delightful glimpses of cosmic humour-all part of the book's 'new reality'.
'The reader becomes imbued with a zest- fulness,' writes critic Dr Van Ikin, 'responding to the questing philosophical spirit with which these writers have con- fronted their troubled times.'
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket with discolouration. Some tanning/foxing to book block edges.
1979, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 22 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Whispers Press / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
First edition of Whispers October, 1979 (Vol 4, No.1/2, Whole Numbers 11/12). Special Fritz Leiber issue with stories by Leiber, Roger Zelazny, Brian Lumley and others. Front and back cover art by Stephen Fabian.
Whispers was a 1970s horror and fantasy fiction magazine. Named after a fictitious magazine referenced in the H. P. Lovecraft story "The Unnamable", Whispers began as an attempt by editor, publisher and avid horror collector Stuart David Schiff to produce a modest semi-professional magazine that hoped to revive the legendary Weird Tales in a small way. The magazine was also a followup to August Derleth's The Arkham Collector, which had ceased after Derleth's death. The magazine won the first "Howard" or World Fantasy Award for non-professional publishing in 1975. Whispers went on to become an important elaborate showcase for dark fantasy fiction and artwork of the 1970s, featuring Manly Wade Wellman, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Karl Edward Wagner, and David Drake. A string of anthologies were published through the 1980s.
Very Good copy.
1985, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 22 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Whispers Press / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
First edition of Whispers March 1982, a double issue (Vol. 4, Nos. 3/4, Whole Numbers 15/16), Special Ramsey Campbell issue includes three stories by Campbell and an article about him by Dr. Jeffrey M. Elliott. Also contains stories by Karl Edward Wagner, Ray Russell, Michael Shea, William F. Nolan, and others. Front cover by John Stewart, rear cover by Hannes Bok, with interior illustrations by Lee Brown Coye, John Stewart and others.
Whispers was a 1970s horror and fantasy fiction magazine. Named after a fictitious magazine referenced in the H. P. Lovecraft story "The Unnamable", Whispers began as an attempt by editor, publisher and avid horror collector Stuart David Schiff to produce a modest semi-professional magazine that hoped to revive the legendary Weird Tales in a small way. The magazine was also a followup to August Derleth's The Arkham Collector, which had ceased after Derleth's death. The magazine won the first "Howard" or World Fantasy Award for non-professional publishing in 1975. Whispers went on to become an important elaborate showcase for dark fantasy fiction and artwork of the 1970s, featuring Manly Wade Wellman, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Karl Edward Wagner, and David Drake. A string of anthologies were published through the 1980s.
Very Good copy.
1984, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 22 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Whispers Press / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
First edition of Whispers December 1984 (Vol. 5, Nos. 1/2, whole number 21/22). Fiction by Fritz Leiber, Dennis Etchinson, Tanith Lee, Hugh B. Cave, and others. Front and back cover art by Anatoly Ivanov.
Whispers was a 1970s horror and fantasy fiction magazine. Named after a fictitious magazine referenced in the H. P. Lovecraft story "The Unnamable", Whispers began as an attempt by editor, publisher and avid horror collector Stuart David Schiff to produce a modest semi-professional magazine that hoped to revive the legendary Weird Tales in a small way. The magazine was also a followup to August Derleth's The Arkham Collector, which had ceased after Derleth's death. The magazine won the first "Howard" or World Fantasy Award for non-professional publishing in 1975. Whispers went on to become an important elaborate showcase for dark fantasy fiction and artwork of the 1970s, featuring Manly Wade Wellman, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Karl Edward Wagner, and David Drake. A string of anthologies were published through the 1980s.
Very Good copy.
1989, English
Softcover, 262 pages, 18 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
New English Library / London
$15.00 - In stock -
"Do bodices get ripped in outer space!
How can you form a
meaningful relationship in a state of weightlessness or get serious in zero gravity?
Which bit goes where when you're talking chlorine-breathing polyps?
Does the earth still move when you're beyond the stars?
Pretty fundamental questions.
It was a late-night bar after a writers' conference when, as can happen, the subject of sex and SF came up. Imaginations were lubricated. Fingers began to itch in anticipation of the firm but yielding touch of the keyboard. The idea became a concept. Another round was bought. The concept hardened into a project.
Arrows of Eros was conceived..."
1989 New English Library edition of this Sci-Fi/Horror/Eros anthology edited by Alex Stewart featuring stories by Brian Stableford, David Langford, Anne Gay, Iain M. Banks, Geraldine Harris, Kim Newman, Tanith Lee, Chris Morgan, Freda Warrington, Alex Stewart, Paul Kincaid, Garry Kilworth, Stephen Gallagher, Diana Wynne Jones, Christina Lake, Simon Ounsley.
"Challenged to produce original stories of SF, fantasy and horror in some way related to sexual-ity, the contributors to this volume cover almost the entire field of modern speculative writing. Fantasist Geraldine Harris appears next to the maverick talents of lain M. Banks, Stephen Gallagher's mastery of horror mingles with Brian Stableford's traditional SF approach, and established stars like Garry Kilworth and Tanith Lee stand alongside newcomer Paul Kincaid's first major sale. The new generation actually accounts for seven of the sixteen stories in this collection, in itself something that could hardly have been contemplated a year or two ago. All that really matters, though, is that the stories themselves are entertaining. So now, if you dare, follow our sixteen contributors into the shadows cast by the dark side of sex ..."
Good—VG copy with light tanning the ages, light wear/creasing to covers, sticker damage to barcode area of back cover. Previous inscription clipped from top corner of first page.
1979, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 220 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Norstrilia Press / Brunswick
$35.00 - In stock -
First 1979 hardcover edition of Keith Antill's 'Moon in the Ground', published by Norstrilia Press and cover artwork by Stephen campbell. Alick Keith Antill (b. Perth 1929—1999) was an Australian broadcaster and author whose sf novel, 'Moon in the Ground', involves an unpleasant US military intelligence unit battling to extract an Alien AI from Australia's Northern Territory. The Australians (and the Russians) resist.
"What is really happening at the famous and very secret US base just outside of Alice Springs? Communications with satellites . . . or communications with Pandora? And who is Pandora? An ancient Aboriginal god, the origin of the Rainbow Snake legends from the dreamtime? A computer with a quirky sense of humour? A vanguard of an interstellar invasion fleet? Or is the reality much simpler . . . and much more dangerous?'
Norstrilia Press is a small press established in 1975 prior to Aussiecon, Australia's first world science fiction convention, by Rob Gerrand, Bruce Gillespie and Carey Handfield. Specialising in science fiction and speculative fiction, they published books by Gerald Murnane, Greg Egan, George Turner, Damien Broderick, Roger Zelazny, and many others.
Good copy in Good dust jacket with wear to extremities and discolouration to spine edge, closed tears. Book VG with some dustiness to top of block.
1990, English
Softcover, 122 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$70.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 1990 English Atlas Press edition, published in an edition of 1000 copies.
Introduced by Antony Melville. Translated by Jon Graham.
Perhaps the most important Surrealist automatic text, The Immaculate Conception (1930) traces the interior and exterior life of man from Conception and Intra-Uterine Life to Death and The Original Judgement. The central section is a celebrated series of “simulations” of various types of mental instability.
Maurice Nadeau (in The History of Surrealism) described the book as “An astonishing series of poems in prose, more brilliant than those of either Breton or Eluard on his own … if all that remained of the Surrealist movement were the pages of The Immaculate Conception, man, alerted, could not turn away from the astounding mystery of his condition.”
Very Good copy some wear/light creasing to covers.
1966, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 320 pages, 22 x 15 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Anthony Blond / London
$80.00 - In stock -
Rare first UK 1966 hardcover edition of Genet's classic, translated from French by Gregory Streatham, published by Anthony Blond, London.
Jean Genet, French playwright, novelist and poet, turned the experiences in his life amongst pimps, whores, thugs and other fellow social outcasts into a poetic literature, with an honesty and explicitness unprecedented at the time. Widely considered an outstanding and unique figure in French literature, Genet wrote five novels between 1942 and 1947. Querelle of Brest is widely considered to be Jean Genet's most accomplished novel, which was made into a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1982. Querelle, a young sailor at large in the port of Brest, is an object of illicit desire to his diary-keeping superior officer, Lieutenant Seblon. He is coveted, too, by corrupt policeman Mario. He gives himself freely both to brothel-keeper Madame Lysiane and to her husband. But Querelle is a thief and a murderer -- not a man to be trusted or trifled with . . .
Jean Genet, (born Dec. 19, 1910, Paris, France-died April 15, 1986, Paris), French criminal and social outcast turned writer who, as a novelist, transformed erotic and often obscene subject matter into a poetic vision of the universe and, as a dramatist, became a leading figure in the avant-garde theatre, especially the Theatre of the Absurd.
Good copy in Good dust jacket, some wear to dj extremities, small closed tears, foxing to block edge and inner dj. Preserved in mylar wrap.
1977, German
Hardcover (clothbound w. screen-printed vinyl dust jacket in publisher's slipcase), 1330 pages, 44.5 x 33.5 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
S. Fischer Verlag / Frankfurt am Main
$400.00 - In stock -
The stunning 1977 hard cover, slip-cased facsimile reproduction of Schmidt's epic manuscript of Zettel's Traum (Bottom's Dream), comprising 1334 leaves and published by S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. Since its publication in 1970 Zettel’s Traum/Bottom’s Dream has been regarded as Arno Schimdt’s magnum opus, as the definitive work of a titan of postwar German literature. Schmidt's gargantuan novel was published in this collector's facsimile folio format just as Schmidt created it — the un-type-settable story is told mostly in three shifting columns, presenting the text in the form of collages, typewritten pages and marginalia. Bound in cloth hardcover with wrap-around thick vinyl dust jacket with screen-printed colour artwork, in publisher's original cardboard slipcase with attached paper spine label, this edition of Schmidt's "superbook" presents the reader with it's true character, beautifully reproduced on warm paper stock.
Bottom's Dream (German: Zettels Traum or ZETTEL'S TRAUM as the author wrote the title) is a novel published in 1970 by West German author Arno Schmidt. Schmidt began writing the novel in December 1963 while he and Hans Wollschläger were translating the works of Edgar Allan Poe into German. The novel was inspired by James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake, particularly Schmidt's use of columns (his "SpaltenTechnik"), which Schmidt claimed was borrowed from the Wake. It tells the love story between the aging writer Daniel Pagenstecher and the sixteen-year-old Franziska Jacobi, and also tells the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe. He develops his own literary theory in the tradition of Sigmund Freud and, as if by chance, develops a new orthography. In Zettels' Dream, Arno Schmidt's efforts to create a modern prose form and an appropriate linguistic representation of human consciousness reach their preliminary climax.
Arno Schmidt, in full Arno Otto Schmidt, (b. 1914—1979), novelist, translator, and critic, whose experimental prose established him as the preeminent Modernist of 20th-century German literature. With roots in both German Romanticism and Expressionism, he attempted to develop modern prose forms that correspond more closely to the workings of the conscious and subconscious mind and to revitalize a literary language that he considered debased by Nazism and war. The influence of James Joyce and Sigmund Freud are apparent in both a collection of short stories, Kühe in Halbtrauer (1964; Country Matters), and, most especially, in Zettels Traum (1970; Bottom’s Dream)—a three-columned, more than 1,300-page, photo-offset typescript, centring on the mind and works of Poe. It was then that Schmidt developed his theory of “etyms,” the morphemes of language that betray subconscious desires. Two further works on the same grand scale are the “novella-comedy” Die Schule der Atheisten (1972; School for Atheists) and Abend mit Goldrand (1975; Evening Edged in Gold), a dream-scape that has as its focal point Hiëronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and that has come to be regarded as his finest and most mature work. Schmidt was a man of vast autodidactic learning and Rabelaisian humour. Though complex and sometimes daunting, his works are enriched by inventive language and imbued with a profound commitment to humanity’s intellectual achievements.
Near Fine copy in VG DJ, VG slipcase with light wear/toning.
BEWARE: This might be the heaviest book in our bookshop, so precise shipping costs will be applied if inaccurate.
2025, English
Softcover, 188 pages, 29.5 x 20.5 cm
Published by
AdminAdmin / Melbourne
$45.00 - In stock -
Containing original contributions; artwork, art-historofiction, hagiofiction, critical essays, poetry and prose, some loosely centred around instinct and the mind.
This with contributions by Erik van Lieshout, Peles Duo x Rob Crosse, CAConrad, Robert McKenzie, Mark Beasley, Hany Armanious, Patrick Hartigan, Elizabeth Pulie, Anthea Behm, Luke Stettner, Skyler Brickley, Tommy Miller, Rebecca Holborn, Penelope Latté, Guy Benfield, Jason Vorhees.....and more
2025, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Nightboat Books / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
Perverts traverses the psychic landscapes of Kay Gabriel and her community of friends, writers and organizers, piecing together a collective dream that both mirrors and transforms waking life.
Against the backdrop of the anti-trans panic, Perverts explores desire as a political problem. It asks two questions at the same time: whose desire is understood as dangerously excessive? And—a classic organizer’s question—how do we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want? Synthesizing her own dreams with those of her friends, Kay Gabriel’s Perverts is an exercise in turning private experience into shared consciousness and illicit desire into common cause.
“Kay Gabriel has written an anti-epic for our current moment, bringing contemporary queer community into being with lyric verve amid and in resistance to our ongoing catastrophe.”—John Keene
“Perverts is a gorgeous multicolored quilt of the subconscious of others, a pleasure, a riot . . . a gift.”—Hannah Black
Kay Gabriel is a writer and organizer. She’s the author of Perverts (2025), Kissing Other People or the House of Fame (2023), and A Queen in Bucks County (2022). She’s the Editorial Director at the Poetry Project in New York City.
2010, English
Softcover, 76 pages, 18 x 11.5 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$26.00 - In stock -
The first of Pierre Louÿs’s erotic works to see publication after his death, The Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners is also his most outrageous, and one of the few erotic classics in which humor takes precedence over arousal. By means of shockingly filthy advice and a parodic format, Louÿs turns late nineteenth-century manners roundly upon their head, with ass prominently skyward. Whether he is offering rules for etiquette in church, school, or home, or outlining a girl’s duties toward family, neighbor, or God, Louÿs manages to mock every institution, leaving no hypocrisy unexposed. The book has only grown more scandalous and subversive than when it first appeared in 1926.
Pierre Louÿs (1870–1925) was a best-selling author in his time, and a friend of and influence on such luminaries as André Gide, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde, and Stephane Mallarmé. He achieved instant notoriety with Aphrodite and The Songs of Bilitis, and his 1898 novel The Woman and the Puppet has been adapted for the screen in such noteworthy films as Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman and Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire. But it was only after his death that his true legacy was to be uncovered: nearly nine hundred pounds of erotic manuscripts were discovered in his home, all of them immediately scattered among collectors and many lost. The body of work that has since been gathered—manuscripts continue to be discovered—leaves little doubt: Louÿs is the greatest French writer of erotica there ever was.
“Louÿs entered eroticism the way others enter politics or religion”—Jean-Paul Goujon
“One of the great and glorious erotomaniacs of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth”—André Pieyre de Mandiargues
“This is just the book to give your niece—if she’s a quiet, neat, straight-laced girl.”—A. D. Jameson, The Review of Contemporary Fiction
“Exuberantly naughty.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
2010, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 11.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$33.00 - In stock -
Translated, with an afterword, by Marc Lowenthal.
One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the “infraordinary”: the humdrum, the nonevent, the everyday—“what happens,” as he put it, “when nothing happens.” His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice where, ensconced behind first one café window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse, as if in accordance to some mysterious command; the wedding (and then funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols, and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that eventually absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie, and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time, and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.
Georges Perec (1936–1982) was a French novelist, essayist, and filmmaker whose linguistic talents ranged from fiction to crossword puzzles to authoring the longest palindrome ever written. Winner of the prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel Things, and the prix Médicis in 1978 for his most acclaimed novel, Life A User’s Manual, Perec was also a member of Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians devoted to the discovery and use of constraints to encourage literary inspiration. One of their most famous products was Perec’s own novel, A Void, written entirely without the letter “e.”
2025, English
Softcover, 312 pages, 20.3 x 13.3 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$42.00 - In stock -
Joris-Karl Huysmans’s semi-autobiographical third novel, first published in French in 1881, signaled the beginning of his break from the naturalism of Émile Zola and his turn toward a “new naturalism” that laid out the negative consequences of determinism and embraced a disgust for human existence and an all-out war against respectability.
Domesticity tells the tale of novelist André Jayant and artist Cyprien Tibaille, two men struggling between the urges of their body and the urges of their soul—between the comforts of coupledom and the ideals of art—and with the failure of matrimony or the artistic endeavor to fulfill the needs of either. More than a psychological character study, though, Domesticity stands as one of the most memorable portraits of late-nineteenth-century Paris: its shops, its eateries, its apartments, and its sad, futile affairs of the heart.
Steeped in sardonic pessimism, this ode to sterility was one of the author’s own favorite novels of his career.
Earning a wage through the French civil service, Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) quietly explored the extremes of human nature and artifice through a series of books that influenced a number of literary movements: from the gray and grimy naturalism of Marthe and Downstream, to the cornerstones of the decadent movement, Against Nature and the Satanist classic Down There, to the dream-ridden surrealist favorite, Becalmed, and his Catholic novels, The Cathedral and The Oblate.
Translated, with an afterword, by George MacLennan.
2025, English
Softcover, 131 pages, 20.2 x 12.7 cm
Published by
The New York Review of Books / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
A new translation of one of the defining works of the French surrealist movement, an energetic autobiographical novel that is at once both a tumultuous romance story and an initiation into the surrealism of everyday life.
The most renowned of all surrealist literary works, Andre Breton's Nadja has been stirring passions and imaginations since its first publication in 1928. At once a poignant romance, an autobiography, a philosophical inquiry into questions of identity, and a lively illustration of the surrealist belief in life-changing chance, Nadja relates the fortuitous meeting and brief, tumultuous relationship between Breton, surrealism's founder and primary theorist, and the "wandering soul" who called herself Nadja, "because in Russian it's the beginning of the word for hope, and because it's only the beginning."
Over the course of a single breathless week, recounted with scrupulous precision and a poet's sense of drama, Breton and Nadja pursue an adventure that stands outside of societal or moral conventions, and that brings both of them to what Breton termed "the extreme limit of the surrealist aspiration." Bookending this beguiling and ultimately tragic story are a series of "petrifying coincidences," episodes that initiate the reader into the surrealism of everyday life, and a penetrating examination of Breton's own share of responsibility in Nadja's ultimate fate, ending with the shattering intrusion into the author's life of a final transformative occurrence.
In this, the first new translation of Nadja in more than sixty years, award-winning translator and surrealism scholar Mark Polizzotti brings a fresh perspective to this unique and haunting tale. Making use of the most recent research (including the revelation of Nadja's identity and life story and the discovery of Breton's original manuscript), he sets the narrative in its historical and biographical context and corrects a number of inaccuracies in the previous English version.
This vibrant, emotionally resonant translation breathes new energy and urgency into a book that has long been recognized as one of the seminal masterpieces of twentieth-century modernism.
2023, English / French
Softcover, 219 pages, 15.2 x 21.5 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$40.00 - In stock -
Erotic-macabre poetry by an overlooked Surrealist woman from the Middle East.
"You know very well, Joyce, that you are for me—and very objectively too—the greatest poet of our time. Surrealist poetry, that's you."—André Breton
"Your poems know the essential cries, those which speak of passion in its vertigo."—Gaston Bachelard, author of The Poetics of Space
The most significant Surrealist poet to emerge in 1950s Paris was a woman, Joyce Mansour. Mansour was a Syrian Jewish exile from Egypt whose fierce, macabre, erotically charged works gave André Breton's Surrealist group a much-needed jolt after the ravages of the Second World War. Among new adherents, only Mansour wrote poems commensurate with those of Robert Desnos, René Char, Benjamin Péret, and other poets from the movement's heyday. Yet she remains curiously neglected in English translation, and even her posthumous reputation in France suffers from the patriarchal and chauvinist biases of the French literary establishment.
Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems by Joyce Mansour is a much-needed corrective to this state of affairs, a compact yet career-spanning, bilingual anthology of this incendiary poet. With a biographical introduction by translator Emilie Moorhouse, Emerald Wounds showcases the entire arc of Mansour's trajectory as a poet, from the at-once gothic and minimalist fragments of her first collection in 1953, Screams, to the serpentine power of her final poems of the 1980s. Juxtaposing the original French poems with their English translations, Mansour's voice surges forward uncensored and raw, communicating the frustrations, anger, and sadness of an intelligent, worldly woman who defies the constraints and oppression of a male-dominated society that sees women as superficial objects of desire rather than multidimensional, autonomous subjects. Mansour is a poet the world needs today.