World Food Books

Bernard Heidsieck
Poème-Partition "F"

2001, French
Softcover (w. audio CD + print insert), 64 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Ed. of 500,
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by Le Corridor Bleu / Nîmes

$60.00 - In stock -

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Limited edition book and CD presentation of Bernard Heidsieck's Poème-Partition "F" with print insert. Written 1957 and recorded 1960, this publication was issued in an edition of 500 in 2001 by Le Corridor Bleu, Nîmes. Includes an additional introduction by Heidsieck (1928—2014) himself, one of the greatest French poets of the 20th century, and an originator of the sound poetry movement.

Bernard Heidseick (1928-2014) was a French sound poet, associated with various movements throughout a long career: including Beat, Fluxus, and minimalism. Heidseick decided in the mid-1950s to break off from written poetry, and to bring it outside of books. He opposed passive poetry to active poetry, to an “on its feet” poetry, in his own words. Starting in 1955 he was one of the founders of Sound Poetry, and in 1962 of Action Poetry. As early as 1959 he used a tape recorder as an additional means for writing and retransmitting, opening his research to new experimental fields. While remaining concerned with semantics, Bernard Heidseick became increasingly independent from the constraints of language. He explored all its formal aspects, either by spatializing the text in his written scores, or by the presence of his body in space. He gave sound a formal dimension, notably through an exceptional diction based as much on breathing as on articulating perfectly or on constantly renewing the inflections of his voice. As the years went by he reinvented his writing in order to render our daily life more accurately. Our social, political or economical universe, through its main events, as well as through its extreme ordinariness. In 1955 he developed his first Score-Poems. He then worked continuously on series, with the 13 Biopsies between 1966 and 1969. From 1969 to 1980, he created the 29 Passe-Partout (Catch-alls). From 1978 to 1986, he wrote Derviche/Le Robert (Dervish/Le Robert) composed of 26 sound poems. Then, beginning in 1988, Respirations et brèves rencontres ( Respiration and Brief Encounters) (60 poems created from the archives of recordings of artists' breathing). He organised the first international festival of sound poetry in 1976 and the event Rencontres Internationales 1980 de poésie sonore which took place in Rennes, in Le Havre and at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

As New with tiny little coffee drip mark to cover.

File under: Bernard Heidsieck Bernard Heidsieck Le Corridor Bleu / Nîmes Concrete Poetry Art Performance / Dance / Theater Objects / Ephemera / A/V Fiction / Poetry Poetry Fluxus Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic

Sun Ra
Extensions Out, Plus: Four Poetry Books (1959/1972)

1959 / 1972 / 2021, English
Ed. of 1000,
Published by Corbett vs. Dempsey / Chicago

$90.00 - Out of stock

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Beautiful new edition set of four poetry books by Sun Ra, issued Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago. Two of these were pamphlets that accompanied early Sun Ra albums issued in the late 1950s; the other two were published more than a decade later by Infinity Inc./Saturn Research. CvsD's reprints are fastidiously designed facsimiles of the original publications, marking the first time they have been available in their Ra-ordained form since they were published.

An architect of Afrofuturism and one of the great musical thinkers of the 20th century, Ra's work extended far beyond jazz and even music to the realms of pageantry, performance, theater, philosophy, visual art, and literature. In the mid 1950s, he handed out leaflets and gave street corner lectures – revisionist interpretations of the Bible and bold meditations on the status of African Americans in American society. A few years later, Ra began disseminating his poems in – and sometimes on – his albums. His debut, Jazz By Sun Ra, was issued in 1957 by the Boston-based Transition label, a short-lived company that sold records by subscription; this record contained a beautiful booklet, now as prized as the LP itself, with rare photographs and a selection of poems and proclamations, as well as the personnel and recording credits. Ra's Jazz In Silhouette was released two years hence on Saturn Records, the label he started with Alton Abraham, and it came with a mimeographed liner booklet – now exceedingly rare – that was folded, unstapled, as an ultra-economical accompaniment to the vinyl. The CvsD version folds this slim pamphlet of poetry into a slipcover with a classic photo portrait of Ra by Thomas "Bugs" Hunter on the back. Perhaps Ra's best known book of poetry, reprinted in many alternative versions with different contents over the years, is The Immeasurable Equation; this incarnation restores the original Infinity Inc./Saturn Research version, published in Chicago in 1972 and distributed widely by the Arkestra, often from the bandstand. It features more than 60 of Ra's poems. Finally, perhaps the rarest of Ra's poetry books is Extensions Out: Immeasurable Equation Vol. II, which was also published by Infinity Inc./Saturn Research. This 8 1/2 x 11 inch book is a massive compendium of more than 130 poems, very much in step with the mimeo poetry publications of its era – simple staple binding, one-sided pages – featuring three photographs of artwork by Ayé Aton, a close ally of Ra's in this, the period of the Arkestra classic Space Is The Place, on which Aton plays percussion. Great care was taken to reproduce the special textured cover of this highly sought after book.

These four books are exclusively sold as a set. The first edition is limited to 1000 copies. Corbett vs. Dempsey is proud to represent the non-musical side of the Sun Ra Estate. We gratefully acknowledge Irwin Chusid and Sun Ra LLC for the permission to release this historically rich chronicle of Ra's poetry, presented as he originally conceived it.

File under: Sun Ra Ayé Aton Corbett vs. Dempsey / Chicago Sound / Music Fiction / Poetry Objects / Ephemera / A/V

THE SCIENCE OF LOVE AND OTHER WRITINGS
by Charles Cros

2024, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 17.8 x 11.4 cm
Published by Wakefield Press / Cambridge

$32.00 - In stock -

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An indefinable polymath of fin de siècle Paris, Charles Cros made work that was simultaneously grounded in literature and science. This collection brings together for the first time in English all of his literary prose. The collection includes proto-science-fiction stories; prose poems; an essay on methods of communication with other planets; and the patent application written with his brother for a (never-built) notating keyboard.

The literary imagination Cros was able to bring into the field of science was matched by the humorous scientific sobriety he introduced into his literature, which he did nowhere so effectively as in the title piece, “The Science of Love”: depicting a young scientist’s painstakingly executed seduction of a woman for the sake of scientific analysis. Also included are stories such as “The Newspaper of the Future” (which presents a 19th-century imagining of artificial intelligence) and “The Stone Who Died of Love.”

Charles Cros (1842–88) was a French writer and inventor. He is credited with submitting the earliest method for recording sound, but his idea for the “Paleophone” was obscured by Thomas Edison’s patent for the phonograph less than a year later.

File under: Charles Cros Wakefield Press / Cambridge Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction Fiction / Poetry Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle

Dangerous Visions
Edited by Harlan Ellison

2024, English
Softcover, 666 pages, 22.61 x 15.19 cm
Published by Blackstone / US

$42.00 - Out of stock

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Dubbed "the most significant and controversial SF book" of its generation, Harlan Ellison's groundbreaking collection launched an entire subgenre: New Wave science fiction. With contributions from legendary authors and multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, Dangerous Visions returns to print in a stunning new edition perfect for new and returning fans alike.

A landmark short story collection that put the more character-based New Wave science fiction on the map, Dangerous Visions won several prestigious awards and was nominated for many others. This now-classic anthology includes thirty-three stories by thirty-two award-winning authors, over half of whom have won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Contributing authors include: Robert Silverberg, Frederik Pohl, Brian W. Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, Larry Niven, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Theodore Sturgeon, J.G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, and Ellison himself.

As relevant now as it was when first published, Dangerous Visions is a phenomenal collection that deserves a place on every bookshelf.

File under: Robert Silverberg Frederik Pohl Brian W. Aldiss Philip K. Dick Larry Niven Fritz Leiber Poul Anderson Theodore Sturgeon J.G. Ballard Samuel R. Delany Harlan Ellison Blackstone / US Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction Transgressive / Visceral / Abject Fiction / Poetry SALE

BEDLAM
by Charlene Elsby

2023, English
Softcover, 132 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia

$24.00 - Out of stock

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"One of my favorite contemporary writers. Each of these vicious little stories is a perfect articulation of the madness of being a conscious entity. Elsby’s voice winds its way into your head and smashes about like a trapped heron."—B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space

"Elsby's easy tone and accessible prose conceals a complex malignant design. The naked mind speaks from an isolated place inside the cruelty of everyday power structures with flat affect, leaving the reader to sort out the relentless inequity, outrage, and pain. Bedlam is exactly the kind of brilliant and unapologetic trauma I crave."—Joe Koch, author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands and Convulsive

"In a series of scathing monologues, Bedlam is searching for an exit, craving for escape while stuck detailing the minutiae that keep us in place (the hairdos, the joggers, the dick pics, the doors, the death, the men...), as our new lives wait indefinitely—aging badly, somewhere in the near distance, before they’ve even begun." —Gary J. Shipley, author of Terminal Park

"Elsby taps into the worst parts of ourselves and presents them as mundane grotesquery. The cruel things people do to one another daily are presented in a chilling, matter of fact way alongside passages of interiority that terrify because one might see them as a mirror. That's the true, wicked power of Bedlam."—Anthony Dragonetti, author of Confidence Man

Charlene Elsby wrote Hexis, Psychros, Affect and Musos. Her essays have appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Bustle Books, and the LA Review of Books Philosophical Salon.

File under: Charlene Elsby Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia Transgressive / Visceral / Abject Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction Fiction / Poetry

Pier Paolo Pasolini
Writing on Burning Paper

2022, English
Softcover (two-book set), 200 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by Fireflies Press / Berlin—Melbourne

$75.00 - In stock -

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Published on the centenary year of Pasolini’s birth, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper is a dual edition that stages a dialogue between cinema today and Pasolini’s timeless films and words.

The two complementary volumes slide into one another, forming a unique set that evokes and celebrates Pasolini’s enduring influence. The smaller book features his epic autobiographical poem ‘Poet of the Ashes’, in a revised translation by esteemed poet Stephen Sartarelli; the larger book comprises original tributes by vital filmmakers from across the contemporary cinema landscape.

Twenty filmmakers shared personal reflections in the form of essays, poems, photographs, drawings and more: Catherine Breillat, Luise Donschen & Helena Wittmann, Jia Zhangke, Radu Jude, Payal Kapadia, Alexandre Koberidze, Dane Komljen, Mike Leigh, Mariano Llinás, Roberto Minervini, Valérie Massadian, Luc Moullet, Ben Rivers, Angela Schanelec, Ulrich Seidl, Basma al-Sharif, Deborah Stratman, Anocha Suwichakornpong and Gustavo Vinagre.

To coincide with the NYC launch of the book on November 4, Fireflies Press has curated Love Meetings: Pasolini & Contemporary Cinema, a program of screenings at Metrograph, running through November.

File under: Pier Paolo Pasolini Catherine Breillat Luise Donschen & Helena Wittmann Jia Zhangke Radu Jude Payal Kapadia Alexandre Koberidze Dane Komljen Mike Leigh Mariano Llinás Roberto Minervini Valérie Massadian Luc Moullet Ben Rivers Angela Schanelec Ulrich Seidl Basma al-Sharif Deborah Stratman Anocha Suwichakornpong Gustavo Vinagre Fireflies Press / Berlin—Melbourne Film / Video Theory / Essay Fiction / Poetry

The Anecdoted Topography of Chance
Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, Emmett Williams, Roland Topor

1966, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 214 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Something Else Press / New York

$120.00 - Out of stock

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First hardcover English edition, published in 1966 by Something Else Press, New York, of "An Anecdoted Topography of Chance", arguably the most important and entertaining "Artist's Book" of the post-war period. A unique collaborative work by four artists associated with the FLUXUS and Nouveau Realisme movements, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, Emmett Williams, and Roland Topor.

What is the Topography? Hard to explain an idea so simple yet so brilliantly executed. Following a rambling conversation with his dear friend Robert Filliou, Daniel Spoerri one day mapped the objects lying at random on the table in his room, adding a rigorously scientific description of each. These objects subsequently evoked associations, memories, anecdotes; not only from the original author, but from his friends as well: a beguiling creation was born. Many of the principal participants of FLUXUS make an appearance (and texts by Higgins, Jouffroy, Kaprow, Restany, and Tinguely are included, among others). It is a novel of digressions in the manner of Tristram Shandy or Robbe-Grillet; it's a game, a poem, an encyclopaedia, a cabinet of wonders: a celebration of friendship and creativity.

The Topography personifies (and pre-dates) the whole FLUXUS spirit and constitutes one of the strangest and most compelling insights into the artist's life. From out of the banal detritus of the everyday a virtual autobiography emerges: of four perceptive, witty and eloquent members of the human species.

Translated from the French and further anecdoted by poet Emmett Williams.

First 1966 hardcover edition in Very Good condition, with Good dust jacket, some wear and tear to edges, light fading to spine, preserved in mylar wrap.
Couldn't be more highly recommended.

File under: Allan Kaprow Jean Tinguely Dick Higgins Daniel Spoerri Robert Filliou Emmett Williams Roland Topor Alain Jouffroy Pierre Restany Dick Higgins Something Else Press / New York Art Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic Fluxus Sculpture / Installation Fiction / Poetry Theory / Essay Out-of-print / Rare Drawing

Vulturnus
by Léon-Paul Fargue

2024, English
Softcover, 88 pages, 17.8 x 11.4 cm
Published by Wakefield Press / Cambridge

$32.00 - In stock -

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Foreword by René Daumal
Translated by Terry Bradford

When published in 1928, Vulturnus represented a new direction in Léon-Paul Fargue’s writing: a shift from the lyrical post-Symbolist melancholy of his early poetry to something more grandiose, dynamic, and cosmic. A long prose poem, for lack of a better term, but one that weaves together philosophical dialogue, metaphysical meditation, and mournful reminiscence delivered in a language that spirals into scientific terminology and Rabelaisian neologism.

Jolted into a nightmare aboard a long-distance train journey, the author finds himself alone yet not alone, his mind pinned like an insect, as he sets off on a journey that takes him from his hometown to other existences, accompanied by the fanfare of the planets and two companions—Pierre Pellegrin and Joseph Aussudre—who guide him as Virgil did Dante, though not through hell, but to a sketched-out terrestrial paradise in quest of a moment of eternity: a syphilis of the ether, “one foot godward, two steps brute.”

This first English translation finally introduces an essential yet underrecognized twentieth-century voice and includes an essay on the text by René Daumal, who declares that “Vulturnus suffocates me with its obviousness … I see behind Fargue the great frame of Doctor Faustroll.”

“Vulturnus is an astonishing book.”—Paul Valéry

“A rollicking interplanetary poem.”—Eugene Jolas

Léon-Paul Fargue (1876–1947) was the archetypal poet of Paris, with ties to everyone from Alfred Jarry and Erik Satie to Colette and Maurice Ravel. His work was admired by Rilke, Joyce, and Walter Benjamin. Though his work spanned and was sometimes associated with various literary movements, a bridge of sorts from symbolism to surrealism (though he was opposed to the latter), he kept to his own path throughout his life: a night wanderer who turned his perambulations through Paris into a unique poetry and prose.

“The greatest living poet in France.”—Walter Benjamin

“One of our greatest poets.”—Rainer Maria Rilke

“Fargue taught us to sublimate the life of everyday and make the highest poetry out of it.”—Max Jacob

File under: Rene Daumal Léon-Paul Fargue Wakefield Press / Cambridge Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction Fiction / Poetry

An Anthology of Concrete Poetry
Edited by Emmett Williams

1967, English
Hardcover, 342 pages, 23.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by edition hansjörg meyer / Düsseldorf

$220.00 - Out of stock

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Rare first 1967 European hardcover edition of An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, published by the legendary edition hansjörg meyer. The book's editor, Emmett Williams, "as one of the original practitioners of concrete poetry, has been in a unique position to observe the development of the movement since its beginnings, and the selection in this volume therefore reflects a view of this evolution from within the movement rather than from a distance." An Anthology of Concrete Poetry was the first anthology on the international movement of Concrete poetry, published subsequently by the legendary Something Else Press in 1967 in America. The movement itself began in the early 1950s, in Germany–through Eugen Gomringer, who borrowed the term “concrete” from the art of his mentor, Max Bill–and in Brazil, through the Noigandres group, which included the de Campos brothers and Decio Pignatari. Over the course of the 1960s it exploded across Europe, America and Japan, as other protagonists of the movement emerged, such as Dieter Roth, Öyvind Fahlström, Ernst Jandl, bpNichol, Mary Ellen Solt, Jackson Mac Low, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Bob Cobbing, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Pierre Garnier, Henri Chopin, Brion Gysin and Kitasono Katue. By the late 1960s, poet Jonathan Williams could proclaim: “If there is such a thing as a worldwide movement in the art of poetry, Concrete is it.” The work of the 77 writers collected in this anthology varies greatly in its aims and forms, but all can be said to emphasize the visual dimension of language, manipulating individual letters and minimal semantic units to produce poems that are for contemplating as much as for reading. Emmett Williams, the book’s editor, added explanatory commentary for the poems and biographies of their authors, making this volume–long out of print–the definitive anthology of this movement, which has so influenced artists and writers of subsequent generations.

Writers and artists included: Friedrich Achleitner, Alain Arias-Misson, H. C. Artmann, Ronaldo Azeredo, Stephen Bann, Carlo Belloli, Max Bense, Edgard Braga, Claus Bremer, Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, Henri Chopin, Carl Friedrich Claus, Bob Cobbing, Paul de Vree, Reinhard Döhl, Torsten Ekbom, Öyvind Fahlström, Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Larry Freifeld, John Furnival, Heinz Gappmayr, Ilse and Pierre Garnier, Matthias Goeritz, Eugen Gomringer, Ludwig Gosewitz, Bohumila Grögerova and Josef Hiršal, José Lino Grünewald, Brion Gysin, Al Hansen, Václav Havel, Helmut Heissenbüttel, Åke Hodell, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Ernst Jandl, Bengt Emil Johnson, Ronald Johnson, Hiro Kamimura, Kitasono Katue, Jiri Kolar, Ferdinand Kriwet, Arrigo Lora-Totino, Jackson Mac Low, Hansjörg Mayer, Cavan McCarthy, Franz Mon, Edwin Morgan, Maurizio Nannucci, bp Nichol, Hans-Jørgen Nielsen, Seiichi Niikuni, Ladislav Novák, Yuksel Pazarkaya, Décio Pignatari, Vlademir Dias Pino, Luiz Angelo Pinto, Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, Diter Rot, Gerhard Rühm, Aram Saroyan, John J. Sharkey, Edward Lucie Smith, Mary Ellen Solt, Adriano Spatola, Daniel Spoerri, Vagn Steen, Andre Thomkins, Enrique Uribe Valdivielso, Franz Van Der Linde, Franco Verdi, Emmett Williams, Jonathan Williams, Pedro Xisto and Fujitomi Yasuo.

"Emmett Williams, as one of the original practitioners of concrete poetry, has been in a unique position to observe the development of the movement since its beginnings, and the selection in this volume therefore reflects a view of this evolution from within the movement rather than from a distance. However it is far too soon to regard any anthology of Concrete Poetry as being definitive since the movement is extremely active and major new works have yet to appear in this most interesting of current poetry movements." -- from interior flap. Printed in black-and-white.

Very Good copy with some light edge wear to thick covers, general light age/tanning.

File under: Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd Bohumila Grögerova and Josef Hiršal José Lino Grünewald Václav Havel Helmut Heissenbüttel Åke Hodell Friedrich Achleitner Alain Arias-Misson H. C. Artmann Ronaldo Azeredo Stephen Bann Carlo Belloli Max Bense Edgard Braga Claus Bremer Augusto de Campos Haroldo de Campos Henri Chopin Carl Friedrich Claus Bob Cobbing Paul de Vree Reinhard Döhl Torsten Ekbom Öyvind Fahlström Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim Ian Hamilton Finlay Larry Freifeld John Furnival Heinz Gappmayr Ilse and Pierre Garnier Matthias Goeritz Eugen Gomringer Ludwig Gosewitz Dom Sylvester Houédard Ernst Jandl Bengt Emil Johnson Ronald Johnson Hiro Kamimura Kitasono Katue Jiri Kolar Ferdinand Kriwet Arrigo Lora-Totino Jackson Mac Low Hansjörg Mayer Cavan McCarthy Franz Mon Edwin Morgan Maurizio Nannucci bp Nichol Hans-Jørgen Nielsen Seiichi Niikuni Ladislav Novák Yuksel Pazarkaya Décio Pignatari Vlademir Dias Pino Luiz Angelo Pinto Diter Rot Gerhard Rühm Aram Saroyan John J. Sharkey Edward Lucie Smith Mary Ellen Solt Adriano Spatola Daniel Spoerri Vagn Steen Enrique Uribe Valdivielso Franz Van Der Linde Franco Verdi Emmett Williams Jonathan Williams Pedro Xisto Fujitomi Yasuo André Thomkins André Thomkins Friedrich Achleitner Alain Arias-Misson H. C. Artmann Ronaldo Azeredo Stephen Bann Carlo Belloli Max Bense Edgard Braga Claus Bremer Augusto de Campos Haroldo de Campos Henri Chopin Carl Friedrich Claus Bob Cobbing Paul de Vree Reinhard Döhl Torsten Ekbom Öyvind Fahlström Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim Ian Hamilton Finlay Larry Freifeld John Furnival Heinz Gappmayr Ilse and Pierre Garnier Matthias Goeritz Eugen Gomringer Ludwig Gosewitz Bohumila Grögerova and Josef Hiršal José Lino Grünewald Brion Gysin Al Hansen Václav Havel Helmut Heissenbüttel Åke Hodell Dom Sylvester Houédard Ernst Jandl Arrigo Lora-Totino Jackson Mac Low Hansjörg Mayer Cavan McCarthy Franz Mon Edwin Morgan Maurizio Nannucci bp Nichol Hans-Jørgen Nielsen Seiichi Niikuni Ladislav Novák Yuksel Pazarkaya Décio Pignatari Vlademir Dias Pino Luiz Angelo Pinto Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd Diter Rot Gerhard Rühm Aram Saroyan John J. Sharkey Edward Lucie Smith Mary Ellen Solt Adriano Spatola Daniel Spoerri Vagn Steen Andre Thomkins Enrique Uribe Valdivielso Franz Van Der Linde Franco Verdi Emmett Williams Jonathan Williams Pedro Xisto Fujitomi Yasuo Bengt Emil Johnson Ronald Johnson Jiří Kolář Hiro Kamimura Kitasono Katue Ferdinand Kriwet edition hansjörg meyer / Düsseldorf Concrete Poetry Conceptual Art Out-of-print / Rare Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art Art Minimal Art Fiction / Poetry Poetry Fluxus

Stubble Archipelago
by Wayne Koestenbaum

2024, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 20 x 14 cm
Published by Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles

$34.00 - In stock -

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Wild new adventures in word-infatuated flânerie from a celebrated literary provocateur.

This book of thirty-six poetic bulletins by the humiliation-advice-giver Wayne Koestenbaum will teach you how to cruise, how to dream, how to decode a crowded consciousness, how to find nuggets of satisfaction in unaccustomed corners, and how to sew a language glove roomy enough to contain materials gathered while meandering. Koestenbaum wrote many of these poems while walking around New York City. He'd jot down phrases in a notebook or dictate them into his phone. At home, he'd incorporate these fragmented gleanings into overflowing quasi sonnets. Therefore each poem functions as a coded diary entry, including specific references to sidewalk events and peripatetic perceptions. Flirting, remembering, eavesdropping, gazing, squeezing, sequestering: Koestenbaum invents a novel way to cram dirty liberty into the tight yet commodious space of the sonnet, a fourteen-lined cruise ship that contains ample suites for behavior modification, libidinal experiment, aura-filled memory orgies, psychedelic Bildungsromane, lap dissolves, archival plunges, and other mental saunterings that conjure the unlikely marriage of Kenneth Anger and Marianne Moore. Carnal pudding, anyone? These engorged lyrics don't rhyme; and though each builds on a carapace of fourteen lines, many of the lines spawn additional, indented tributaries, like hoop earrings dangling from the stanzas' lobes. Koestenbaum's poems are comic, ribald, compressed, symphonic. They take liberties with ordinary language, and open up new pockets for sensation in the sorrowing overcoat of the “now.” Imagine: the training wheels have been removed from poetry's bicycle, and the wheeling flâneur is finally allowed a word pie equal to fantasy's appetite. Stubble—a libidinal detail—matters when you're stranded on the archipelago of your most unsanctioned yet tenaciously harbored impulses.

File under: Wayne Koestenbaum Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles Fiction / Poetry Poetry LGBTQ+ Theory / Essay

The Beauty of Light: An Interview
Etel Adnan & Laure Adler

2024, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
Published by Nightboat Books / New York

$38.00 - Out of stock

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A lively and spontaneous interview with Etel Adnan about her absolute belief in the beauty of the world and the beauty of art.

In these interviews with journalist and editor Laure Adler, conducted in the months before her death in November 2021, Etel Adnan traces with depth and emotion the founding experiences of her artistic approach, between poetry and painting. From her youth in Lebanon, her American years in New York and California, to her late recognition at Documenta in 2012 and her life in France, the conversation covers philosophy, painting, poetry and aesthetics, as well Adnan's views on history and politics in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. These transcripts usher the experiences and observations of Adnan's long and rich life into an intimate and spontaneous conversation with a dear friend―a window on the “universe” of her imagination.

File under: Etel Adnan Etel Adnan Laure Adler Nightboat Books / New York Fiction / Poetry Poetry Painting Art Theory / Essay

Apocalypse Culture
Edited by Adam Parfrey

1990, English
Softcover, 362 pages, 21.6 x 24 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by Feral House / Los Angeles

$40.00 - Out of stock

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"Apocalypse Culture is compulsory reading for all those concerned with the crisis of our times. An extraordinary collection unlike anything I have ever encountered. These are the terminal documents of the twentieth century."—J.G. Ballard

Two thousand years have passed since the death of Christ and the world is going mad. Nihilist prophets, born-again pornographers, transcendental schizophrenics and just plain folks are united in their belief in an imminent global catastrophe. What are the forces lurking behind this mass delirium?

APOCALYPSE CULTURE is a startling, absorbing and exhaustive tour through the nether regions of today’s psychotic brainscape.

First published in 1987, APOCALYPSE CULTURE immediately touched a nerve. Alternately excoriated and lauded as “epochal”, “the most important book of the decade,” APOCALYPSE CULTURE had begun to articulate what many inwardly sensed — the-fear inspired irrationalism and faith, the clash of irreconcilable forces, and the ever-looming specter of fin de race. In its present incarnation for Feral House, APOCALYPSE CULTURE has significantly increased in size, taking on new perspectives on our current crisis, with pertinent revisions of many articles from the original edition.—burb from this expanded and revised 1990 edition.

Good copy with general wear/"kinkiness".

File under: Peter Sotos Joe Bradley Peter Sotos Adam Parfrey John Zerzan Hakim Bey Paul Lemos Thomas McEvilley Feral House / Los Angeles Fiction / Poetry Art Eros Counterculture Sound / Music Out-of-print / Rare Transgressive / Visceral / Abject Crime / Violence Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic Film / Video Theory / Essay Anarchism

Putting My Foot In It: A Novel
by René Crevel

1992, English
Softcover, 173 pages, 24 x 15 cm
Published by Dalkey Archive Press / US

$32.00 - Out of stock

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English edition of this 1933 classic surrealist novel by René Crevel (1900-1935), a bisexual communist dadaist who suffered a traumatic religious upbringing and suffered from tuberculosis. Crevel is considered to be one of the most important writers of surrealist fiction, a true genius of the movement. Translated by Thomas Buckley, this edition includes Ezra Pound's well-known essay on Crevel as a foreword, and an introduction by Edouard Roditi.

Imagine, if you can, Freud and Proust sitting down for a chat with Zippy the Pinhead and the marquis de Sade. Then, just when things are starting to get a bit silly, in walks Karl Marx with a dead serious face to deliver a vitriolic diatribe. After he has finished his speech, Jacques Lacan enters and slips a couch under the narrator, who begins psychoanalyzing himself and his text. Zippy soon prevails, however, and the narrative has turned into a political allegory with characters out of Felix the Cat: a surrealist, graphic (historiographic, geographic, pornographic) version of The Romance of the Rose. Rene Crevel's 1933 novel Putting My Foot in It (Les Pieds dans le plat) has long been considered a classic of the surrealist period, but has never been translated into English until now. Loosely structured around a luncheon attended by thirteen guests, the novel is a surrealistic critique of the intellectual corruption of post-World War I France, especially the capitalist bourgeoisie and its supporter, the Catholic Church. The novel begins with an account of the family of the major character, known as the "Prince of Journalists." This bizarre family - the grandparents a soldier and a sodomized woman, the parents an orphaned epileptic and a hunchback - is matched by Crevel's bizarre syntax and vocabulary: nouns that initially appear legitimate, intact, and respectable, soon decompose into obscene epithets, making other nouns, both common and proper, suspect. The story continues in this way to deconstruct itself on many levels - literary, semantic, psychological, ideological - until the final chapter, when the luncheon degenerates in a way reminiscent of a Bunuel film and all of the novel'scharacters appear in a dirty movie entitled The Geography Lesson, a final metaphor for the corruption of European society between the world wars.

File under: René Crevel René Crevel Thomas Buckley Ezra Pound Edouard Roditi Dalkey Archive Press / US Fiction / Poetry Surrealism Dada

1982, Janine
by Alasdair Gray

1984 / 2003, English
Softcover, 340 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Published by Canongate Books / Edinburgh

$39.00 - Out of stock

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The unforgettable, challenging and experimental second novel from the author of Lanark. Published in 1984, 1982, Janine remains Scottish author Alasdair Gray's most controversial work. Its use of pornography as a narrative device attracted much criticism, although others, including Gray himself, consider it his best work.

Jock McLeish, failed husband, lover and businessman is alone in a hotel room, drinking whisky, fantasising about sex and contemplating suicide. As he tries to distance himself from reality, his lonely, alcohol-fuelled fantasies are interrupted by a flood of memories, reminding him of his own shortcomings.

An unforgettably imaginative book, deeply experimental in its form and charged with a dark humour, 1982, Janine is a searing portrait of male need and inadequacy. Gray's exploration of politics, religion, powerlessness and pornography has lost none of its power to shock and entertain.

Introduced by Will Self.

"Perhaps the finest artist/writer of his generation . . . Tumultuous, inventive, heart-rending . . . A landmark work"—Will Self

"1982, Janine has a verbal energy, an intensity of vision that has mostly been missing from the English novel since D.H. Lawrence . . . Gray is a natural storyteller and it is the wit and energy of his language that keep the rendering of Jock's lonely, wasted life from being unbearably depressing. The richness of this novel and the pleasures of its language and form are sufficient affirmation, a real message of hope"—New York Times

"Made me realise that contemporary fiction would still be a vivid and vital way of interpreting the world . . . 1982, Janine revived my flagging impetus to continue writing myself"—Jonathan Coe

"1982, Janine is not pornography but a thoughtful and sad study of the human predicament; to be trapped in a world where the little man, woman or country will always be exploited by the big bullies"—Irish Independent

File under: Alasdair Gray Canongate Books / Edinburgh Fiction / Poetry

Your Dreams
by Thomas Moore

2023, English
Hardcover, 106 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
Published by Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin

$44.00 - In stock -

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The long-awaited new novel from a major literary talent. With cover design by Michael Salerno (KIDDIEPUNK).

“I’m so close to falling apart. Fuck it. Who isn’t?”

Thomas Moore’s latest novel Your Dreams, the follow-up to 2021’s devastating Forever, is a visceral yet contained inquiry into the endless need to be understood. Eavesdropping on a debate about cancelled bands, listening to a close friend’s explanation of his disturbing desires, facilitating a conversation about kinks at a party until it goes wrong, Moore’s narrator is less of a character than a witness of desperate disconnection. Your Dreams, despite its impulse to hide, faces the reader head-on in an intimate unmasking, still grasping for closeness in a world of limits.

“Simple words. Deep emotions … beyond prose to another plane. Openness that pours through you.”
Jack Skelley, The Los Angeles Review of Books

“Thomas Moore is one of the best writers the world has in stock.”
Dennis Cooper

File under: Thomas Moore Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin Fiction / Poetry LGBTQ+ Transgressive / Visceral / Abject

Forever
by Thomas Moore

2021, English
Softcover, 140 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin

$34.00 - Out of stock

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SADNESS ALWAYS FINDS PEOPLE

"I'm writing this instead of killing myself" states the narrator of Forever, Thomas Moore's most compelling novel yet. A young man travels alone to Paris, to see out his days in painful reflection and sexual abandon until the money inevitably runs out.

By turns hauntingly elegiac and viscerally brutal, Moore charts with forensic precision the topographies of violence and self-harm that flourish within the dehumanised environment of predatory global capitalism.

Unflinchingly crafted in exquisite prose, Forever is a vividly political and intensely personal vision of life and language pushed to the very limits.

"We are always told that things should be more, everything should be bigger, better, owned, ownable. Things should be forever even though nothing is."

"Thomas Moore is one of the best writers the world has in stock."—Dennis Cooper

Thomas Moore's previous work include In Their Arms, When People Die, Small Talk at the Clinic (with Steven Purtill), and most recently the novel Alone, also published by Amphetamine Sulphate.

Cover art by Micahel Salerno

File under: Micahel Salerno Thomas Moore Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin Eros LGBTQ+ Fiction / Poetry

Alone
by Thomas Moore

2020, English
Softcover, 166 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
Published by Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin

$44.00 - Out of stock

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Has Grindr killed psychic gay powers?

For Halloween I’m dressing as a YouTube video of Corey Haim, when he was still alive and talking about kissing girls, feeling like dolphins were swimming through his blood. And I’d dress as the helpline 1-800-C-O-R-E-Y that he set up when he was seventeen, when he was high and giving advice to young fans about how to stay off drugs.

The pièce de résistance of my costume would be the contrast that the viewer makes in their mind between the image of Corey Haim in The Lost Boys with a beautiful smile and skin that looks healthier than you’ve ever seen and the TMZ report of pneumonia and the enlarged heart that killed him and the question about whether the reader would carry through the metaphor and make the link between the dolphins he said were in his blood and what they would look like now.

"Thomas Moore is one of the best writers the world has in stock, and I always expect a ton from what he writes, but, even so, ALONE is beyond the pale — immaculate, febrile, deadly, a complete stunner."—Dennis Cooper

File under: Thomas Moore Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin LGBTQ+ Eros Fiction / Poetry

World of Interiors
by Aurelia Guo

2022, English
Softcover, 138 pages, 21.6 x 13.9 cm
Published by Divided Publishing / London

$32.00 - Out of stock

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In World of Interiors I use collage and appropriation to destabilise the first-person ‘I’. I also write directly about the inescapable condition of being perceived and positioned by other people. Our lives take place in time and space, meaning in history and geography, as well as in relation to one another – not just interpersonally, but intergenerationally, with all the baggage of race, class, gender and nation that this implies. I write about economic cycles of wealth and poverty at the levels of the individual, group and state. The book is about travel and immigration: migrants, tourists and refugees. It is about the work of survival and the cost of survival. It is also a hopeful book – about how strong and indomitable the will can be.

Aurelia Guo is a writer and researcher based in London. She is a lecturer in law at London South Bank University.

'Tracing the borders between essay and poem, quotation and the fragment, Aurelia Guo’s writing circles and contradicts narratives of power. Her close readings of contested histories, abject biographies and her own experiences of migration and displacement transfix and unsettle. This book is mesmerising.'—Natasha Soobramanien

'An uncategorisable writer … intimate, impersonal, visionary and pitiless.'—Sam Riviere

File under: Aurelia Guo Aurelia Guo Divided Publishing / London Australian Art Fiction / Poetry

Patty Chang
The Wandering Lake

2017, English
Softcover, 124 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
Published by Dancing Foxes Press / Brooklyn Queens Museum / Queens

$50.00 $30.00 - In stock -

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Integrating video, photography, sculpture, writing, and performance into one expansive body of work, Los Angeles–based artist Patty Chang examines the complex way stories develop through geography, history, cultural mythology, fiction, and personal experience. Accompanying her project A Wandering Lake that was in part inspired by turn-of-the-century colonial explorer Sven Hedin’s book Wandering Lake (1938)—which tells the story of a migrating body of water in the Chinese desert—this artist’s book, combining Chang’s writings and travel photographs with historic and theoretical text excerpts as well as photographs of her sculptures and watercolors, is a personal, associative, narrative meditation on mourning, caregiving, and landscape.

Copublished with the Queens Museum in 2017
Edited by Karen Kelly and Barbara Schroeder
With an afterword by Hitomi Iwasaki
Design by Leftloft

This is a guide to mourning; but Chang widens the scope to include political conflict and environmental degradation, and argues that, despite the losses we’ve incurred, we are still collaborators in the making of our worlds.”—Erin Schwartz, The New York Review of Books

File under: Patty Chang Hitomi Iwasaki Karen Kelly Barbara Schroeder Patty Chang Dancing Foxes Press / Brooklyn Queens Museum / Queens Film / Video Art Fiction / Poetry Theory / Essay Sculpture / Installation Photography SALE Painting

Roberte Ce Soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (Two Novels)
by Pierre Klossowski

1971, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 214 pages, 20 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Calder and Boyars / London

$45.00 - Out of stock

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First 1971 hardcover edition of the first English edition of Roberte Ce Soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, published in London by Calder and Boyars. Together these two novels comprise the most fascinating, obsessive, and erotic works of contemporary French fiction. Like the works of Georges Bataille, and those of the Marquis de Sade before him, Klossowski's fiction explores the connections between the mind and the body through a lens of sexuality. Both of these novels feature Octave, an elderly cleric; his striking young wife Roberte; and their nephew, Antoine in a series of sexual situations. But Klossowski's books are about theology as well, and this merging of the sexual with the religious makes this book one of the most painstakingly baroque and intellectual novels of our time.

Pierre Klossowski (August 9, 1905, Paris – August 12, 2001, Paris) was a French writer, translator and artist. He was the eldest son of the artists Erich Klossowski and Baladine Klossowska, and his younger brother was the painter Balthus.

As a writer, Pierre Klossowski wrote full length volumes on the Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche, a number of essays on literary and philosophical figures, and five novels. Roberte Ce Soir (Roberte in the Evening) provoked controversy due to its graphic depiction of sexuality.[1] He translated several important texts (by Virgil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, Nietzsche, and Walter Benjamin) into French, worked on films and was also an artist, illustrating many of the scenes from his novels. Klossowski participated in most issues of George Bataille's review, Acéphale, in the late 1930s.

His 1969 book, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, greatly influenced French philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard.

Very Good copy in VG dust jacket, preserved under mylar wrap.

File under: Pierre Klossowski Pierre Klossowski Calder and Boyars / London Fiction / Poetry Eros Out-of-print / Rare Art Theory / Essay

The Suspended Vocation
by Pierre Klossowski

2020, English
Softcover, 76 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by Small Press / New York

$30.00 - Out of stock

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Made available in English for the very first time by NY based Small Press, Pierre Klossowski's debut novel from 1950, The Suspended Vocation, fictionalizes and satirizes the great erotic artist, philosopher, and iconoclast's brief, wartime flirtation with the priesthood, portraying the Church as a haven for conspiracy, idolatry, perversion, and even atheism.

Written in the form of a disapproving monograph on an anonymous, confessional novel (itself titled The Suspended Vocation), it is the story of the hapless Jérôme, whose lust for holiness leads him astray in a cloistered world full of ideological and physical temptations.

Sometimes a knowing critique of "religious fiction," sometimes a wicked self-parody of Klossowski's own lifelong obsessions, and sometimes a sacerdotal spy novel, The Suspended Vocation is one of the strangest and most audacious debuts in twentieth-century literature.

Translated by Jeremy M. Davies and Anna Fitzgerald, with an introduction by Brian Evenson.

File under: Pierre Klossowski Pierre Klossowski Small Press / New York Fiction / Poetry Eros Art

Proust and Signs : The Complete Text
by Gilles Deleuze

2000, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 190 pages, 19.6 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota

$100.00 - In stock -

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First hardcover edition of the first English translation of the essential work on Proust.

In a remarkable instance of literary and philosophical interpretation, the incomparable Gilles Deleuze reads Proust’s work as a narrative of an apprenticeship of a man of letters. Deleuze traces the network of signs laid by Proust (those of love, art, or worldliness) and moves toward an aesthetics that culminates in a meditation on the literary work as a sign-producing “machine”—an operation that reveals the superiority of “signs of art” in a world of signs.

"Deleuze conducts readers on a corollary search that leads to a new and deeper understanding of the network of signs laid down by Proust."—Translation Review

Translated by Richard Howard

Fine copy in Fine dust jacket.

File under: Gilles Deleuze Marcel Proust Richard Howard University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota Philosophy Fiction / Poetry Theory / Essay Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Psychoanalysis Out-of-print / Rare

Poems and Prose: A Bilingual Edition
by Georg Trakl

2001, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 23 x 15.6 cm
Published by Northwestern University Press / Evanston

$52.00 - Out of stock

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"Trakl's poetry is for me a thing of sublime existence."—Rainer Maria Rilke

A comprehensive English-language edition of verse by the Austrian poet.

An undeniable aura surrounds the name of Georg Trakl, a poet of intense inner vision and originality whose work stands alongside that of Yeats, Valéry, and T. S. Eliot. Besides Rilke, his more famous admirers include Karl Kraus and Martin Heidegger. The distinctive tone of Trakl's work-especially admired by his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein-is autumnal and melancholy. Trakl was writing at a time of spiritual and social disintegration on the eve of the First World War, when personal values and perceptions tended to be subsumed in a more generalized anguish and exaltation. Neo-romantic, early modernist, his rich, vitally sensuous poetry can be seen to mark the transition from impressionism to expressionism, but at the same time transcends such categories. Trakl's poetry has previously only been available in English in short selections or in anthologies. This bilingual edition, the most comprehensive to date, gives readers the chance to get to know Trakl's work more fully than ever before.

Georg Trakl (1887–1914) was born into a middle-class family in Salzburg, Austria. He trained as a pharmacist at the University of Vienna where he started to experiment with drugs and began writing. The patronage of a periodical publisher and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein enabled Trakl to concentrate on his poetry and he brought out his first volume in 1913. The following year he enlisted as a lieutenant in the army medical corps, however, he became very distraught after witnessing the agony of the seriously wounded soldiers. He was sent for observation to a military hospital, where he died of an overdose of cocaine, possibly inadvertently.

Alexander Stillmark is Emeritus Reader in German at University College London. He is the author of numerous comparative studies and articles, especially on Austrian nineteenth and twentieth century literature. Stillmark was awarded the translation prize by the Austrian Federal Chancellors office for Trakl's Poems and Prose.

File under: Georg Trakl Alexander Stillmark Northwestern University Press / Evanston Poetry Fiction / Poetry

Paris, When It's Naked
by Etel Adnan

1993 / 2022, English
Softcover, 115 pages, 14 x 20.3 cm
Published by Post Apollo Press / US

$44.00 - Out of stock

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Etel Adnan's novel PARIS, WHEN IT'S NAKED amazes our retinas, ears, lips, fingertips, and noses with sensing, talking, and envisioning the city of Baudelaire and Delacroix, Mallarme and Picasso, Sartre and Djuna Barnes, Miller and Nin, Vietnamese and African refugees, revolutions and Bohemia. This tale of the Creative Now is told through the fine-tuned sensibility of Etel Adnan, the expatriate poet-painter who knows the French Capital as wholly as she does Beirut and San Francisco, her other homes. She is also the author of SITT MARIE-ROSE, an underground novel of the Lebanese Civil War, and many books of poetry. Her new work is a philosophically charged lyric in prose. The elan vital of every word evokes the eternal present of this wise woman. A highly personal, life-enhancing masterpiece in a deathly age of impersonality.

An indespensable book by an indispensable writer — Morgan Gibson.

File under: Etel Adnan Etel Adnan Post Apollo Press / US Theory / Essay Fiction / Poetry Art