World Food Books

Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe
by Jacques Lezra

1997, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 412 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$60.00 - In stock -

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In groundbreaking readings linking works of Descartes, Shakespeare, and Cervantes with contemporary revisions of Freud and Nietzsche, Unspeakable Subjects argues that the concepts and discourses that have come to define European modernity―the subject's extension and responsibility, genealogies of intention and of freedom, the literary, legal, and medical construction of the body, among others―arise as strategies for evading a profound redefinition of the nature of events in early modern Europe.

Negotiating the often competing claims of rhetorical reading and cultural analysis, Lezra reassesses the grounds of literary and philosophical history as a materialist practice of eventful reading. His original accounts of Don Quixote, Descartes's Second Meditation and Regulae, and Measure for Measure tack between linguistic, psychoanalytic, and cultural materialist approaches to define and discuss the double aspect of the event in early modern literature and philosophy, and in Freudian and Heideggerian critical discourse: the event is at once an accident, the unpredictable, deontic intrusion of the empirical in idealizing schemes, and the disclosing and recollecting of a subject's relation to discursive and cultural morphologies in which empirical events are said properly to take place.

The advent of "modernity," Unspeakable Subjects argues, arises as the novel account of the permanently interrupted negotiation between the event's deontic and its morphological aspects. If Unspeakable Subjects considers on this level the "singularities" of textual events, it also seeks to show their complex relation to the "singularities" of the forms given material history.

Drawing upon such varied sources as the proclamations of James I, the law of entail, Renaissance treatises on typography, and documents on Jacobean and Elizabethan privateering, as well as accounts of the "events" of May 1968 and of Lacan's treatment of the fort-da game, and of the cultural uses of the figure of Don Quixote in Spanish proto-Falangist thought, the author shows that the institutional setting and conditions for literary and philosophical speech-acts, and the graphic constraints upon the bodies that such acts support, also take shape according to patterns set in response to the instability of the event.

NF—Fine copy in NF dust jacket under mylar wrap.

File under: Martin Heidegger Jacques Lacan Sigmund Freud Friedrich Nietzsche William Shakespeare René Descartes Miguel de Cervantes Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Philosophy Psychoanalysis Fiction / Poetry

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 Surrealism

High Solitude
by Léon-Paul Fargue

2024, English
Softcover, 220 pages, 20.32 x 12.7 cm
Published by Contra Mundum Press / New York

$45.00 - Out of stock

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Heir of symbolism, father of surrealism, extraordinary verbal inventor, L on-Paul Fargue reveals himself to be a visionary in his prose poems. He calls High Solitude a "diorama of states of the soul."

In this work, originally published in 1941, Léon-Paul Fargue revives both the night of prehistoric times and that of the end of the world. And, between the two, this fantastic universe also: the Paris that he so loved and of which he was the unforgettable Pi ton. Paris, whose secret geography he traces, in the company of the ghosts of those who were dear to him. The Paris of white nights, stations, and cafes.

But every road, every street, leads to this high, unique place: solitude. "I work at my solitude, searching to guide it in the sea of insomnia where the long line of the dead has thrown us..."

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

"Fargue transforms reality and incites it to undergo perilous metamorphoses, and eventually drives it some way toward the abyss. That is the danger of an art devoted to metaphor: it calls everything into question; but that is also its merit, and in the lament for the life of another era which Fargue readily, too readily, intones, it is right that we should hear the wrong note, the unheard of note, which intrudes into it like the cracked echo of an enigma."—Maurice Blanchot

"There is an unknown demon within Fargue that seems to drive him to the most audacious comparisons, in which he makes use of animals, cathedrals, or monsters to castigate the moral squalor of his day. It is a matter of pure poetry, an agility of spirit that leads him ceaselessly to find resemblances or associations for everything his eyes fall on."—André Beucler

LÉON-PAUL FARGUE (1876-1947) was a writer of poems, novels, and essays. He was a member of Les Apaches, an artist's group formed by Ravel and others, and a close friend of Alfred Jarry. Walter Benjamin considered Fargue the greatest poet in twentieth-century France and the two met in the 30s, with Fargue touring the philosopher around the arcades and other parts of Paris. Fargue was considered the great walker of the city of lights and recounted his perambulations in D'après Paris (1931) and Le Piéton de Paris (1939). Other books of his include Haute solitude (1941) and Déjeuners de soleil (1942).

Rainer J. Hanshe was born in Tehran, Iran, raised in New York, and has resided in Europe and elsewhere. He is the author of the novels The Acolytes and The Abdication, as well as of the hybrid entity Shattering the Muses (2016), a collaboration with visual artist Federico Gori, Closing Melodies (2023), a phantomatic encounter between Nietzsche & Van Gogh, and Dionysos Speed (2024). His translations include Baudelaire's My Heart Laid Bare (2017; 2020), Belgium Stripped Bare (2019), and Paris Spleen (2021), Évelyne Grossman's The Creativity of the Crisis, Antonin Artaud's Journey to Mexico: Revolutionary Messages, and Léon-Paul Fargue's High Solitude. as well as longer and shorter works by other authors.His newest work, Humanimality, is forthcoming in 2025. Beyond Sense, a vatic exploration of the aphasiac disintegration of Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Artaud, is due out in 2026. He is at work on a new book entitled Burn Poet Burn.

File under: Léon-Paul Fargue Contra Mundum Press / New York Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle Surrealism Fiction / Poetry

Stories, Tales, and Fables
by Marquis de Sade

2025, English
Softcover, 656 pages, 20.3 x 12.7 cm
Published by Contra Mundum Press / New York

$68.00 - In stock -

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“It is said I present vice as too odious. The reason: I do not want people to be attracted to vice. I am far more moral than those who make their villains attractive. I shall only ever depict crime in the most vivid colours of hell. I want readers to see crime in all its vile nakedness, to fear it and to hate it, and so I show it in all its horror. Woe to those who dress crime in roses! Their intentions are impure, and I will never imitate them.”—The Marquis de Sade

Written in his Bastille cell in the years between 120 Days of Sodom and Justine, this is the first English translation of Marquis de Sade’s collection of short works, Stories, Tales, and Fables.

Essential reading for all Sade devotees, Stories, Tales, and Fables is an introduction for those who are not yet familiar with the work of this controversial French literary innovator. The short works in this collection range from the dramatic novella, Dorci, to comic tales such as The Duped Judge. Whether he is writing bawdy, exuberant comedies, supernatural tales, or human tragedies, Sade is essentially a moralist, and his exploration of the darker side of human nature remains as relevant to our society as it was to his own.

Psychologically perceptive and defiantly unconventional, Stories, Tales, and Fables reveals the compelling force of Sade’s narrative powers. An accomplished and artful fiction writer, Sade, like all great writers, asks penetrating questions about society, life, and humanity. This collection also includes a selection of Sade’s non-fiction, ranging from his insightful survey of the novelist's art, Some Thoughts on the Novel, to his Last Will and Testament, as well as several essays about Sade’s work by renowned authors including Apollinaire, Heine, Masson, Anatole France and Paul Ėluard.

Translated by R.J. Dent

File under: Marquis de Sade The Marquis de Sade Guillaume Apollinaire Andre Breton André Breton Paul Eluard Heinrich Heine Anatole France R.J. Dent Contra Mundum Press / New York Transgressive / Visceral / Abject Sociology / Politics Eros Fetishism / BDSM Fiction / Poetry Theory / Essay Philosophy

Milton's Minor Poems
by J. B. Leishman; Edited with a Preface By Geoffrey Tillotson

1969, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 340 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by Hutchinson International Authors / London

$10.00 - In stock -

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"When J. B. Leishman died just over six years ago, he left, among his posthumous papers, manuscript lectures on Milton's minor poems which have now been edited for publication by Professor Geoffrey Tillotson, his literary executor. Such a book is doubly welcome: first and foremost, it is by J. B. Leishman, an outstanding scholar and literary critic, author of The Monarch of Wit, Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets and The Art of Marvell's Poetry, as well as translator of Rilke; secondly, it is concerned with Milton's minor poems, to which surprisingly little attention has been paid by recent critics, in comparison with Paradise Lost.

Over half this book is devoted to Comus and Lycidas, the rest chiefly to L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Arcades and the Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity. Characteristically, Leishman is concerned to show from what sources Milton derived his ideas, images and phrases. He makes numerous comparisons, quoting widely both from the Greek and Roman poets and from Milton's English predecessors and contemporaries.

Professor Tillotson writes: 'Many of us nowadays have almost no equipment for reading Milton as he should be read.

Leishman laboured to make himself as nearly the ideal reader of Milton as he could manage. He read what Milton had read, which meant in particular the poetry written in Europe from its beginnings in Greece and Rome? This book is far more, though, than an immensely learned discussion; it is 'critical appreciation' in the fullest sense. Leishman imparts not only scholarship but enthusiasm, as when he lovingly calis Lycidas the most perfect poem of its length in the English language' And after reading Leishman we can indeed turn to Lycidas, and to the other poems, with greater understanding and enjoyment."

Good copy with price-clipped end paper. Good dj with wear to extremities.

File under: J. B. Leishman Geoffrey Tillotson Hutchinson International Authors / London Fiction / Poetry Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Theory / Essay Poetry Out-of-print / Rare

Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture
by Jonathan Freedman

1990, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 204 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$25.00 - In stock -

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The author traces Henry James's career-long encounter with the tradition of British aestheticism and places both in the context of the late-19th-century's professionalization and commodification of literary life. Professions of Taste reopens the question of later James in a new fashion and with a new perspective. A richer genealogy of modernism, and indeed postmodernism, begins to take shape, in which both the problematics of British aestheticism and James's relations with it play an important role. This book aims to enlighten the reader's understanding of the way Pre-Raphaelite concerns fertilized the aestheticist breeding grounds of Anglo-American modernism.

"Our understanding of the way Pre-Raphaelite concerns fertilized the aestheticist breeding grounds of Anglo-American modernism takes a leap forward with Freedman's Professions of Taste, an ambitiously theorized, handsomely written, and enlightening book."—Studies in English Literature

"Professions of Taste is a work that Henry James might have read with pleasure. It is beautifully written, crafted in the highest spirit of critical enterprise."—American Literature

"An important and innovative book. . . . Professions of Taste reopens the question of later James in a new fashion and with a new perspective. A richer geneaology of modernism, and indeed postmodernism, begins to take shape, in which both the problematics of British aestheticism and James's relations with it play an important role."—Henry James Review

"This well-written study sheds much new light on the sphere of experience and expertise, 'the aesthetic,' that was created in the latter half of the nineteenth century."—Virginia Quarterly Review

VG copy in VG dj. Minor light marginalia in erasable lead pencil.

File under: Henry James Oscar Wilde Jonathan Freedman Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Fiction / Poetry Out-of-print / Rare Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Theory / Essay

The Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabès
Edited by Eric Gould (w. Paul Auster, Maurice Blanchot, Mary Ann Caws, Robert Duncan, Rosmarie Waldrop...)

1985, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 252 pages, 22.4 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by University of Nebraska Press / Lincoln

$70.00 - In stock -

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"In the last ten years, nothing of interest has been written in France that does not have its precedent somewhere in the work of Jabès."—Jacques Derrida

Rare first hardcvoer edition of this first full-length study in English of the work of Edmond Jabès. It provides a comprehensive introduction to his books, which — thanks to the translations of Rosmarie Waldrop — are now accessible to a growing British and American audience.

Any discussion of the writing of this Egyptian-born and French-speaking Jewish postmodernist must deal with a number of important literary issues: the nature, necessity, and difficulty of post-Holocaust Jewish literature; contemporary theories of deconstruction and the ontological limits of writing; the poetics of exile and dis-placement. Jabes's works strike at the heart of all these matters.

Eric Gould introduces the collection and contributes one of the seventeen essays. Four significant entries by Jabès himself and an interview by Paul Auster make this book an essential starting point for all future studies. Two commentaries by European critics, Maurice Blanchot and Jean Starobinski, appear in translation. Analyzing and responding to the intensely lyrical and aphoristic writing that makes up the seven volumes of The Book of Questions and the three of The Book of Resemblances are such American scholars and poets as Mary Ann Caws, Robert Duncan, Edward Kaplan, Susan Handelman, Richard Stamelman, Rosmarie Waldrop, Sydney Lévy, Kathryn Kinczewski, and Berel Lang.

Very Good copy in VG dust jacket with minor price tag discolouration/wear.

File under: Jacques Derrida Eric Gould Rosmarie Waldrop Edmond Jabès Mary Ann Caws Robert Duncan Edward Kaplan Susan Handelman Richard Stamelman Sydney Lévy Kathryn Kinczewski Berel Lang Maurice Blanchot Jean Starobinski University of Nebraska Press / Lincoln Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Theory / Essay Out-of-print / Rare Fiction / Poetry Poetry

Paris Peasant
By Louis Aragon

2011, English
Softcover, 228 pages, 20.5 x 15 cm
Published by Exact Change / Boston

$34.00 - In stock -

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Translated and with an introduction by Simon Watson Taylor.

Paris Peasant (1926) is one of the central works of Surrealism, yet Exact Change's edition is the first U.S. publication of Simon Watson Taylor's authoritative translation, completed after consultations with the author.

Unconventional in form--Aragon consciously avoided recognizable narration or character development--Paris Peasant is, in the author's words, “a mythology of the modern.” The book uses the city of Paris as a stage or framework, and Aragon interweaves his text with images of related ephemera: café menus, maps, inscriptions on monuments and newspaper clippings. A detailed description of a Parisian arcade (nineteenth-century precursor to the mini-mall) and another of the Buttes-Chaumont park, are among the great set pieces within Aragon's swirling prose of philosophy, dream and satire.

André Breton wrote of this work: “no one could have been a more astute detector of the unwonted in all its forms; no one else could have been carried away by such intoxicating reveries about a sort of secret life of the city. . . .”

File under: Louis Aragon Simon Watson Taylor Exact Change / Boston Fiction / Poetry Surrealism

Story of the Eye
by Georges Bataille

2001, English
Softcover, 103 pages, 14 x 20.4 cm
Published by City Lights Books / San Francisco

$28.00 - In stock -

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"The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster's horrible crowing." - G.B.

A masterpiece of transgressive, surrealist erotica, Bataille's first novel, published under the pseudonym 'Lord Auch', is still his most notorious work. Called a "metaphysician of evil, Bataille wrote the 1928 novella "Story of the Eye (French: L'histoire de l'œil) as a psychoanalytical task. In this explicit erotic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacrilegious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille's obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.

Georges Bataille (1897-1962), French essayist and novelist, was born in Billom, France. He converted to Catholicism, then later to Marxism, and was interested in psychoanalysis and mysticism, forming a secret society dedicated to glorifying human sacrifice. Leading a simple life as the curator of a municipal library, Bataille was involved on the fringes of Surrealism, founding the Surrealist magazine Documents in 1929, and editing the literary review Critique from 1946 until his death.

File under: Georges Bataille City Lights Books / San Francisco Eros Surrealism Fiction / Poetry Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction

Rogério Duarte
MARGINÁLIA 1

2013, English / Portugese
Softcover, 224 pages, 23 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite / Berlin

$150.00 - In stock -

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The first in-depth survey of Brazilian designer, poet, musician, artist and author, Rogério Duarte's practice, and the first time that a selection of his poems and texts have been translated into English. Now long out-of-print and collectible resource.

Arguably, Rogério Duarte (* 1939, Ubaíra) is “the genius behind the geniuses” (Narlan Mattos) of Brazil's 1960–70s counter-cultural and avant-garde efforts. Thus, it comes as no surprise that key figures in the fields of design, music, art, and cinema, such as Glauber Rocha, Hélio Oiticica, Gilberto Gil, and Caetano Veloso, have provided the posterity with a vast catalogue of testimonies that leave no doubt as to the crucial role that Rogério played in the emergence of what is known today as the Tropicália movement, or Tropicalism. Yet, despite the growing interest that the Brazilian counter-culture of that time encountered on the international stage during the past two decades, Rogério's work has remained almost unknown to a broader public.

Marginália 1 was developed by the designer Manuel Raeder and the artist Mariana Castillo Deball over a period of four years and published by BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE. Profusely illustrated in colour and b/w with texts by Rogério Duarte, Narlan Matos Teixeira, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Mariana Castillo Deball, Manuel Raeder. Published in both English and Portuguese.

As New copy, still sealed.

File under: Rogério Duarte Manuel Raeder Mariana Castillo Deball Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz Narlan Matos Teixeira Rogério Duarte Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite / Berlin Graphic Design / Typography Sound / Music Film / Video Art Fiction / Poetry Out-of-print / Rare Drugs / Psychedelia Concrete Poetry

Livre du Cueur d'Amours Espris Rene of Anjou Published by Thames and Hudson, 1975
by Duke René d´Anjou; illustrated by Barthélemy d'Eyck

1975, English
Hardcover (clothbound in slipcase), 48 pages, 27.5 x 19 cm
Ed. of 3000,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by Thames and Hudson / London

$30.00 - In stock -

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Lavish 1975 slipcase reproduction of Le livre du Coeur d'amour épris (The book of the love-smitten heart) an allegorical romance written in 1457 by King René of Anjou (1409-80). Inspired by a tragic loss, illustrated with the most beautiful twilight scenes of illumination: an allegorical chivalric romance written by Duke René d´Anjou and illustrated by Barthélemy d'Eyck

The text in verse and prose recounts the quest for love of the knight Heart who, in a dream, leaves with Desire in search of his lady, Mercy. This amorous journey combines the knight's studies and his personal memories. The tone is that of a disenchanted man at the end of his life, for whom courtly love and desire both amount to obstacles and suffering. The work combines features of the Arthurian novels in prose and allegorical poems in the style of the Roman de la Rose.

Near Fine—Fine copy all-round.

File under: Barthélemy d'Eyck René d´Anjou Thames and Hudson / London Renaissance / Neoclassicism / Romanticism Out-of-print / Rare Painting Fiction / Poetry Poetry

Confessions of a Mask
by Yukio Mishima

1988, English
Softcover, 174 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Paladin / London

$35.00 - In stock -

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Lovely 1988 Paladin paperback edition.

Confessions of a Mask is Yukio Mishima's most compact, powerful and unadorned novel. It tells, in an autobiographical mode, of the sado-sexual obsessions that were to dominate his life and work, beginning with the angry childhood discovery that Joan of Arc was a woman and an erotic fascination with the figure of Saint Sebastian. Here, in their starkest and most terrifying form, are the preoccupations that found their final expression in Mishima's ritual suicide as an act of political protest at the direction of modern Japanese society.

VG copy with foxing/tanning to pages, light wear.

File under: Yukio Mishima Paladin / London Eros Fiction / Poetry LGBTQ+ Out-of-print / Rare

Silver Press Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (second, expanded edition)
Edited by Sarah Shin and Rebecca Tamás

2025, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 19.8 x 12.9 cm
Published by Silver Press / London

$35.00 - In stock -

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This new edition brings together over forty contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them so that it might be remade anew. Contributors include Rachael Allen, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Kaveh Akbar, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, Rebecca May Johnson, Jane Yeh, Flora Yin Wong. Further contributors include: A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Anthony V. Capildeo, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Paige Emery, Livia Franchini, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Precious Okoyomon, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Sarah Shin, Himali Singh Soin, Tai Shani, Rebecca Tamás, Bones Tan Jones, Dolly Turing,

File under: Rebecca Tamas Sarah Shin Silver Press / London Occult / Esoterica Fiction / Poetry Poetry LGBTQ+

Witch Anthology
Edited by Michelle Tea

2025, English
Softcover, 360 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 cm
Published by Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles

$38.00 - In stock -

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An exploration of the Witch, as radical archetype, in ancient and contemporary life. An adult woman haunted by her childhood muses on the foster system, institutions, and the medieval tale of a girl given to a witch. A genderqueer Brooklynite learns of their past life as a murdered sorceress. An uptight participant at a Northern California witch camp finds community in the kitchen. A professor uses magic to help students under attack by right-wing politicians. In this collection of manifesto, poetry, playscripts, and prose, the archetype of the Witch is honored and unpacked, poked and prodded, owned and othered. From work centered in antiquity to writing which illustrates how primordial occult energies continue to enliven our world today, WITCH: Anthology lays bare a wilderness of myth, magic, trickery, and power swarming beneath the surface of contemporary life.

With work from CAConrad, Edgar Fabián Frías, Amanda Yates Garcia, Ashley Ray, Brooke Palmieri, Yumi Sakugawa, Kai Cheng Thom, Ariel Gore, Myriam Gurba, Fariha Róisín, and many others.

File under: Michelle Tea CAConrad Caconrad Amanda Yates Garcia Ashley Ray Brooke Palmieri Yumi Sakugawa Kai Cheng Thom Ariel Gore Myriam Gurba Fariha Róisín Edgar Fabián Frías Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles Poetry Fiction / Poetry Occult / Esoterica LGBTQ+

We'll Never Be Fragile Again
by Thomas Moore

2025, English
Hardcover, 100 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
Published by Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin

$52.00 - In stock -

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WHAT I SEE IS BEAUTIFUL, BUT I DON'T THINK IT'S ENOUGH

"I’m beyond thrilled to announce that my brand new novel, WE’LL NEVER BE FRAGILE AGAIN, is ready and waiting to enter the world. It’s my sixth novel, and a book that I’m really proud of. I feel it’s the best writing I’ve done so far and I’m excited to share it with you very soon.

"And again, I’m honoured that the incredible Michael Salerno has given me his miraculous skills and created such gorgeous, beautiful artwork for the book.

"It’s a strange, painful book about memory, regrets, art, friendship, desire and death."—Thomas Moore

Original cover photography and design throughout by Michael Salerno.

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

"I RUINED YOUR LIFE"
Poems by Thomas Moore

2025, English
Hardcover, 160 pages, 13 x 13 cm
Published by kiddiepunk / Paris

$60.00 - In stock -

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A series of haunted and tragic events are pieced back together in Thomas Moore’s first book of poems in 7 years. Told in shattered, three-lined verses, "I RUINED YOUR LIFE" explores guilt, mourning, regret and blame with a searingly precise economy of language.

File under: Thomas Moore kiddiepunk / Paris Eros LGBTQ+ Poetry Fiction / Poetry

Paresis
by Isabelle Nicou

2021, English
Softcover, 122 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin

$46.00 - Out of stock

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The paresis conquered my entire right side in a procession of patient and orderly ants. Pins and needles pulsating across my cheek, my leg, my arm, followed by a disturbing heat that flooded them intermittently; then the anesthesia took everything away. There was no pain. I let myself be occupied by your absence; I waited without trying to understand. Almost without moving.

A few days after the first rush of desire – my mouth on your lips, seeking your tongue – after those words that lodged themselves in the pit of my being and yet held no meaning for me, when all I wanted was for your body to never leave me in peace, came the waiting, the endless putting off of things. What was so repugnant about me that your hand wouldn’t venture to touch my breasts, to reach under my sweater or stroke my stomach? That you wouldn’t make the slightest attempt to undress me or lead me to your place?

What was electric in our joining turned aseptic, doctored, calculated as our depravity played itself out. And if you bit the back of my neck, it was with such effort that I wondered if you hadn’t sensed, nearby, a sudden decompensation: a collapsing building, an accident, a scream...

Isabelle Nicou is a French writer (b.1969)
Studying philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Isabelle began researching phenomenology and the works of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, eventually working with Derrida for some years during her studies. She published her first novel, Paresis, in 2002 and her second, Genesis 0, in 2007. In 2015, Isabelle played the role of Nora in the movie Love by Gaspar Noé, selected for the Cannes Film Festival the same year. She is currently finishing her third book, Stricture.

File under: Isabelle Nicou Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin Eros Fiction / Poetry Transgressive / Visceral / Abject

GENESIS 0
by Isabelle Nicou

2021, English
Softcover, 108 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin

$46.00 - Out of stock

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“As soon as my eyes close, I’m besieged by waves of blood. A piece of flesh floats in with the tide. No panic, only silence and then the sound of the bloody debris when it comes crashing into my wall. I’m a rampart. An enclosure. A stronghold. Very strong, and I’m afraid of nothing. Certainly not of blood, of its stench of warm entrails and iron dust.

Tomorrow I’ll gain what life will lose: defeat of my body – of the teeming power of the body – that will disgorge its excess of blood and return me to myself, alone, cut off from all lineage and with no line of descent. Being done with this tension in my breasts. Done with the stigmata of your existence and all those that pass through me in the place where you cling. Done with being possessed like this, double-stitched, overlocked, woven into a web that covers me like a shroud. Tomorrow, it’s the women in my family, their tide of hemoglobin A, that I’ll abort. Once the pills are absorbed, I would wait to be delivered. Alone. Free of all lineage and with no line of descent. Eternal. The genesis and the lack. The apocalypse and its angel. Now and forever. The point zero. O.”

Isabelle Nicou is a French writer (b.1969)
Studying philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Isabelle began researching phenomenology and the works of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, eventually working with Derrida for some years during her studies. She published her first novel, Paresis, in 2002 and her second, Genesis 0, in 2007. In 2015, Isabelle played the role of Nora in the movie Love by Gaspar Noé, selected for the Cannes Film Festival the same year. She is currently finishing her third book, Stricture.

File under: Isabelle Nicou Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin Eros Fiction / Poetry Transgressive / Visceral / Abject

Stricture
by Isabelle Nicou

2022, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 20.5 x 12.5 cm
Published by Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin

$48.00 - In stock -

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Isabelle Nicou returns with her fiercely imaginative new novel Stricture.

A dizzying, kaleidoscopic work of filial obligation, literary mentorship and childhood dreams of alien abduction.

"In Harry’s suburban house, cluttered with books and stacks of papers, time was bending in an elliptical orb that never failed to constrain me during the few months broken by vacations and interruptions—several, for Harry was often invited abroad—where I went once a week to, as my famous mentor put it, “assist” him.

"Around 9:30 in the morning, after he had come—often still in pajamas over which he put on a putty-colored raincoat—to look for me at the train station in his white Fiat Panda, after we had a cup of coffee in the kitchen and greeted his wife who was leaving for her job in Paris, in the fifth arrondissement, just a few streets over from my studio, I had to climb the stairs and get started."

Suffused with eroticism and troubling despair, Stricture is the work of a major talent at the very height of her considerable powers.

File under: Isabelle Nicou Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin Fiction / Poetry Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction Eros

Genet
by Edmund White

1994, English
Softcover, 820 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / average
Published by Picador / USA

$18.00 - Out of stock

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1994 Picador edition of this meticulously researched, award-winning biography of Jean Genet, one of France's most notorious writers. Acclaimed novelist and essayist Edmund White illuminates Genet's experiences in the worlds of crime, homosexuality, politics, and high culture, and gives a compelling analysis of Genet's plays, novels, and essays. With heavily illustrated plate sections.

"A superb introduction to the great novelist and playwright, vagabond, thief and convict, and to the brutal childhood from which he mined his remarkable vision"—J G Ballard, Books of the Year, Sunday Times

Interviewing lovers, friends, publishers and acquaintances, Edmund White draws from material, letters (a number published here for the first time) and other original sources to explore the perverse extremes of Jean Genet's life and writing. Separating the fact from the mythology which was fostered by Genet himself, White's portrait is a deftly painted celebration of French Literature's most modern rogue.

Average—Good copy with general softening to corners, light creasing to covers/spine, general tanning to block.

File under: Edmund White Jean Genet Picador / USA Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language LGBTQ+ Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay Fiction / Poetry

Unica Zürn

2006, English / French
Softcover (french folds), 208 pages, 24 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Halle Saint-Pierre / Paris

$200.00 - Out of stock

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First edition of this wonderful Unica Zürn monograph, published by Publisher Éditions du Panama to accompany a major survey exhibition in Paris in 2006—2007 at the Halle Saint Pierre, curated by Martine Lusardy and Sepp Hiekisch-Picard. Lavishly illustrated, this important catalogue, now long out-of-print, includes a large number of illuminating texts by scholars in bi-lingual English/French, including: "Unica Zürn: designs so dense" by Roger Cardinal; “Du wirst dein Geheimnis sagen (“You will tell your secret”). The anagram in the work of Unica Zürn" by Victoria Appelbe; "The magical encounter between writing and image" by Barbara Safarova; "The work of Unica Zürn, genesis and reception" by Sepp Hiekisch-Picard; "Read Unica Zürn: the contagion of the void" by Jean-Louis Lanoux; "Unica Zürn (July 6, 1916 – October 19, 1970): biographical references" by Rike Felka and Erich Brinkmann. An important, heavily illustrated reference of Zürn's life and work.

The German artist and writer Unica Zürn (1916-1970) joined the ranks of Surrealism in the 1950s, after moving to Paris and taking up residence with fellow German-born Surrealist Hans Bellmer. Already an accomplished author, Zürn was drawn to the Surrealist movement's espousal of automatic drawing and writing, Zürn pursued Henri Michaux's declaration that "the hand dreams," making a vocation of these techniques with her dense, otherworldly drawings and paintings that are labyrinthine in detail, as one form sprouts out of another. Also with her experimental anagrams, natural extensions of her established interest in hidden meanings and coincidences. Zürn produced most of her oeuvre during this intensive period in the 1950s and 60s, though one marked by her deteriorating mental health. Many of her works were made during periods of hospitalisation. In 1970, Zürn leapt to her death from the balcony of the Paris apartment she had shared with Bellmer. Upon his death in 1975, Bellmer was buried, at his request, next to Zürn in Paris’s Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Their grave is marked with the words Bellmer wrote for Zürn’s funeral wreath nearly five years before: “My love will follow you into Eternity.”

Zürn has left us an account of the sensation of automatic drawing: "After an initial moment when the pen 'swims' hesitantly on the paper, she discovers the place assigned to the first eye. It is only when she is being watched from the depths of the paper that she begins to get her bearings and, effortlessly, one motif is added to another."

Very Good copy with light wear.

File under: Gilles Berquet Unica Zürn Hans Bellmer Philippe Fuzeau Unica Zürn Roger Cardinal Victoria Appelbe Barbara Safarova Sepp Hiekisch-Picard Jean-Louis Lanoux Rike Felka Erich Brinkmann Halle Saint-Pierre / Paris Surrealism Drawing Art Fiction / Poetry Out-of-print / Rare

Liberty Or Love! And Mourning For Mourning
Surrealist Novels by Robert Desnos

2013, English
Hardcover, 176 pages, 17.4 x 19.6 cm
Published by Atlas Press / London

$46.00 - In stock -

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Mystery, the marvellous, the city of Paris transmuted by love, and Sanglot the Corsair’s pursuit of the siren Louise Lame: these are the essential ingredients of this masterpiece of early Surrealism. It was originally published in 1924 to immediate and lasting acclaim — except from the public authorities who immediately censored whole sections (here restored).

How describe a novel of such virtuosity and bravura, which never behaves as one would expect? Characters appear and vanish according to whim and desire, they walk underwater, nonchalantly accept astounding coincidences. It’s a hymn to the erotic, an adventure story illumined by the shades of Sade, Lautréamont and Jack the Ripper, a dream at once violent and tender, in fact the perfect embodiment of the Surrealist spirit: joyful, despairing, and effortlessly scandalous.

Desnos was one of the earliest members of the Paris Surrealist group. His remarkable talents first emerged during the “Period of Sleeping Fits”, when the group was investigating unconscious and trance states. Able to put himself in trance at will, he would pour out sonnets, prophecies, enigmatic drawings. “Desnos more than any of us got closest to the Surrealist truth,” wrote Breton in their first manifesto.

An active member of the Resistance, Desnos died of typhus two weeks after his liberation from the Nazi concentration camp at Terezin.

Translated and introduced by Terry Hale.

File under: Robert Desnos Robert Desnos Atlas Press / London Surrealism Fiction / Poetry Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction

Semmelweis
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

2008, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 17 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Atlas Press / London

$25.00 - Out of stock

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Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) is best known for his early novels Journey to the End of the Night (1932)—which Charles Bukowski described as the greatest novel of the past 2,000 years—and Death on the Installment Plan (1936), but this delirious, fanatical "biography" predates them both.

The astounding yet true story of the life of Ignacz Semmelweis provided Céline with a narrative whose appalling events and bizarre twists would have lain beyond credibility in a work of pure fiction.

Semmelweis, now regarded as the father of antisepsis, was the first to diagnose correctly the cause of the staggering mortality rates in the lying-in hospital at Vienna. However, his colleagues rejected both his reasoning and his methods, thereby causing thousands of unnecessary deaths in maternity wards across Europe. This episode, one of the most infamous in the history of medicine, and its disastrous effects on Semmelweis himself, are the subject of Céline's semi-fictional evocation, one in which his violent descriptive genius is already apparent. The overriding theme of his later writing—a caustic despair verging on disgust for humanity—finds its first expression here, and yet he also reveals a more compassionate aspect to his character.

Semmelweis was not published until 1936, after the novels that made Céline famous. "It is not every day we get a thesis such as Céline wrote on Semmelweis!" wrote Henry Miller of this volume.

VG copy with some cover rubbing/wear.

File under: Louis-Ferdinand Celine Atlas Press / London Fiction / Poetry Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay Health Sociology / Politics

House of Dolls
by Ka-tzetnik 135633

1958, English
Softcover, 222 pages, 18 x 11.5 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by Panther / London

$40.00 - Out of stock

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1958 Panther paperback edition of House of Dolls, the 1953 novella by Ka-tzetnik 135633, the pen name of Yehiel De-Nur (1909-2001), a Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor, whose books were inspired by his time as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The novella describes "Joy Divisions", which were groups of women imprisoned in the concentration camps during World War II who were kept for the sexual pleasure of other inmates. It is the book that inspired the name of British post-punk band Joy Division. One of their early songs, "No Love Lost", also contains a short excerpt from the novella. The success of the book showed there was a market for Nazi exploitation popular literature, known in Israel as Stalags. However Yechiel Szeintuch from the Hebrew University rejects links between the smutty Stalags on the one hand, and Ka-Tzetnik's works, which he insists were based on reality, on the other.

Lord Russell of Liverpool: "In my book ' THE SCOURGE OF THE SWASTIKA' I wrote regarding Auschwitz, the 'Camp of Death', these words: 'Were everything to be written it would not be read. If read, it would not be believed.' Ka-tzetnik's book ' THE HOUSE OF DOLLS' is based on a diary kept by a young Jewess who was captured in Poland when she was fourteen years old and subjected to enforced prostitution in a Nazi labour camp. It is a terrible story which, nevertheless, should be read; it shows the depths of bestiality to which Germans sank under Hitler during World War Il. The story would be incredible were not the authenticity of its background undisputed."

Good copy with light cover wear and some light rippling to the cover and pages, toning to pages.

File under: Ka-tzetnik 135633 Lord Russell of Liverpool Panther / London Crime / Violence Out-of-print / Rare Fiction / Poetry