World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
SHOP CLOSED FOR SUMMER
RE—OPEN JAN 2
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2000, English / German
Softcover, 63 pages, 21.5 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Kunstverein Braunschweig / Germany
Lukas & Sternberg / Berlin
$40.00 - In stock -
Edited by Tom Burr and Karola Grässlin, Kunstverein Braunschweig
Texts by Tom Burr, Carina Herring, Juliane Rebentisch
Video peepshows, porno theatres, garden pavilions – with subtle insight, Tom Burr (*\b. 1963) sheds light upon what is marginalized, or not immediately recognizable. His works, which make reference to Minimal art’s object sculptures, redefine them in current socio-economic and “queer” aspects. By acting as an intermediary between formal stringency and socio-political content, Tom Burr’s works overcome Hal Foster’s criticism that Minimal art tended to “handle the viewer as historically innocent and sexually indifferent." With comprehensive texts and illustrations, this book features an artist who belongs among those who have shaped a new form of institutionally critical art.
In her seminal text on “Tom Burr’s Minimalism”, author Juliane Rebentisch discusses how the artist “injects a new political and aesthetic engagement into certain works by Smith, Serra, Smithson, and Morris, by shifting their logic.” Detecting a melancholic aspect of Burr’s queer minimalist appropriations, she writes that “they connect in a peculiar way with what one might call the sepulchral quality which seems to predestine the anti-monumentalism of the minimalist aesthetic for the tasks of memorial art. At the same time the dialectic of mourning and desire, which can be released by the recollection of a largely destroyed sub-culture in Burr’s minimalist adaptations, is also, at least potentially, directed forward towards another future – a queer future. In so far as Burr’s works also function as allegorical gestures by means of which an image of the present crystallizes in images of the past, this opens the present up to the future.“
As New.
1992, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket + obi), 190 pages, 14.5 x 10.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
Futami Shobo / Japan
$60.00 - In stock -
Amazing pocket art book of fetish masters John Willie and Eric Stanton. Bondage Comix was edited by Makoto Ohrui and Japanese novelist Mari Akasaka (both editors of SALE2/Fiction Inc.) and published in Tokyo Japan by Futami Shobo in 1992. Packed cover-to-cover with colour and b/w reproductions of classic artworks by Willie and Stanton, from "Sweet Gwendoline" to "From Girl to Pony" to "Beached", Fetish and Bizarre publications, John Willie's bondage photography, Stanton fashions, and much more. Perfectly compiled in the way SALE2 did so well, with elegant scrapbook style, dense with imagery, blown-up, full-bleed reproductions from many publications. Cover artwork and postcard insert by John Willie.
John Alexander Scott Coutts (1902—1962), better known by the pseudonym John Willie, was an artist, fetish photographer, editor and the publisher of the first 20 issues of the fetish magazine Bizarre, featuring his characters Sweet Gwendoline and Sir Dystic d'Arcy.
Eric Stanton (1926—1999) was an American underground cartoonist and fetish art pioneer. While Stanton began his career as a bondage fantasy artist for Irving Klaw, the majority of his later work depicted gender role reversal and proto-feminist female dominance scenarios.
Makoto Ohrui founded the publishing house Fiction Inc. (later Radical Silence Production), the magazine SALE2, the gallery THE deep in Tokyo, and the magazine THE International. Ohrui was art director for SALE2, Purple, Rockin' On, and designed many books.
Mari Akasaka (b. 1964) is a Japanese novelist. In 1999 her novel Vibrator was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, which was adapted into a 2003 film directed by Ryūichi Hiroki. She was again nominated for the Akutagawa prize in 2000 for her novel, Muse, and won the Noma Literary Prize for New Writers for the same novel.
Very Good copy, with obi.
1977, English
Softcover, 396 pages, 18 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$28.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first 1977 Penguin paperback edition of the first 1973 English translation. Cover design by Tsutomu Harada.
In November 1970, Yukio Mishima committed suicide, in the old Japanese way by disembowelling himself. His last years were devoted to the completion of a quartet of novels, The Sea of Fertility, of which this is the second volume.
Isao is a young, engaging patriot, and a fanatical believer in the ancient samurai ethos. He turns terrorist, organising a violent plot against the new industrialists, who he believes are threatening the integrity of Japan and usurping the Emperor’s rightful power. As the conspiracy unfolds and unravels, Mishima brilliantly chronicles the conflicts of a decade that saw the fabric of Japanese life torn apart.
Mishima's own superlative literary qualities... include a complete control of complex nárrative, the ability to convey psychological depths often far removed from the everyday, and a sense of total commitment and response to the experience of life, all of which transcend the author's personal obsessions'—New Statesman
Yukio Mishima (1925—1970), one of the most spectacularly gifted writers in modern Japan, was born into a samurai family in 1925. Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai ("Shield Society"), an unarmed civilian militia. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. His works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Mishima's work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death", according to author Andrew Rankin. In November 1970 he and his Tatenokai forced their way into a Self-Defense Force headquarters in Tokyo, where Mishima, after reading out a proclamation, committed ritual suicide with a young follower in the commanding officer's room. On the morning of his death, the last volume of Mishima's tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility (The Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel) was delivered to his publisher.
Scarce first 1976 Penguin paperback edition of the first 1968 English translation. Cover design by Tsutomu Harada.
Shunsuké, an ageing novelist, hits on a brilliant plan to avenge himself on womankind, who, he believes, have blighted his life. He bribes a beautiful homosexual student, Yuichi, to marry. The plan works, Yuichi's wife is made miserable. And Shunsuké gets Yuichi to compromise two of his past tormentors, the blackmailing Mrs Kaburagi and Kyoko, a dizzy socialite. But Yuichi, now the toast of Tokyo's 'gay people' and free of all moral restraint, refuses to be further manipulated. Soon the old writer sees his protégé, his creation, turn into a monster dangerously out of control.
Mishima's own superlative literary qualities... include a complete control of complex nárrative, the ability to convey psychological depths often far removed from the everyday, and a sense of total commitment and response to the experience of life, all of which transcend the author's personal obsessions'—New Statesman
Yukio Mishima (1925—1970), one of the most spectacularly gifted writers in modern Japan, was born into a samurai family in 1925. Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai ("Shield Society"), an unarmed civilian militia. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. His works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Mishima's work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death", according to author Andrew Rankin. In November 1970 he and his Tatenokai forced their way into a Self-Defense Force headquarters in Tokyo, where Mishima, after reading out a proclamation, committed ritual suicide with a young follower in the commanding officer's room. On the morning of his death, the last volume of Mishima's tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility (The Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel) was delivered to his publisher.
Good copy with general wear and age, book block cocked from storage, tanning. Sample images only.
1977, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 18 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$22.00 - In stock -
Scarce first 1977 Penguin paperback edition of the first 1973 English translation. Cover design by Tsutomu Harada.
The third novel in Mishima's final tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility.
In Bangkok, Honda discovers Princess Ying Chan, the second reincarnation of his friend Kiyoaki. Years later she reappears in Japan where the ageing Honda commits himself to establishing the mystical link between her and her predecessors.
'Once again Mishima displays all the gifts which made him by the time of his death one of the few writers whose greatness was unquestionable. The shattering beauty is still there, the humour, eroticism, sensuousness, the fusion of passion and imagery... Mishima's greatness transcends cultural barriers'—Janice Elliott in the Sunday Telegraph
'The present translation perfectly conveys the sharpness and selectivity of the author's descriptions, his wonderfully acute sense of social and historical placing, and above all that unsparing apprehension, almost lost to Western literature, of worldly vanity'—The Times Literary Supplement
Yukio Mishima (1925—1970), one of the most spectacularly gifted writers in modern Japan, was born into a samurai family in 1925. Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai ("Shield Society"), an unarmed civilian militia. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. His works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Mishima's work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death", according to author Andrew Rankin. In November 1970 he and his Tatenokai forced their way into a Self-Defense Force headquarters in Tokyo, where Mishima, after reading out a proclamation, committed ritual suicide with a young follower in the commanding officer's room. On the morning of his death, the last volume of Mishima's tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility (The Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel) was delivered to his publisher.
Good—Very Good copy with general light cover wear and age. No spine creases.
1977, English
Softcover, 206 pages, 18 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$24.00 - In stock -
Scarce first 1977 Penguin paperback edition of the first 1974 English translation. Cover design by Tsutomu Harada.
With this short hovel Mishima concludes The Sea of Fertility, work he conceived as his own
literary monument: When he completed the manuscript, in November 1970, the author committed ritual suicide, thus giving a tragic climax to the themes thay shaped his life and work.
'Mishima's great novel... supremely eloquent, tragically obsessed with fantasy, magnificently written, this closing of the Honda-Mishima saga terminates a great and bitter achievement'—Ronald Blythe in the Sunday Times
'An unexpected and brilliant end... These four remarkable novels are the most complete version we have of Japan in the twentieth century'—Paul Theroux in The Times
Average—Good copy with cover wear and light back cover creasing, tanning to block.
1976, English
Softcover, 428 pages, 18 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$48.00 - In stock -
Scarce first 1976 Penguin paperback edition of the first 1968 English translation. Cover design by Tsutomu Harada.
Shunsuké, an ageing novelist, hits on a brilliant plan to avenge himself on womankind, who, he believes, have blighted his life. He bribes a beautiful homosexual student, Yuichi, to marry. The plan works, Yuichi's wife is made miserable. And Shunsuké gets Yuichi to compromise two of his past tormentors, the blackmailing Mrs Kaburagi and Kyoko, a dizzy socialite. But Yuichi, now the toast of Tokyo's 'gay people' and free of all moral restraint, refuses to be further manipulated. Soon the old writer sees his protégé, his creation, turn into a monster dangerously out of control.
Mishima's own superlative literary qualities... include a complete control of complex nárrative, the ability to convey psychological depths often far removed from the everyday, and a sense of total commitment and response to the experience of life, all of which transcend the author's personal obsessions'—New Statesman
Yukio Mishima (1925—1970), one of the most spectacularly gifted writers in modern Japan, was born into a samurai family in 1925. Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai ("Shield Society"), an unarmed civilian militia. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. His works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Mishima's work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death", according to author Andrew Rankin. In November 1970 he and his Tatenokai forced their way into a Self-Defense Force headquarters in Tokyo, where Mishima, after reading out a proclamation, committed ritual suicide with a young follower in the commanding officer's room. On the morning of his death, the last volume of Mishima's tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility (The Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel) was delivered to his publisher.
Good—Very Good copy with general light cover wear and age. No spine creases.
1978, German
Hardcover (w. hard slipcase), 22 pages + 34 plates, 35 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Edition Volker Huber / Offenbach am Main
$35.00 - Out of stock
First German 1978 edition of Paul Wunderlich's erotic portfolio "Homo Sum", published by Edition Volker Huber, Offenbach am Main. An lovely over-sized, hardcover edition of 34 full-page drawings housed in hard slipcase with illustrated plate by German painter, sculptor and graphic artist, Paul Wunderlich (1927—2010). Homo Sum is Wunderlich's more explicit works including many same gender male and female scenarios rendered in his iconic airbrush style.
Paul Wunderlich (1927—2010) is known for his erotic, Surrealist-inspired paintings, prints, and sculptures featuring mythological imagery. A pioneer of Magic Realism, Wunderlich received the Japan Cultural Forum Award and the Kunstpreis des Landes Schleswig-Holstein among other accolades. Despite his iconic works being held in some of the world’s most prominent museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, Wunderlich remains an “artist’s artist.” He studied graphic arts at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg; he later learned printmaking techniques from Oskar Kokoschka and Emil Nolde. His early paintings displayed an abstract, Tachist style, although he embraced figuration in the late 1950s and he developed his characteristic style. He portrayed dismembered figures and sexually provocative imagery reminiscent of the Surrealists, but also influenced art movements such as Art Deco and Art Nouveau. His work was critically received as so scandalous that, in 1960, his lithograph series Qui s’explique (1959) was seized by authorities in Hamburg, and he often had trouble with raids that destroyed his works. Paul Wunderlich was married to photographer Karin Székessy in 1971, and the couple pursued art projects together.
Average copy due to significant foxing (spotting) to pages throughout, light wear, tanning to box edges.
2025, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 30.5 x 22.6 cm
Published by
Richardson / New York
$77.00 - In stock -
New "California" themed issue of of Richardson magazine, the cult magazine that navigates the murky boundaries between art and obscenity, edited by Andrew Richardson (of Richardson label, fashion stylist w. Supreme, CK, Valentino, etc.) and art direction by Laura Genninger of STUDIO 191 (designer of AnOther Magazine, etc.). Featuring Sky Bri, Photographed by Harley Weir. With additional work by Frances Stark, Mario Ayala, Andy Capper, Bruce Wagner, Ed Ruscha, Bruce LaBruce, Chivas Clem, Alex Kekesi, Delicious Tacos, Jack Mason, Kazumi, Karley Sciortino, Noah Kumin, Taylor Lorenz, Weirdo Dave / Fuck This Life, William E. Jones, Scarlett Kapella, Stewart Home, Rosie Marks, A. Kircher, Anna Khachiyan, and Dasha Nekrasova.
2010, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 30.5 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Richardson / New York
$220.00 - In stock -
Incredible fourth issue ("The Female Gaze Issue") of Richardson magazine, the cult magazine that navigates the murky boundaries between art and obscenity, edited by Andrew Richardson (of Richardson label, fashion stylist w. Supreme, CK, Valentino, etc.) and art direction by Laura Genninger of STUDIO 191 (designer of AnOther Magazine, etc.). This fourth issue (The Female Gaze Issue) features the Sasha Grey cover photographed by Glen Luchford (w. continued photo feature inside), and featuring work by Carolee Schneemann, Valie Export, Genesis P-Orridge, GB Jones, Alex Needham, Amy Kellner, Kira Jolliffe, Bunny Yeager, Tristan Taormino, Michelle Maccarone, Mila Djordjevic, Gunter Rambow, V. Vale/ Re/Search, Simon Ford, Clara Herve & Eugene Krafft, Carol Bove, Sue Williams, Tracy Emin, Carolin Kunst & Sunje Todt, Kotaro Iizawa, and much more. Riddled with bans and confiscations due to explicit un-censored imagery by Japanese censorship standards.
Very Good copy.
1998, English / Japanese
Softcover, 128 pages, 30.5 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Little More / Tokyo
Richardson / New York
$250.00 - Out of stock
Controversial inaugural (December 1998) issue of Richardson magazine, the cult 1990's art/sex magazine published by Little More in Japan, edited by Andrew Richardson (of Richardson label, fashion stylist w. Supreme, CK, Valentino, etc.) and art direction by Laura Genninger of STUDIO 191 (designer of AnOther Magazine, etc.). Navigating the murky boundaries between art and obscenity, an honourable pursuit in Japan, this first issue features the double-cover (censored and non-censored) of adult film star Jenna Jameson shot by Glen Luchford, along with J.J. photo feature and interview, Richard Prince’s “Spiritual America” text and photography/artworks inc. the infamous 11-year-old Brooke Shields piece, "Be Broken" erotic artwork gallery by Harmony Korine, "Love Letter to Amerika" from Takashi Homma, Terry Richardson photography, "Cunt" fiction by Stewart Home, photos by French cinematographer (Gummo, Ulysse, Boy Meets Girl, etc.) Jean-Yves Escoffier, Japanese V-Cinema and pink star Nao Saejima, Stewart Home on Cosey Fanni Tutti, many works of photography and text by American photojournalist and writer Erika Langley, erotic photography by skater Ed Templeton of photographer and wife Deanna Templeton, vintage erotica collection by photographer Bela Borsodi, poetry and more! Riddled with bans and confiscations due to explicit un-censored imagery by Japanese censorship standards.
Texts in both English and Japanese.
Very Good copy.
2025, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 12 pages, 13.4 x 13.6 cm
Limited Edition,
Published by
Oriette Wood / Naarm
$40.00 - In stock -
"Comic Trials" is a new small edition hand silk-screen and assembled graphic zine from Oriette Wood.
"A homage to the golden age of comics, this screen printed publication is an exercise of drawing and half-toning in colour, formatted like a comic panel. Like a lot of my work these pages are scenes of love, kink, femininity, and something other."—Oriette Wood
Silkscreened in very limited edition
2025, English
Softcover, 16 silk-screened pages, 14 x 16 cm
Edition of 30,
Published by
Oriette Wood / Naarm
$70.00 - In stock -
"'Insect Smut' is a small edition graphic zine made up of 14 collages. These are made by abstracting references from my personal archive of smut, kink, and comics. It's a homage to the vibrant scene of French graphic zines in the 1980's to 90's. Printed and bound at Troppo Print Studio over a three week period."—Oriette Wood
Silkscreened edition of 30
2024, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 256 pages, 22 x 17 cm
Published by
Thin Man Press / London
$74.00 - In stock -
Cancelled Confessions reveals Claude Cahun to be a major surrealist writer and pioneering queer theorist almost a century ahead of her time.
"The re-appearance of this glittering and dissenting semi-lost epic is a gift… Cahun’s writing is stylish, playful and prescient, peopled with angel slang, flowering disavowals, God’s lipstick and an infinite layering of masks."—Daisy Lafarge, author.
In 1930, Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) and her partner, artist Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe) published their surrealist masterpiece, Aveux non Avenus, translated here as Cancelled Confessions and available in English for the first time in twenty years. Susan de Muth’s revised translation of Cancelled Confessions has a new introduction by art historian Amelia Groom which contextualizes it within contemporary queer discourse.
"It’s a surrealist, trans, queer, autofiction, (anti)memoir, and also none of those things. It’s a text, and a life, felt as connection and at the same time completely singular."—McKenzie Wark, author.
'The kaleidoscopic text is pieced together from diverse fragments… there are philosophical and subversive theological musings, aphorisms and fables, letters and dialogues, dreams and hymns, nightmares and jokes,' writes Groom. The book’s nine sections are prefaced by dreamlike photomontages (reproduced in high definition here) which reflect, illuminate and converse with the verbal content. Upon publication, Aveux non Avenus simply baffled all but a few of Cahun’s friends and admirers, leading Cahun to describe herself as, ‘An unwanted Cassandra’. Now, however, is the time of the remarkably prescient Cahun and Moore.
"Cahun was a pioneer of gender-bending role-playing…eerily ahead of her time she has attracted an almost cult-like following."—The late David Bowie
Cahun and Moore’s appeal is wide and universal. They were adventurers in life as in art. Cahun famously terrified Andre Breton in the 1920s when she appeared in a Paris café with her head shaved and painted gold. Having moved to Jersey in 1938, Cahun and Moore waged a mischievous two-person resistance campaign against the occupying Nazi forces from 1940. Finally caught and imprisoned in 1944, they were sentenced to death in 1945, saved at the very last moment by the armistice.
2025, English
Hardcover, 128 pages, 24.2 x 17.2 cm
Published by
Magic Hour Press / New York
$90.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Francis Schichtel, Jordan Weitzman, Nan Goldin.
Text by Hilton Als.
Lankton's iconic and startling doll sculptures as we have never seen them before: through her own eyes
This is the first monograph on the trans visionary artist Greer Lankton (1958–96), whose lifelike doll sculptures shocked 1980s New York. Lankton's dolls, which she began making as a child and produced obsessively until her death at age 38, were a means to explore her fraught relationship with the human body. In the book's 100 photographs, all shot by Lankton herself, these figures take on a life of their own, kvetching at a party, strolling along a beach, or lounging on a stoop in the East Village. Among this extraordinary cast of oddballs—usually femme, often freakish, always radiating a glamorous confidence—we find characters of Lankton's own invention alongside well-known icons such as Divine, Coco Chanel, Andy Warhol and even Lankton herself.
Born in 1958 to a Presbyterian minister in Michigan, Greer Lankton moved to New York in 1978 and became a rising star of the downtown scene. There, her deviant elegance was immortalized in photographs by Peter Hujar, David Armstrong and Lankton's close friend Nan Goldin, who described her as "one of the luminaries of the East Village renaissance: beautiful, glamorous, wild and hysterically funny." Lankton's work was a neighborhood fixture, in exhibitions at the gallery Civilian Warfare and in regular window displays at Einstein's Boutique, and was also celebrated farther afield, in era-defining group shows at PS1 and the Venice Biennale. Her final work, an immersive installation created for the Mattress Factory in 1996, remains on permanent view.
“Now I’m completely bowled over. Greer Lankton has got to be a genius…these are her dolls at her best... One scene is a birthday party for a ninety year old woman of culture and taste. I can’t describe anything that is going on in this scenario because I could actually write a complete novel about the party and the party people…. What a celebration! Hallelujah!!! —Cookie Mueller
“Greer Lankton’s dolls are entire biographies on legs, whole movies, three-dimensional Alice Neels. And they’re all self-projections, all of her contradictory impulses--abjection and eminence, dissipation and what comes after, gender fixed or fluid--examined lovingly and pitilessly. She could locate variously aged and battered versions of herself on the street, in a movie, at a party, alone on a park bench--with her eye she could see herself from outer space, sub speciae aeternitatis. And her taste and her skills were impeccably suited to her unique medium. Why did we have to lose her?”—Lucy Sante
“I found my first encounters with Greer Lankton’s grotesque dolls shocking. My cohort of 80’s artists challenged authorship and valued detachment and did not warm to raw displays of intimacy (and god forbid craft) that were the core of Greer’s prescient, messy battle with beauty and pain. Current culture is hungry for exactly what Greer’s art serves up - the exploration of gender, imperfection, self-expression and authenticity.”—Laurie Simmons
“Lankton’s creatures live in a psychic interline where genitals and gender identity are scrambled in the play of appearances, and reveal an exacerbated, possibly mutilated sexuality as the trigger of personality. Like Theodora Skiptare’s housewife automata that vomit and menstruate, Lankton’s ambisexual dolls wear faces of crumbling self-assurance, or even moronic friendliness and self-contentment, while breathing pain in and out through their pores."—Gary Indiana, Art in America, 1984
“Of course, to say that a doll by Greer Lankton is “just a doll” is absurd. Lankton’s dolls are like no other dolls, and no Lankton doll is like any of her dolls. For that matter many Lankton dolls weren’t even like themselves from one moment to the next. Lankton constantly reworked them ‘changing their gender, identities, sizes and clothes.’ But some…change by being photographed from different angles, using different lighting and backgrounds. Simple as the photographs are, they manage to bring the dolls to life, give them a story.”—Douglas Crimp
“She has become, to this young community what Rimbaud must have been to Paris in the 1920's. She has been compared to Hans Bellmar and to Frida Kahlo, for both have created highly self referential imagery affected heavily by events which have changed the course of their lives.”—Dean Savard, co-founder of Civilian Warfare
2025, English
Hardcover (w. slipcase), 192 pages, 31.6 x 26.6 cm
Published by
Monacelli Press / New York
$140.00 - Out of stock
A lavish portfolio of never-before-seen erotic drawings by celebrated twentieth-century American artist and gay icon, Paul Cadmus.
Paul Cadmus entered the art scene in the 1930s with paintings of dream-like urban demi-mondes: roiling tableaux of beatniks, sailors, and prostitutes. Undergirding his work has always been the artist’s masterful draftsmanship, seen in hundreds of drawings of nude male models, chief among them his long-time lover and muse, Jon Anderson. Paul Cadmus: 49 Drawings collects these never-before-seen drawings for the first time, presenting a singular body of work that exemplifies Cadmus’s classical proficiency, channeled into an obsessive emphasis of his model’s erotic zones.
Packaged in a stamped portfolio envelope, this is a landmark collection of queer art by a twentieth-century master, its images complemented by an introduction by Graham Steele that details the significance of Paul Cadmus to his career in the art world, plus an essay by leading queer-art scholar Richard Meyer, as well as a momentous discussion with painters Nash Glynn, Doron Langberg, and Oscar yi Hou, moderated by curator and critic Jarrett Earnest.
This elegant book, sumptuously produced to reflect the eminence of this newly revealed body of work, and the intimacy of its subject matter, represents a rare exposé of a significant body of unknown work from a major twentieth-century artist, and a substantial contribution to the study and legacy of queer art.
Graham Steele is founder of Graham Steele, Inc., a Los Angeles-based private art dealership.
Richard Meyer is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University.
Jarrett Earnest is a critic and curator whose books includeWhat it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics andThe Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930-1955.
2025, English
Softcover, 460 pages, 17.8 x 11 cm
Published by
Verdurin / London
$48.00 - In stock -
"Be a bad gay. Be a very bad gay! Read Inversion! This pugnacious book seeks to undermine the new identitarian hegemony of 'queer,' with its alphabet soup nomenclature. The essayists in Inversion survey a culture-war-torn, dystopian landscape wrecked by mindless conformity, rampant atomization, politically correct cancel culture gone mad, sexual puritanism (I never thought I'd see the day!), circular firing squads, victim Olympics, micro-aggression regression, anti-class-consciousness, and yes, even the (arguably) inherent misogyny of drag!" If you're a faggot who is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, this is the book for you! Guaranteed to trigger, or your money back!"—Bruce LaBruce, director of The Raspberry Reich
With contributions by Blake Smith, Roger Lancaster, David Moulton, Stephen Adubato, Amir Naaman, Ran Heilbrunn, Pierre d'Alancaisez, Travis Jeppesen, Oliver Davis, Yotam Feldman, and Marcas Lancaster.
Today’s world of PrEP, Pride parades, and gay marriage eclipses the wildest dreams of the sexual revolution. While it was formerly deviant to promote gay lifestyles, it is now ‘problematic’ to suggest that not all departures from the norm are in the homosexual’s best interest. Amidst this excess, a new wave of discontent rises among the once-keenest proponents of sexual progress: gay men.
What happened in the transition from inversion to homosexuality, gayness, and queerness? Why do some gay men lament the freedoms afforded to them by sexual and social acceptance? Bold and daring, the essays in Inversion reflect on the vicious cycle of debasement, acceptance, sacrifice, and liberation that homosexuality has been stuck in for longer than it wishes to acknowledge.
As gay culture fails to confront its history, it adopts hollow narratives of struggle. Some gay men fear losing their freedoms, some advocate for sexual restraint, while others, lost in the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ ‘community,’ continue to make maximalist ideological demands of those outside. These responses mark a fracture in gay life. If there is some essence to homosexual desire, how is it being served by today’s gay culture and queer politics? Has the gay man — homosexual, queer, or inverted — rendered himself obsolete?
Bringing together contributions by eleven leading thinkers, theorists, and critics who examine the consequences of pink-washing history, denial of sexual realities, and the memetic nature of desire, Inversion reclaims homosexuality’s lost depth in an era of profound discontent.
Fearless in its critique and challenging in its proposals, Inversion considers the cultural and political aspects of gay life after homosexuality as it battles with queerness and the allure of a reactionary return, pharmacologically fueled sexual degeneration, and existential dread.
2005, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 15 x 21.1 cm
Published by
Grove Press / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
Set largely on the pages of a website where gay male escorts are reviewed by their clients, and told through the postings, emails, and conversations of several dozen unreliable narrators, The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth. Explicit, shocking, comical, and displaying the author's signature flair for blending structural complexity with direct, stylish, accessible language, The Sluts is Cooper's most transgressive novel since Frisk, and one of his most innovative works of fiction to date.
Dennis Cooper (born 1953) is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor and performance artist who grew up in the Southern California. In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr. Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.
Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.
"Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer"—William Burroughs
"Cooper’s language is at first intense, nearly minimal, then suddenly, it ascends into vision"—Kathy Acker
1994, English
Softcover, 144 pages , 14 x 21 cm
Published by
Grove Press / New York
$34.00 - Out of stock
First published in 1994.
Physically beautiful and strangely passive, George Miles attracts his fellow students with a mysterious promise, like a wallet lying on the street. One after another, his teenage friends rifle through George, ransacking him for love or anything else they could trust in the mindlessness of middle America. What they find is a vision of nightmare intensity, in a novel that assaults the senses as it engages the mind.
Closer follows the links of desire and value that drag George into the arms of men like John, an artist who drains his portraits of humanity in order to find what lies beneath; Alex, fascinated by splatter films and pornography; and Steve, an underground entrepreneur who turns his parents’ garage into a nightclub. These and others pass George from hand to hand, hoping to feel even one emotion clear and uncorrupted by society, but George remains a blurry ghost until he is picked up by two men in their forties. Tom and Philippe think they can find reality in the sharp outlines of bones and the bright red of blood; obsessed with the beauty of death, they find in George the perfect object for their passion.
In brutally frank prose that exposes euphemism, cliché, and evasion, Dennis Cooper stares unflinchingly at the horror of a society without values, and his vision makes its enormity all too real. It is a world in which pain is an undeniable reality, the inevitable companion of truth, and a test of our commitment to life. Dennis Cooper explores the limits of experience, and while he sharpens our understanding of the life around us, he leaves no escape from what he finds.
“Closer translates the moments and feelings for which we don’t really have a vocabulary. Cooper taps the ineffable, the murky underside of sexual and human relations.” –Lynne Tillman
“An incredibly beautiful and daring book. Cooper’s language is at first intense, nearly minimal, then suddenly, it ascends into vision.” –Kathy Acker
Dennis Cooper (born 1953) is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor and performance artist who grew up in the Southern California. In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr. Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries. Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.
"Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer" - William Burroughs
1995, English
Softcover, 199 pages, 14 x 21 cm
Published by
Grove Press / New York
$34.00 - In stock -
“Written in Mr. Cooper’s taut, chillingly ironic prose. . . Try is about a world under severe emotional repression–a fascistic world of pure sadistic power. . . . As improbable as it may seem, Dennis Cooper has written a love story, all the more poignant because it is so brutally crushed.” –The New York Times Book Review
Simultaneously deadpan and queasily raw, Try is the story of Ziggy, the adopted teenaged son of two sexually abusive fathers whose failed experiment at nuclear-family domesticity has left him stranded with one and increasingly present in the fantasies of the other. He turns from both of these men to his uncle, who sells pornographic videos on the black market, and to his best friend, a junkie whose own vulnerability inspires in Ziggy a fierce and awkward devotion.
Terminally insecure and yet inured to sexual brutality, Ziggy questions his two fathers, his uncle, his drug dealer, his friends, and himself in an attempt to isolate and define the vagaries and boundaries of sexuality, attraction, and abuse, compiling their responses into a magazine that he calls I Apologize.
In prose that is taut, rhythmic, charged, chillingly precise, and beautifully controlled, Cooper examines his characters’ motivations not as the product of cultural coercion but as the emanations of something hungry and amoral and essentially human. Try explores “that buried need to go all the way and really possess someone,” that place where desire disintegrates into the irrational. He illuminates with utter clarity the need to claim the desirable, to possess wholly something that will fulfill the profound emptiness of the human soul.
With Try, Cooper has produced a novel even more complex than his previous books, dangerously innovative and with the startling familiarity of truth in its examination of love, obsession, devotion, and the depths of human need.
Dennis Cooper (born 1953) is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor and performance artist who grew up in the Southern California. In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr. Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.
Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.
"Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer" - William Burroughs
"Cooper’s language is at first intense, nearly minimal, then suddenly, it ascends into vision" - Kathy Acker
2001, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 14 x 20.9 cm
Published by
Grove Press / New York
$34.00 - In stock -
The stunning conclusion to Dennis Cooper's five-book cycle, Period earned its author the accolade "a disquieting genius" by Vanity Fair and praise for his "elegant prose and literary lawlessness" by The New York Times.
The culmination of Cooper's explorations into sex and death, youth culture, and the search for the ineffable object of desire, Period is a breathtaking, mesmerizing final statement to the five-book cycle it completes. Cooper has taken his familiar themes - strangely irresistible and interchangeable young men, passion that crosses into murder, the lure of drugs, the culpabilities of authorship, and the inexact, haunting communication of feeling - and melded them into a novel of flawless form and immense power. Set in a spare, smoke-and-mirror-filled world of secret Web sites, Goth bands, Satanism, pornography, and outsider art, Period is a literary disappearing act as mysterious as it is logical. Obsessive, beautiful, and darkly comic, Period is a stunning achievement from one of America's finest writers.
Dennis Cooper (born 1953) is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor and performance artist who grew up in the Southern California. In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr. Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.
Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.
"Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer" - William Burroughs
"Cooper’s language is at first intense, nearly minimal, then suddenly, it ascends into vision" - Kathy Acker
1998, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 14.6 x 21 cm
Published by
Avalon Travel Publishing / Chicago
$34.00 - Out of stock
This title explores the psyches of four young gay men who are trying to alter their existence with drugs, violent erotic experiences, and love.
Dennis Cooper (born 1953) is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor and performance artist who grew up in the Southern California. In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr. Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.
Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.
1992, English
Softcover, 190 pages, 18 x 11.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$25.00 - Out of stock
First 1992 Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents edition of "Sick Burn Cut (At Last the Reappearance of Our Lady of the Ugly Ones in Spokane, Washington)" by Deran Ludd.
"Mary is a 31-year-old man with a revolver in a cheap cotton dress."
Good copy with age/light wear to block edge/cover edges.
1997, Japanese
Softcover, 32 pages, 25.5 x 18.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
G.I. Joe Collectors Club of Japan / Tokyo
$30.00 - In stock -
First issue of G.I. Joe Collector, the official fanzine of the G.I. Joe Collectors Club of Japan, a glossy newsletter published in 1997 for club members. All things devoted to the classic American action figure created by Hasbro in 1964, G.I. Joe Collector was the primary source of reference for collectors in Japan, with this issue launching the club, featuring a Joe convention report, illustrated articles on the history of many specific figures including G.I. Nurse and G.I. Jane, lots of uniform research, tripwire figures, G.I. Joe customs, and much more. Very heavily illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with texts in Japanese.
Very Good—Near Fine copy, light wear to edges, tightly bound and preserved.
1991, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 130 pages, 25.5 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Haga Bookstore / Japan
$90.00 - In stock -
First edition published only in Japan in 19... 'Beautiful Boy: Angels of European Cinema', is centred around young Swedish actor Björn Andrésen (1955—2025) whose role as the "most beautiful boy", the fourteen-year-old Tadzio in Luchino Visconti's 1970 film adaptation of the 1912 Thomas Mann novella Death in Venice, led to his poster boy status in the Japanese "Bishōnen" (beautiful boy) aesthetic. Bishōnen is a Japanese term for a "beautiful boy" or "pretty boy," describing an androgynous aesthetic of a young man whose beauty transcends traditional gender boundaries. This deluxe "Cine Album" edited by Ikuko Ishihara, author of 'The Trans Sexual Movies,' is absolutely packed with full colour and b/w photographs and film stills of the "Angels of European Cinema", male child and adolescent actors, including Andrésen, Didier Haudepin (Delannoy's "This Special Friendship"...), John Moulder-Brown ("First Love"...), Mark Lester ("Oliver!"...), Leonard Whiting (Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet"...), Bertil Guve (Bergman's "Fanny and Alexander"...), Mathieu Lacaille ("Bastien, Bastienne"), Adam Tønsberg, Edmund Moeschke (Rossellini's "Germany Year Zero"), Nikolai Burlyayev ( Tarkovsky's "Ivan's Childhood"...), Mathieu Carrière ("Young Törless"...), Dominic Guard ("The Go-Between..."), Stefano Colagrande ("Misunderstood"), Matthew Barry (Bertolucci's "Luna"), David Eberts ("Burning Secret"), Gaël Seguin ("Jeux d'artifices"), and many more. Includes illustrated essays on Truffaut, etc., plus portrait profiles and filmographies on all young actors featured.
Very Good copy.
Born: 26 January 1955, Stockholm, Sweden
Died: 25 October 2025
Edited by Ikuko Ishihara
Deluxe Color Cine Album 47
Beauty/Boy/Year
Angels of European Cinema Centered Around Bjorn Andresen
Editor-in-chief: Ikuko Ishihara