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:
BOOKSHOP CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10.
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED AND WILL BE PROCESSED AFTER NOV 10.
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
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 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.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, 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.
1997, Japanese
Softcover, 208 pages, Softcover, 15 cm x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tom Shobo / Japan
$130.00 - Out of stock
Too Negative issue no. 8, March 1997. Now rare and highly collectible, Too Negative, the "Forbidden Picture Book", was a visceral and visually explosive glossy cult arts magazine that reflected the gory-depraved-beyond salvation-bad taste expressions visible in international subculture at the height of 1990s underground publishing, a time when art was pushing the limits of taste and morality. Edited solely by legendary Japanese publisher and gallery owner Kotaro Kobayashi and published by Tom Publication Inc. between 1994—2000, each thick, glossy volume takes on the aesthetics of a vibrant fashion magazine in the great Japanese "mook" format (the magazine book) packed cover to cover with themes of Eros and Thanatos, such as fetishism, erotica, medical/autopsy photography, death journalism, Japanese bondage, grotesque and neo-surrealist art, crime scene photography, tattooing/irezumi, piercing, and all things of the mondo, macabre, bizarro realm. Frequent collaborators and featured artists were Kiyotaka Tsurisaki, Joel-Peter Witkin, Trevor Brown, Kiyoshi Ikejiri, to name a few. With a Japanese publishing lineage that may be found in earlier bounding-pushing periodicals such as the 1920s erotic grotesque magazine Hentai Shiriou (Pervert Documents), Tasuhiko Shibusawa’s incredible 1960s avant-garde journal Le Sang Et La Rose, or Fiction Inc’s SALE2 journal published from 1980—mid 1990s, Too Negative, and affiliated periodicals such as ORG, Spiral, Schizo, etc. took their subjects to another level of extremism, even by Japanese standards.
Not for the faint hearted.
This issue, Too Negative issue no. 8, March 1997, features the photography the paintings of Manuel Ocampo, the art of Helter Skelter corpse/death photography, the art of Jake and Dinos Chapman, grotesque tabloid news, the art of Pierre Molinier, the art of Damien Hirst, the fetish photography of Hiroshi Yokoi, latex/rubber fetish photography by Uchiyama Kazunori, Kiyotaka Tsurisaki, Kiyoshi Ikejiri, loads of abnormal medical photography, autopsy, anatomical photographic/illustrated, much more.
Very Good copy.
1968 / 1969, Japanese / French
4 Vols., softcover, approx. 1000 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tensei Shuppan / Tokyo
$350.00 - In stock -
Complete 4 issue run of Le Sang Et La Rose — a masterpiece of the Japanese underground! Opening with Kishin Shinoyama's photographic portraits of Yukio Mishima depicted as Saint Sebastian and onward through one thousand pages exploring the outer limits of subversive human potential!
Revue de Érotologie, Homosexualité, Sadisme, Masochisme, Fétischisme, Narcissime, Infantilisme, Magie, Occultisme, Humour Noir, Complexe Psychisme. What more could you ask for? Le Sang Et La Rose was a groundbreaking, yet short-lived Japanese arts and literary journal published in Tokyo from late 1968—mid 1969, published in a total of four luxurious, now collectible, volumes. The first three issues were edited by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), a legendary, controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade, and specialist in medieval demonology. The fourth final issue, and rarest of the four, edited by critic Masaaki Hiraoka and designed by self-taught painter, graphic designer and political activist, Kiyoshi Awazu (!) The importance of this magazine to the Japanese avant-garde and radical culture cannot be overstated.
Born from a period of political, social and economical turmoil in Japan, Le Sang Et La Rose may be understood as a emblematic distillation and product of the late ‘60s student rebellion and anti-authoritarian underground culture. Wilfully politically subversive, the publication drew upon a vast range of perspectives - from criticism, literature, obscure esoteric sciences, art, eroticism, radical avant-garde and a historical-rooted Japanese counterculture; featuring literature, theory, art, photography, illustration and graphic design from the most innovative and subversive Japanese and international (predominately French) artists, authors and critics, spanning the themes above. As instigator, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa in effect formulated the magazine’s design to be a spiritual and political operative that would weaponize its readers minds. This stance was made clear in the 1969 manifesto text — "My 1969" — in which Shibusawa discuss' how he perceived the ‘60s as being the age of ideas, ideas as weapons, and outlined a distain towards systems of power, moralism, State oppression, sanitised and harmless liberalism, dogmatic academic sciences and an outright distrust for ideological, progressive literary scholars who advocate "freedom of expression", but have never caused friction with the judicial power. The magazine sketched out an aim to push towards a new kind of personal freedom, intellect, autonomy and moral compass. Here, the concept of ‘erotism’ — as discussed by Georges Bataille in his highly influential 1957 book "Erotism: Death and Sensuality" — acts as a critical force.
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), was a well-known and controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, and translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade. In 1960 he and his publisher, Kyōji Ishii, were trialled for public obscenity over the publishing of Shibusawa's translation of de Sade's Juliette into the Japanese language. What was to be known as the "Sade Trial" took 9 years and although many of Japan's leading authors testified for the defense, in 1969 the Japanese Supreme Court ruled them guilty and charged. This did not deter Shibusawa, whose essays on black magic, demonology and eroticism were popular reading in Japan, and in 1981 he was awarded the 9th Izumi Kyoka Literature Prize.
All Good—VG copies with general wear and age.
1993, Japanese
Softcover, 240 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atelier Peyotl / Tokyo
$65.00 - Out of stock
"Mannequin" Special Feature Issue of cult Japanese underground magazine Yaso, published in 1993, edited by Yuichi Konno and Atelier Peyotl (publishers of Night Vision/Yaso/Peyotl/Wave/Silvester Club...). Heavily illustrated with texts in Japanese that look at the theme of the mannequin from fashion apparatus to fetish object, automatons to living dolls, including a panoramic photographic history of mannequins, a photo feature of French photographer Bernard Faucon's boy mannequin collection, a huge illustrated article on famous Japanese costume, stage and exhibition designer, and Issey Miyake collaborator Tomio Mohri, the wax anatomical models of dissected corpses by Clemente Michelangelo Susini of Florence (1754–1814) shot by Ryuji Miyamoto, Czech animator Jirí Barta's Klub odlozenych, Japanese model and actress Sayoko Yamaguchi, the living dolls of the Japanese theatre, medical mannequins, crash-test dummies, icons, "Doll Love" and erotic dolls, plus lots more and a lot more Bernard Faucon!
Very Good—Near Fine copy.
1997, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 21 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
IMA / Brisbane
$70.00 - Out of stock
Fantastic catalogue from the 1997 exhibition of Scott Redford's work at the Brisbane Institute of Modern Art, heavily illustrated throughout with a wonderful cross-section of Redford's installations, sculptures, paintings, collages, etc. Foreword by Michael Snelling, essays by Chris McAuliffe, Christopher Chapman, Rex Butler, David Phillips, and Robert Schubert. Also includes selected exhibition history.
Very Good copy.
2004, English
Softcover, 69 pages, 21 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Griffith University / Brisbane
$80.00 - In stock -
Fantastic catalogue from DELL Gallery at QCA in 2004 surveying Scott Redford's collage works, curated by Simon P Wright. Heavily illustrated throughout with texts by Christopher Chapman, Rafael von Usler, Simon P Wright, and a long interview with Scott Redford.
Scott Redford (b. 1962), Gold Coast, Australia. Lives and works at Gold Coast, Australia. Redford is a highly significant and influential Australian contemporary artist who has been exhibiting since the early 1980s. His work is represented in all major collections in Australia and has been included in important international exhibitions. Redford's work is unique in its references to international art movements including colour-field painting, conceptual art and pop art, its engagement with local themes (such as Australian art history and vernacular architecture), and its accessibility to a broad audience. Redford has used images of iconic actors and musicians (including Keanu Reeves and Kurt Cobain) to comment on gender issues, and has worked with surfboard technicians to produce 'surf paintings' that articulate the glossy appeal of surfboards.
Very Good copy.
2024, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 7.6 x 10.5 cm
Published by
Hanuman Editions / US
$4.00 - Out of stock
My idols are dead, and my enemies are in power. Domination co-opts language, making it almost unusable, other than by machines. We are to be ruled without even the semblance of style. I speak instead of what I have loved: writing, the city. In the end, after many diversions, this body, this world—and you.
From acclaimed theorist and trans icon McKenzie Wark, Life Story is a divulsion and revision of the author’s multiple forms. Life Story asks, 'how to write not about love, but with love, in love, in form as well as content?' With an offering of lucidity amid disaster; a reinvention in the face of modernity’s unraveling. A tour of her selves, works, and worlds, Life Story is at once elegiac and mutinous, 'an arc of history as built on an ontology of love'.
In Life Story, McKenzie Wark plays with her future epitaph, creating a biographical form that eludes captured data-points. But for our purposes, let’s say that this Australian-born writer and scholar is renowned for her work on media theory, critical theory, the avant-gardes, and in recent years, raving and transsexual narratives. She is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School in New York City.
Second series redux of Hanuman Books, the legendary and cult series of chapbooks that were printed in southern India and published out of the storied Chelsea Hotel in New York City between 1986 and 1993. Founded by American curator Raymond Foye and artist Francesco Celemente, Hanuman Books was dedicated mainly to the extreme deconstructive edge of the countercultural poetic, musical, and artistic currents of the 1960s and 1970s, spanning the era of the Cold War, the AIDS crisis, the Harlem Ballroom scene, the Beats, Warhol's Factory etc. Hanuman Books sought to marry the folk-minimal-artisanal with the cutting edge, playfully marketing their books as ‘secret’ documents of an avant-garde subculture, meant to be passed on covertly at street corners just as millenarian chapbooks of medieval times were supposed to have been. Printed in India, the small format is meant to mimic the chapbook form of the Hanuman Chalisa (a folk compendium of chants to the Hindu god Hanuman, sold very cheaply in the bazaars of India) that made them perfect for slipping illicitly into any pocket. Redux editions edited by Shruti Belliappa and Joshua Rothes.
2024, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
Published by
Duke University Press / North Carolina
$49.00 - Out of stock
Susan Stryker is a foundational figure in trans studies. When Monsters Speak showcases the development of Stryker’s writing from the 1990s to the present. It combines canonical pieces, such as “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” with her hard to find earlier work published in zines and newsletters. Brought together, they ground Stryker’s thought in 1990s San Francisco and its innovative queer, trans, and S/M cultures. The volume includes an introduction by editor McKenzie Wark, who highlights Stryker’s connections to developments in queer theory, media studies, and autotheory while foregrounding Stryker’s innovative writing style and scholarly methods. When Monsters Speak is an authoritative and essential collection by one of the most important and influential intellectuals of our time.
Susan Stryker is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Transgender History and coeditor of The Transgender Studies Reader.
McKenzie Wark is Professor of Culture and Media at The New School and the author of several books, including Raving and Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker, both also published by Duke University Press.
“Whenever Susan Stryker speaks, I listen. Stryker’s career is one of those that has altered the way that those of us who came after her think—and live our lives. We are so lucky to now have a collection that allows us to trace her thoughts over her own life.”—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
“Decades ago, the monster demanded a word with its creator, and thus was trans studies born. In these pages, trace years of intellectual labor without an academic job in queer San Francisco. Study the obligate fiction of a field’s birth. And surrender to the fear, then the pleasure, of challenging the surgeon in your head. Chase the experience, half psychedelic twinkle, half S/M ripple, of enacting theory in the flesh. Reading Susan Stryker, we are gloriously transformed.”—Jules Gill-Peterson, author of Histories of the Transgender Child
"Stryker provides a bracing assessment of frictions within the LGBTQ movement, criticizing cis gay and lesbian individuals who seek to secure a place in mainstream society by excluding trans people. . . . The result is a striking introduction to the work of an essential queer thinker."—Publishers Weekly
"In this slim volume, McKenzie Wark has collected some of Susan Stryker’s most prominent pieces, both fiction and nonfiction. Wark provides a robust introduction, setting the stage for this and subsequent generations to fully grasp the importance and context of her work."—Karla Strand, Ms. Magazine
2019, English
Softcover, 440 pages, 25.1 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Nightboat Books / New York
$42.00 - Out of stock
Drawn from Lou Sullivan’s meticulously kept journals, this landmark book records the life of arguably the first publicly gay trans man to medically transition.
2020 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER
FINALIST FOR THE PUBLISHING TRIANGLE AWARD
Preface by Susan Stryker
We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan narrates the inner life of a gay trans man moving through the shifting social, political, and medical mores of the second half of the 20th century. Sullivan kept comprehensive journals from age eleven until his AIDS-related death at thirty-nine. Sensual, lascivious, challenging, quotidian and poetic, the diaries complicate and disrupt normative trans narratives. Entries from twenty-four diaries reveal Sullivan’s self-articulation and the complexity of a fascinating and courageous figure.
"We Both Laughed In Pleasure brings to vivid life the many journals left behind by queer transcestor Lou Sullivan. This finely edited collection pulls out threads like gender self-determination, illicit queer sexual desire, and relationship woes that span his entire life. The volume reads like an open letter written for future queer trans people longing to understand their identities and experiences across time and space."—Chris Vargas
"We Both Laughed in Pleasure is necessarily provisional and condensed; the editors acknowledge they have “prioritize[d] the intangibles of Sullivan’s San Francisco, tracing his worldly pleasures and ephemeral expressions of identity.” And yet given how many contemporary trans narratives are rooted in trauma, their choice to foreground trans pleasure and sensuality is celebratory, even radical."—Jeremy Lybarger, The New Yorker
2024, English
Softcover, 448 pages, 27.2 x 20 cm
Published by
Brooklyn Museum / Brooklyn
Phaidon / London
$90.00 - In stock -
The first publication dedicated to artists' zines in North America, a revelatory exploration of an unexamined but thriving aesthetic practice
Copy Machine Manifestos captures the rich history of artists' zines as never before, placing them in the lineage of the visual arts and exploring their vibrant growth over the past five decades. Fully illustrated with hundreds of zine covers and interiors, alongside work in other media, such as painting, photography, film, video, and performance, the book also features brief biographies for more than 100 zine-makers including Beverly Buchanan, Mark Gonzales, G.B. Jones, Miranda July, Bruce LaBruce, Terence Koh, LTTR, Ari Marcopoulos, Mark Morrisroe, Raymond Pettibon, Brontez Purnell, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Kandis Williams. Accompanying a major exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, this expansive book, bound as a paperback with a separate jacket, focuses on zines from North America, celebrating how artists have harnessed the medium's essential role in community building and transforming material and conceptual approaches to making art across all media since 1970.
2024, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 176 pages, 21.59 x 14.61 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$39.00 - Out of stock
A breathtaking memoir of transition, history, art, and memory.
After a successful career, a twenty-year marriage, and two kids, McKenzie Wark has an acute midlife crisis: coming out as a trans woman. Changing both social role and bodily form recasts her relation to the world. Transition changes what, and how, she remembers. She makes fresh sense of her past and of history by writing to key figures in her life about the big themes that haunt us all--love and money, sex and death.
In letters to her childhood self, her mother, sister, and past lovers, she writes a backstory that enables her to live in the present. The letters expand to address trans sisters lost and found, as well as Cybele, ancient goddess of trans women. She engages with the political, the aesthetic, and the numinous dimensions of trans life and how they refract her sense of who she is, who she has been, who she can still become. She confronts difficult memories that connect her mother's early death to her compulsion to write, her communist convictions, her coming to New York, the bittersweet reality of her late transition, and the joy to be found in Brooklyn's trans and raver communities.
2023, English
Softcover, 136 pages, 17.8 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Duke University Press / North Carolina
$34.00 - In stock -
What is an art of life for what feels like the end of a world? In Raving McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York's thriving underground queer and trans rave scene. Techno, first and always a Black music, invites fresh sonic and temporal possibilities for this era of diminishing futures. Raving to techno is an art and a technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them. Extending the rave's sensations, situations, fog, lasers, drugs, and pounding sound systems onto the page, Wark invokes a trans practice of raving as a timely aesthetic for dancing in the ruins of this collapsing capital.
2024, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 256 pages, 22 x 17 cm
Published by
Thin Man Press / London
$74.00 - Out of 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.
2014, English
2 volume Softcover (in hardcover slip case), 240 pages, 25.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$95.00 - Out of stock
The legendary 1975 “Schizo-Culture” conference, conceived by the early Semiotext(e) collective, began as an attempt to introduce the then-unknown radical philosophies of post-’68 France to the American avant-garde. The event featured a series of seminal papers, from Deleuze’s first presentation of the concept of the “rhizome” to Foucault’s introduction of his History of Sexuality project. The conference was equally important on a political level, and brought together a diverse group of activists, thinkers, patients, and ex-cons in order to address the challenge of penal and psychiatric institutions. The combination proved to be explosive, but amid the fighting and confusion “Schizo-Culture” revealed deep ruptures in left politics, French thought, and American culture.
The “Schizo-Culture” issue of the Semiotext(e) journal came three years later. Designed by a group of artists and filmmakers including Kathryn Bigelow and Denise Green, it documented the chaotic creativity of an emerging downtown New York scene, and offered interviews with artists, theorists, writers, and No Wave and pre-punk musicians together with new texts from Deleuze, Foucault, R. D. Laing, and other conference participants.
This slip-cased edition includes The Book: 1978, a facsimile reproduction of the original Schizo-Culture publication; and The Event: 1975, a previously unpublished and comprehensive record of the conference that set it all off. It assembles many previously unpublished texts, including a detailed selection of interviews reconstructing the events, and features Félix Guattari, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Michel Foucault, Sylvère Lotringer, Guy Hocquenghem, Gilles Deleuze, John Rajchman, Robert Wilson, Joel Kovel, Jack Smith, Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, Ti-Grace Atkinson, François Peraldi, and John Cage.
1985, Japanese
Softcover, 276 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Camera Mainichi and The Mainichi Graphic / Japan
$120.00 $80.00 - In stock -
First printing of NEW NUDE 2, published in Japan in 1985 as part of a unique and short-lived book series published by the mighty Camera Mainchi house, showcasing leading photographers and artists on the subject of the nude. Opening with illustrated essays by photo critic Kōtarō Iizawa and others, this lovely volume, printed in Japan, presents works generously and sympathetically presented in colour and black-and-white across various paper-stocks. Includes the work of Masahisa Fukase, Hans Bellmer, Yoshiichi Hara, Masaaki Nakagawa, Nobuyoshi Araki, Lee Friedlander, Alice Odilon, E. J. Bellocq, Heinrich Zille, Donald Woodman, Florence Chevallier, Laurence Sackman, Joel Peter Witkin, Marie Bume, James Wedge, Franco Fontana, Lucas Samaras, Miron Zownir, Herlinde Koelbl, and others.
Good-Very Good copy. General wear.
1986, Japanese
Softcover, 276 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Camera Mainichi and The Mainichi Graphic / Japan
$120.00 $80.00 - In stock -
First printing of NEW NUDE 3, published in Japan in 1985 as part of a unique and short-lived book series published by the mighty Camera Mainchi house, showcasing leading photographers and artists on the subject of the nude. Opening with illustrated essays by photo critic Kōtarō Iizawa and others, this lovely volume, printed in Japan, presents works generously and sympathetically presented in colour and black-and-white across various paper-stocks. Includes the work of Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, Masahisa Fukase, Keiichi Tahara, Noriaki Yokosuka, Irina Ionesco, Hennri Maccheroni, Keizo Kitajima, Takashi Ishii, Richard Cerf, Ayako Parks, Taku Aramasa Seiji Kurata, Jean-Jacques Dicker, Flip and Debra Schulke, Robert Mapplethorpe, Marie-Claire Montanari, Lee Friedlander, Jaques Schumacher, Joyce Tenneson, Herlinde Koelbl, and many others.
Very Good copy. Light wear, crease to one front cover bottom corner.
2023, English
Softcover, 268 pages, 14.8 x 21 cm
Published by
Salitter Workings / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
Number 10 of Salitter Workings' benign criminal enterprise in Lulu/Exoteric archiving.
"This extraordinary novel introduces to the English-speaking world a notable new literary talent from France whose vision has been compared to that of William S. Burroughs and Jean Genet, and whose highly original style and theme have created a considerable stir in French literary circles.
The setting of this novel is an ancient chateau located in a fog-bound region, possibly Brittany, complete with a forbidden cellar in which hang seven bodies, all victims of horrible sexual assaults. The chatelaine is a sinister doctor and her elderly husband, aided by a depraved young henchman, Marco. The inmates in this strange castle are a gang of boys ranging in age from eight to fourteen, rounded up from various city slums and peasant hovels, and purchased from their families for the price of a fishing boat or the side of a pig. The boys are well fed and clothed and allowed every freedom, but on certain afternoons and evenings they must entertain the highly respected gentlemen who have paid well for the privilege of their company.
Strange Landscape is a luminous and haunting work which critics have called a fable of primeval innocence, in which "evil" plays as important a role as "good." The children are creatures living in an Eden before the Fall. Thus they are as innocently free to fall in love with each other as they are to sail their rafts down the river. Duvert's originality of style has been the subject of heated controversy in Paris literary circles. André Delmas, writing in Le Monde, said: "What is so utterly startling in Duvert is the way he transforms our notion of novelistic time." In France, Duvert is rapidly becoming known as one of the most important new voices on the literary horizon.
Tony Duvert was born in 1945. He completed his first novel, Récidive by the age of twenty-one, and it was published in France in 1967. Since then he has also written Le Voyageur, Interdit de séjour, and Portrait d'homme couteau. Strange Landscape, the first of his works to be published in the United States, was described by Le Nouvel Observateur as "the finest of all Duvert's books." Duvert was awarded the 1973 Prix Médicis."
2023, English
Softcover, 180 pages, 14.8 x 21 cm
Published by
Salitter Workings / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
Number 8 of Salitter Workings' benign criminal enterprise in Lulu/Exoteric archiving.
"Like so many novels, this book is the story of a love affair. What is less usual is that Jonathan, an artist, is almost thirty when the story starts, while Serge is a boy of eight. Jonathan had got to know Serge and his mother Barbara in Paris the previous year. Tired of the city and confused by the stress of this relationship, Jonathan shut himself away in a remote village. But his retreat is disturbed when Barbara needs someone to look after Serge for the summer while she travels abroad. Like all lovers, Jonathan and Serge create their own microcosm of domestic and erotic ritual, but theirs is a world that shatters on contact with the surrounding society.
Published by Editions de Minuit, a leading literary press, Tony Duvert is respected in France for both fiction and essays, but the uncompromising motif that pervades his work has up till now barred him from reaching English readers. GMP are especially pleased to welcome Duvert to our translation series; his cool and matter-of-fact portrayal of a sensitive theme is a welcome alternative to the hysteria surrounding the age taboo in the English-speaking countries.
"One of the most intelligent, bold and subversive books of the year" - Le Monde""
1993, Japanese
Softcover, 226 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tom Shobo / Japan
$100.00 - In stock -
Inaugural issue of ORG, published in April 1993. Now rare and highly collectible, ORG was a visceral and visually explosive cult Japanese erotic photo magazine ("Bimonthly Sensual Photo Collection") initiated and edited by legendary Japanese publisher (of Too Negative) and gallery owner Kotaro Kobayashi and published by Tom Publishing between 1993—1997. After working in NYC in the early-mid 1990s, Kobayashi wanted to re-ignite the dense air that had evaporated from the erotic book market in Japan and return it to the subcultural realm of underground expression. ORG hit the shelves in 1993. In the same thick, glossy colour art-book format of Kobayashi's Too Negative, ORG shared very similar arresting and provocative themes, yet ORG focused it's densely-packed pages to erotica, less bloodlust. ORG features all manner of SM and bondage photography from Kiyoshi Ikejiri and like-minded fetish photographers, underground scene reports, an abundance of tattoo/irezumi and body art features, erotic art galleries, queer, trans, dom/slave, fem-dom, she-male, rubber, toys, alongside more traditional sensual nude female model photography and Japanese (and Euro) hardcore porn scenes. Considering it is by the same extreme publishers as Too Negative, a healthy dose of bizarre/trangressive/sado/maso/abnormal/exploitation/death/freak/medical/urolagnia/coprophilia/sodo/etc. content spices up each issue and given glamorous attention, always pushing the limits of taste and morality in the name of freedom of expression. Desire takes many forms... ORG also features some of the most creative censorship collage work of any Japanese smut we've seen.
Not for the faint hearted.
Very Good copy, light wear.
1997, Japanese
Softcover, 226 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tom Shobo / Japan
$70.00 - In stock -
First issue of the 1997 re-birth of ORG, now a "European Hard—Ero Magazine", which lasted only one, this, final issue of the series and dedicated itself entirely to full-throttle European hardcore fetish.
Now rare and highly collectible, ORG was a visceral and visually explosive cult Japanese erotic photo magazine ("Bimonthly Sensual Photo Collection") initiated and edited by legendary Japanese publisher (of Too Negative) and gallery owner Kotaro Kobayashi and published by Tom Publishing between 1993—1997. After working in NYC in the early-mid 1990s, Kobayashi wanted to re-ignite the dense air that had evaporated from the erotic book market in Japan and return it to the subcultural realm of underground expression. ORG hit the shelves in 1993. In the same thick, glossy colour art-book format of Kobayashi's Too Negative, ORG shared very similar arresting and provocative themes, yet ORG focused it's densely-packed pages to erotica, less bloodlust. ORG features all manner of SM and bondage photography from Kiyoshi Ikejiri and like-minded fetish photographers, underground scene reports, an abundance of tattoo/irezumi and body art features, erotic art galleries, queer, trans, dom/slave, fem-dom, she-male, rubber, toys, alongside more traditional sensual nude female model photography and Japanese (and Euro) hardcore porn scenes. Considering it is by the same extreme publishers as Too Negative, a healthy dose of bizarre/trangressive/sado/maso/abnormal/exploitation/death/freak/medical/urolagnia/coprophilia/sodo/etc. content spices up each issue and given glamorous attention, always pushing the limits of taste and morality in the name of freedom of expression. Desire takes many forms... ORG also features some of the most creative censorship collage work of any Japanese smut we've seen.
Not for the faint hearted.
Very Good copy.
2024, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$36.00 - In stock -
What it means to be sexually promiscuous in contemporary American culture, edited by cult-favorite author Michelle Tea.
SLUTS, the first publication from vulgarian queer publisher DOPAMINE BOOKS, is an exploration of what it means to be sexually promiscuous in contemporary American culture. Featuring personal essays, spilled secrets, fiction, memoir, and experimental works, SLUTS asks writers and readers to investigate the many ways the notion of the slut impacts our inner and outer lives, as a threat or an identity, a punishment or an aspiration, a lifestyle, an aesthetic, a philosophy and rallying cry. From hideous and terrifying first encounters to postapocalyptic polyamory, from unionizing sex workers to backstage tableaux of sex and drugs and rock and roll, SLUTS's stories probe the liberating highs and abject lows of physical abandon. Featuring work from performer Miguel Gutierrez, hailed by the New York Times as “an artist of ordered excess”; former Nylon magazine editor in chief Gabrielle Korn; award-winning author Brontez Purnell; Whore of New York author Liara Roux; National Book Critics Circle Award winner Jeremy Atherton Lin; and a host of additional artists and writers, SLUTS reveals the knowledges provoked by a dalliance with desire.
Contributors:
DL Alvarez, Vera Blossom, Chloe Caldwell, Cristy Road Carrera, Sam Cohen, Tom Cole, Lydia Conklin, jimmy cooper, Lyn Corelle, Jenny Fran Davis, Cyrus Dunham, Hedi El Kholti, Robert Gluck, Miguel Gutierrez, Gary Indiana, Taleen Kali, Cheryl Klein, Gabrielle Korn, Jeremy Atherton Lin, Nate Lippens, Meredith Maran, Carta Monir, Amanda Montell, Carely Moore, Bradford Nordeen, Baruch Porras-Hernandez, Kamala Puligandla, Brontez Purnell, Liara Roux, Andrea Sands, Daviel Shy, Jen Silverman, Anna Joy Springer, Laurie Stone, McKenzie Wark, Zoe Whittall
2023, English
Published by Pilot Press, 21 × 15 cm, Softcover, 2023, 9781739364922
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$35.00 - In stock -
Reprinted for the first time in over twenty years, Kevin Killian’s first book of poetry is an audacious, operatic dive into the darkest recesses of the AIDS crisis.
In 1991, Killian reported he was “frozen, unable to think of a way to write about AIDS crisis”. A year later, his friend Kathy Acker suggested the “films of Dario Argento as a prism through which to take apart horror of living and dying in AIDS era”. The result is Argento Series, framing Killian’s real-life experience of losing his friends and lovers to the disease through the camera lens of Italian horror filmmaker, Dario Argento. Here, AIDS is cast as the horror film monster, wreaking cold, unfeeling chaos and destruction wherever it finds itself.
Blending a chilling, impersonal observation of death with Killian's typical high camp, tenderness and O'Hara-like wit, the poems use unflinching honesty and gallows humour to devastating effect. In Argento Series, Killian finds expression for a crisis, and moment in history, that changed everything, forever.
Kevin Killian (1952-2019) was a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, playwright, and art writer. Recent books include Fascination: Memoirs and the poetry collections Tony Greene Era and Tweaky Village. He is the coauthor of Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, the first biography of the important US poet. With Dodie Bellamy, he coedited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing, 1977–1997. He died in 2019.
'Here is Kevin Killian, pounding with bloodied fists on Poetry’s door. My heart swells with pride as I claim his masterpiece for our beleaguered city. Argento Series is Kevin’s Lament for the Makers, a monument reaching half-way to the stars for our fallen stars and every big dream of the world lost to AIDS.’—Robert Glück, author of Margery Kempe
‘Lush, tossed off and incisive, there's no other American poet who lived more vividly on the page of his time and its culture—center, edges all of it. Kevin's Argento Series is a treat and a complete fact. Grab this volume, fast.’—Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls
‘High weirdness, thorny beauty, cruel loss – it's all here, in Kevin's voice, and always will be. We will never stop needing this book.’—Anne Boyer, author of The Undying
'At once tender and terrifying, Argento Series is a dispatch from the end of the world. Moving through Italian horror, memories of lost friends, and the long shadow of the AIDS crisis, Killian finds a language for the impossible. This collection is as urgent and vital as ever, seeing the light of day after being unobtainable for far too long.'—Sam Moore, author of All My Teachers Died of AIDS
'What Jackson Pollock said of himself, I will say of Kevin Killian: he is nature. Argento Series takes its title and frame from the Italian horror film maker Dario Argento but the effect is 100% Killian. Which is nature itself. Argento Series was written out of the carnage of the AIDS crisis. The poems are haunting, somnambulant, aggressive, plaintive, uncompromising, sullen, hilarious, brilliant, and outraged, creating a dynamic theatre of true horror. Argento Series now takes its place alongside the other queer masterworks of San Francisco poetry, including: Robert Duncan’s The Opening of the Field, John Wiener’s The Hotel Wentley Poems, and Jack Spicer’s Language. It’s important we have this title available again for new readers.'—Peter Gizzi, author of Sky Burial
'Through the fake horror of Dario Argento’s giallo movies, legendary writer and editor Kevin Killian captures the true horror of living through the AIDS crisis. ‘The poetry was in the gore,’ Killian writes, and these poems are unsane, trembling, lesioned, possessed; horrorcore whimsy, rotting camp. With all the mordant, adrenal wit of a slasher movie’s final girl, his Argento Series is a survivor’s story, vividly retold.’—Diarmuid Hester, author of Nothing Ever Just Disappears
Foreword by Derek McCormack
Cover artwork by Hedi El Kholti
1989, Japanese
Softcover, 208 pages, 13 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
Issue No.36 of the great SALE2 periodical from Tokyo Japan, founded in 1984 by Makoto Orui, who later became art director for Purple magazine in France and Rockin’on magazine in Japan. SALE2 was active for about 14 years during the 1980s—1990s, published regularly as a sort-of fanzine/journal/catalogue/pocket-book by Fiction, Inc., a specialty shop and publisher of fetish and erotica in Tokyo in the 1980-90s. With Orui's distinct design SALE2 developed an exclusive curated editorial set on ‘erotisism and its spiritual philosophy’, with each issue exploring different themes and features, heavy on fetishism and erotic art.
Issue No.36, the "Female Foot Fetishism Special Issue" with the wonderful wraparound Pierre Molinier cover is packed with imagery and essays around the theme of "Foot and Fetish Heel" throughout history, literature, film and fetish publishing, etc. profusely illustrated with drawings, photography, bondage illustrations, film stills, catalogue clippings, and artworks, including works by Bill Ward, Pierre Molinier, Nobuyoshi Araki, and so many more. It also features the Fiction, Inc. section that samples a cross-section of content from catalogue publications including the work of John Willie, Bill Ward, Carlo, Eric Stanton, Irving Claw, Betty Page, and periodicals such as Rubber Magazine, Amateur Bondage, Bizarre Comix, Bizarre Classix, Bizarre Fotos, Stiletto, and much more... Very heavily illustrated throughout with erotic photography and artwork, all texts in Japanese.
Very Good copy.
1988, Japanese
Softcover, 208 pages, 13 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
Issue No.35 of the great SALE2 periodical from Tokyo Japan, founded in 1984 by Makoto Orui, who later became art director for Purple magazine in France and Rockin’on magazine in Japan. SALE2 was active for about 14 years during the 1980s—1990s, published regularly as a sort-of fanzine/journal/catalogue/pocket-book by Fiction, Inc., a specialty shop and publisher of fetish and erotica in Tokyo in the 1980-90s. With Orui's distinct design SALE2 developed an exclusive curated editorial set on ‘erotisism and its spiritual philosophy’, with each issue exploring different themes and features, heavy on fetishism and erotic art.
Issue No.35, the "EROTIK!!" issue features erotic writings and artwork throughout by Hans Bellmer, Dorothea Tanning, André Berg, Pierre Molinier, Max Ernst, Armando Calvelli, articles on vintage stag films, nude French postcards, interspersed with lots of mysterious vintage erotic imagery, bondage illustration, and catalogue/advertisments/clippings of Eric Stanton, Irving Klaw, Jim, John Willie, Bizarre Comix, and much more...
Very heavily illustrated throughout with erotic photography and artwork, all texts in Japanese.
Very Good copy, tanning to pages.
1980, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 114 pages, 26 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Seven Sha / Tokyo
$580.00 - In stock -
Rare first edition of Kohei Yoshiyuki's cult classic photo book, Document: The Park (Document Park), published in 1980 by Seven Sha, Tokyo. Yoshiyuki's voyeuristic masterpiece, The Park is like no other photo book. A controversial volume of 74 photographs taken by the photographer using a 35mm camera, infrared film, and flash, Yoshiyuki documented a secret community of lovers and voyeurs who gathered in Shinjuku Park and Yoyogi Park between 1971 and 1973. His pictures document the people who gathered in these parks for clandestine trysts under the cloak of darkness, as well as the many spectators lurking in the bushes who watched—and sometimes participated in—these couplings. With their raw, snapshot-like quality, these images not only uncover the hidden illicit sexual encounters of their subjects, both homosexual and heterosexual, but they also serve as a chronicle of a Japan we rarely see. As Martin Parr writes in The Photobook: A History, Volume II, The Park is "a brilliant piece of social documentation, capturing perfectly the loneliness, sadness and desperation that so often accompany sexual or human relationships in a big, hard metropolis like Tokyo."
A beautifully printed book, with original dust-jacket. Includes two conversations with Kohei Yoshiyuki with Kenichi Matsumoto and Nobuyoshi Araki.
Kohei Yoshiyuki (b. 1946—2022) came to recognition in 1972 when material from his photo project “The Park” was featured in magazine Shukan Shincho, and a year later, in respected photo journal Camera Mainichi. However, it was the 1979 photo exhibition “The Park” at Komai Gallery and 1980 photo book “Document: The Park” that established him within the contemporary photographic landscape. Since then, Yoshiyuki was a recurrent fixture in Japan debauchery journal Super Photo Magazine along photographers: Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, Keizo Kitajima and Seiji Kurata.
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket with usual tanning to spine edge, wear to extremities, and dj corner tear hidden inside jacket fold (blank black area, not affecting any content). Otherwise a well preserved copy.