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.
2018, English
Slipcase with three staple-bound booklets and poster, 60 pages, 12 x 15 cm
Published by
Ugly Duckling Presse / New York
$48.00 - In stock -
The Belgian surrealist movement, like its contemporary French cousin, included both visual artists--René Magritte most famously--and writers, who were also its theorists. They shared with the Parisians a fierce commitment to personal, political and aesthetic liberty, and to humour, surprise and transgression as artistic strategies, but they parted company when it came to the unconscious and the occult. Ideas Have No Smell gathers exemplary works by three literary lights of Belgian surrealism: Transfigured Publicity, a visual text of early concrete poetry by poet and photographer Paul Nougé (1895-1967), the apostle of appropriation; the whimsical, hand-drawn artist's book Abstractive Treatise on Obeuse by Paul Colinet (1898-1957); and For Balthazar, a collection of aphorisms and observations by the ever skeptical author, lawyer and anarchist Louis Scutenaire (1905-87). In addition to the booklets presented in a facsimile-style translation by M. Kasper, this letterpressed slipcase includes an introduction by scholar Mary Ann Caws and a poster of an anonymously handwritten panneau of Nougé's visual poems, possibly coauthored with Magritte and previously reproduced only in Marcel Mariën's documentary history, L'Activité surréaliste en Belgique.
"The Belgian Surrealists were more radical, rational and imbued with the wit, folly and brevity of everyday life. This is a delightful sampler of three offbeat virtuosos." --McKenzie Wark
2020, English
Softcover, 58 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$32.00 - Out of stock
This classic surrealist photobook pioneered the imagery of the domestic uncanny
First edited and published by Marcel Marien in 1968 in a limited edition of 230 copies, half a year after Paul Nougé's death, The Subversion of Images is a miniature classic in both the photobook and surrealist canons. It collects Nougé's notes and photographs from 1929-30 to form a guidebook to the surrealist image. Nougé here outlines his conception of the object and the surrealist approach to it, while also offering an accompaniment to the visual work of his colleague, René Magritte, whose paintings he sometimes titled. How might a tangle of string elicit terror? How might the suppression of an object move one to sentimentality? What is the effect of a pair of gloves on a loaf of sliced bread? Nougé's accompanying photographs explore these notions, and feature a number of his Belgian surrealist colleagues.
This translation is presented as a facsimile of the original edition, with an afterword by Xavier Canonne, director of the Musée de la Photographie.
A biochemist by trade, Paul Nougé (1895-1967) was a leading light of Belgian surrealism and its primary theorist, as well as a decisive influence on such Lettrists and Situationists as Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, who would take inspiration from his conception of plagiarism for what would come to be termed "détournement." Nougé steered the Brussels surrealist group toward a more rational approach to visual and verbal language that discarded the Parisian surrealists' proclivity for irrationality and occultism.
2018, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 488 pages, 19.3 x 23.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Karma / New York
$300.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this incredible and very quickly out of print monograph on Gertrude Abercrombie, edited by Dan Nadel. Text by Robert Storr, Susan Weininger, Robert Cozzelino, Dinah Livingston.
Interview with Studs Terkel.
This is the most comprehensive book ever published on the Chicago surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–77), a key figure in midcentury American surrealism. From the late 1930s until her death, Abercrombie made paintings populated by objects of personal significance—moons, towers, cats, pennants, Victorian furniture, shells, snails and doors—to create allegories for her own often precarious psychological states. Often presiding over these symbols was Abercrombie herself, who appears in numerous pictures as proud observer or witchy caricature.
Abercrombie exhibited in Chicago and New York in the 1940s and ‘50s, and her salon became a center of Midwestern culture, hosting jazz musicians (such as her close friend Dizzy Gillespie), writers and artists. This book includes new scholarship by Robert Cozzolino; a memoir of Abercrombie by Robert Storr; the artist's own writing; a definitive text by art historian Susan Weininger; and a memoir by the artist's daughter, Dinah Livingston.
As New copy of this now extremely scarce book.
1983, German
Softcover, 118 pages, 18 x 11.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ullstein KunstBuch / Frankfurt
$40.00 - Out of stock
German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) was one of the most subversive artists associated with Surrealism, famous--notorious, even--for his erotic engravings, objects and photographs. The first edition of Die Puppe (The Doll) comprised a series of Bellmer's photographs "illustrated" with prose poems by Paul Éluard; Bellmer's hand-colored photographs subsequently acquired an iconic status as perhaps the purest exemplification of the Surrealist ideal of "convulsive beauty." Later editions of the book were expanded to incorporate a body of theoretical, poetic and speculative texts that together comprise one of the most important expositions of Surrealist cultural theory. Bellmer weaves a remarkably disparate set of concepts and intuitions--from fields as diverse as mathematics, morphology, optics and psychology--into a theory of eroticism that provides a totally unexpected rationale for his uncompromising art. His ideas are, in the words of poet Joë Bousquet, a "scandal to reason."
This 1983 printing from Frankfurt is in the original German language, as are majority of editions of Die Puppe, and includes Die Puppe, Die Spiele der Puppe, and Die Anatomie des Bildes, and more. Illustrated throughout. Very Good copy.
2011, Japanese / French
Softcover (w. printed plastic jacket over reflective cover), 296 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
National Art Centre / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
First printing of this great exhibition catalogue from the National Art Centre Tokyo via Centre Pompidou Paris, on occasion of the most comprehensive Surrealist exhibition ever staged in Japan, “Le Surrealism: Exposition organisee par Le Pompidou a partir de sa Collection” at The National Art Center, Tokyo in 2011.
Housed in mirrored cover and profusely illustrated in colour with the work of André Breton, Victor Brauner, Rene Magritte, Joan Miro, Andre Masson, Francis Picabia, Claude Cahun, Hans Bellmer, Dorothea Tanning, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Toyen, Guilaume Apollinaire, Meret Oppenheim, Luis Buñuel, Jindrich Heisler, Andre Masson, Yves Tanguy, Alberto Giacometti, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Wilhelm Freddie, and many others, alongside comprehensive documentation of major historical Surrealist exhibitions and documents/publications.
Very Good copy.
1974, German
Softcover, 169 page, 20 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Städtisches Museum / Leverkusen
$65.00 $45.00 - In stock -
"Medium Fotografie" was published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name held at Städtisches Museum, Leverkusen, 18 May - 5 August 1973.
Foreword by Rolf Wedewer; Artists featured include Herbert Bayer, Hans Bellmer, Anton Giulio, Marcel Duchamp, Theodor Fraenkel, Hannah Höch, Layos Kalsas, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, George Mucha, Man Ray, Luigi Veronesi, Stuart Wiese, Christian Boltanski, Marcel Broodthaers, Hamish Fulton, Christoph Kohlhöfer, Ingrid Kohlhöfer, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Johannes Theodor Baargeld, Tristan Tzara, El Lissitzky, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, Jörg Immendorff, A.R. Penck, Edward Ruscha, Pablo Picasso,Gilbert & George, Walter de Maria, and many more. Heavily illustrated throughout, texts in German.
2017, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 14.4 x 16.8 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$30.00 - In stock -
Written in early 1922, this is the first prose work by Surrealist poet and exemplary practitioner of automatic writing Robert Desnos (preceding Mourning for Mourning and Liberty or Love!, also published by Atlas Press).
Its protagonists are swept into violent journeys through Paris by train and steamship; fabulous events consume their everyday lives; oracles spout nonsense or wisdom. All of Desnos' friends in the Paris Dada movement--André Breton, Louis Aragon and Benjamin Péret, among others--make an appearance, and all find a grave in the "cemetery" toward the end of the book, for the past must be buried (even though most of these now legendary names were then in their 20s and had barely made their mark).
By the time this book was written, the Dada movement seemed played out, killed off by a mixture of public success, internal dissent and boredom with the predictability of its scandals. The Punishments of Hell lies between Dada and Surrealism, harking back to the belligerent obfuscation of, say, Tristan Tzara and overwhelming it with the savage lyricism for which Desnos would become known.
Robert Desnos (1900-45) was one of the most celebrated and celebratory of the writers allied to the Paris Dada and Surrealist groups. He effortlessly combined mystery, eroticism and an irrepressible joi de vivre in a flood of poetry, prose fiction, radio plays and even children's verse. An active member of the French resistance, he died of typhoid just days after his liberation from the Terezin concentration camp.
2009, English
Softcover, 156 pages, 15 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$27.00 - In stock -
A collection of outrageous short stories about heretics, renegade mystics and criminal religious fanatics, The Heresiarch & Co. was Apollinaire's first book, and reportedly remained his favorite. Making full use of his encyclopedic knowledge of obscure historical, ecclesiastical and geographic information, Apollinaire's stories rely neither on the dream nor on unlikely juxtaposition, but instead represent an approach that Andre Breton called a "formula" for Surrealism; its "music," Breton famously wrote, is "like gold pebbles rolled in a torrent." Apollinaire himself wrote of The Heresiarch & Co., "This is a book for those who love literature, powerful and disturbing, strange and logical... The author, amid so many fantastic, tragic and sometimes sublime inventions, intoxicates himself with a charming erudition with which he also intoxicates his readers."
Guillaume Apollinaire (26 August 1880 – 9 November 1918) was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic of Polish-Belarusian descent. Apollinaire is considered one of the foremost poets of the early 20th century, as well as one of the most impassioned defenders of Cubism and a forefather of Surrealism. He is credited with coining the term "cubism" in 1911 to describe the emerging art movement and the term "surrealism" in 1917 to describe the works of Erik Satie. The term Orphism (1912) is also his. Apollinaire wrote one of the earliest Surrealist literary works, the play The Breasts of Tiresias (1917), which became the basis for the 1947 opera Les mamelles de Tirésias. Apollinaire was active as a journalist and art critic, and in 1912 Apollinaire cofounded Les Soirées de Paris, an artistic and literary magazine. Two years after being wounded in World War I, Apollinaire died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918; he was 38.
Exact Change publishes books of experimental literature with an emphasis on Surrealism, Dada, Pataphysics, and other nineteenth and twentieth century avant-garde art movements. The press was founded in 1989 by Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang, known outside publishing as musicians from the bands Damon & Naomi, and Galaxie 500.
2010, English
Softcover, 197 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by
Solar Books / US
$44.00 - Out of stock
The Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), best known for his violent, erotic novels, such as 120 Days of Sodom and Justine, was also one of the key inspirational figures identified by André Breton in his Surrealist Manifestos. De Sade’s importance to the Surrealists and their close affiliates is reflected in the sheer volume of art and writing dedicated to, or inspired by, his life, philosophy, and writings. Sade: Sex and Death documents this body of Surrealist work, including many key texts and bizarre and erotic images never before assembled in one volume.
Included in Sade are more than fifty rarely seen transgressive illustrations by some of the most famous names associated with Surrealism, including Dalí, Hans Bellmer, Magritte, André Masson, and Man Ray. The book also features analytical texts by writers of the period such as Bataille, Breton, Bunuel, Eluard, and Klossowski. Also included is the first-ever English translation of “The Divine Marquis” by Guillaume Apollinaire, which was the first modernist appraisal of Sade and remains one of the best concise biographies of its subject, and “Sade and the Roman Noir” by scholar Maurice Heine, in which Heine posits Sade as inventor of the gothic novel. Putting the works in context is an extensive history by editor Candice Black that details the relationship between the Surrealists and Sade.
1976, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 72 pages, 24 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Editions Filipacchi / Paris
$120.00 - Out of stock
First 1976 hardcover English-edition of the great Editions Filipacchi monograph on artist Dorothea Tanning. Profusely illustrated with Tanning's incredible paintings in colour and b/w, accompanied by photography, biography and texts in English by author Gilles Plazy.
Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) was born in the United States in the town of Galesburg, Illinois to Swedish émigré parents. Largely self-taught as an artist, Tanning moved to New York in 1935 where she began working as a freelance illustrator, creating advertisement designs for Macy’s department store and other clients. In 1936 she visited the ground-breaking MoMA exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Surrealism had a profound effect on her. Travelling to France in July 1939, she found a country on the brink of war and Paris empty of the artists with whom she had hoped to be acquainted. Refugees from Nazi occupied France, she would meet the surrealists back in New York through her first art dealer, Julien Levy. Late in 1942 Max Ernst visited her studio, saw a painting, (Birthday), and stayed to play chess. In a double wedding with artist Man Ray and dancer Juliet P. Browner, Tanning and Ernst married in October 1946. They would have 34 years together, moving to the town of Sedona, Arizona, to build a house set within a group of huge red rocks in the Verde Valley. Sedona captivated Tanning’s imagination. Here she would continue to write and paint her enigmatic versions of life on the inside, looking out. By 1956 Max and Dorothea had moved to France. Around 1955 Tanning’s paintings moved away from meticulously rendered figurative dreamscapes, increasingly employing confident gestural flow and movement in the wake of her work as a costume and stage designer for the ballets of the Russian choreographer George Blanchine – Night Shadow (1946), The Witch (1950) and Bayou (1952). In the late 1960s Tanning’s practice shifted once again, moving from drawing, design and painting to three-dimensional sculptural works fashioned from soft textiles and found items. When Ernst died in Paris in 1976, Tanning was bereft. ‘There is no light in the studio,’ she wrote, ‘nothing moves and the colored jokes are fading fast. The disorder is grievous. (Is the heart condemned to break each day?)'. In 1979 Tanning began her return to New York, where she gave full rein to her long felt compulsion to write. Her published works include two memoirs, Birthday and Between Lives, a collection of poems, A Table of Content, and a novel, Chasm. Tanning died in New York on 21 January 2012, aged 101.
1966, French
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 160 pages, 26.5 x 21.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Jean-Jacques Pauvert / Paris
$70.00 - Out of stock
First 1966 hardcover edition of this early comprehensive French monograph on artist Dorothea Tanning, published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert in Paris. Profusely illustrated with Tanning's incredible paintings in colour and b/w, accompanied by extensive texts (in French) by poet and critic Alain Bosquet.
Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) was born in the United States in the town of Galesburg, Illinois to Swedish émigré parents. Largely self-taught as an artist, Tanning moved to New York in 1935 where she began working as a freelance illustrator, creating advertisement designs for Macy’s department store and other clients. In 1936 she visited the ground-breaking MoMA exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Surrealism had a profound effect on her. Travelling to France in July 1939, she found a country on the brink of war and Paris empty of the artists with whom she had hoped to be acquainted. Refugees from Nazi occupied France, she would meet the surrealists back in New York through her first art dealer, Julien Levy. Late in 1942 Max Ernst visited her studio, saw a painting, (Birthday), and stayed to play chess. In a double wedding with artist Man Ray and dancer Juliet P. Browner, Tanning and Ernst married in October 1946. They would have 34 years together, moving to the town of Sedona, Arizona, to build a house set within a group of huge red rocks in the Verde Valley. Sedona captivated Tanning’s imagination. Here she would continue to write and paint her enigmatic versions of life on the inside, looking out. By 1956 Max and Dorothea had moved to France. Around 1955 Tanning’s paintings moved away from meticulously rendered figurative dreamscapes, increasingly employing confident gestural flow and movement in the wake of her work as a costume and stage designer for the ballets of the Russian choreographer George Blanchine – Night Shadow (1946), The Witch (1950) and Bayou (1952). In the late 1960s Tanning’s practice shifted once again, moving from drawing, design and painting to three-dimensional sculptural works fashioned from soft textiles and found items. When Ernst died in Paris in 1976, Tanning was bereft. ‘There is no light in the studio,’ she wrote, ‘nothing moves and the colored jokes are fading fast. The disorder is grievous. (Is the heart condemned to break each day?)'. In 1979 Tanning began her return to New York, where she gave full rein to her long felt compulsion to write. Her published works include two memoirs, Birthday and Between Lives, a collection of poems, A Table of Content, and a novel, Chasm. Tanning died in New York on 21 January 2012, aged 101.
1982, English / French
Softcover, 284 pages, 13.2 x 20.3 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
When Guillaume Apollinaire died in 1918 at the age of thirty-eight, as the result of a war wound, he was already known as one of the most original and important poets of his time. He had led the migration of Bohemian Paris across the city from Montmartre to Montparnasse; he had helped formulate the principles of Cubism, having written one of the first books on the subject, and coined the word "Surrealist"; and he had demonstrated in his own work those innovations we have come to associate with the most vital investigations of the avant-garde.
This bilingual, illustrated edition of The Selected Writings of Apollinaire, the only representative collection in English translation, begins with a comprehensive critical Introduction by the translator, Roger Shattuck. The next section is devoted to poetry. Included here are almost half of Apollinaire's two best-known volumes, Alcools and Calligrammes, as well as a selection from five other books, and the long love poem La Chanson du Mal-Aimé in its entirety. The prose section leads off with "L'Esprit Nouveau et les Poetes", a seminal discussion of modern poetry that anticipates such movements as Dada and Futurism. This is followed by Apollinaire's almost unobtainable "Introduction to Baudelaire and Oneirocriticism", an early experimental work composed in a style prophetic of Surrealist automatic writing. There are, in addition, two stories, a passage from Anecdotiques, and a section from the novel Le Poete Assassiné.
2010, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 15.2 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Afterall / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$49.00 - Out of stock
Duchamp's famous last artwork, seen not as a summation of his work but as an invitation to endless interpretation.
Following Marcel Duchamp's death in 1968, the Philadelphia Museum of Art stunned the art world by unveiling a project on which he had been working secretly for twenty years, long after he had supposedly given up art for chess. Installed by the museum curators with the assistance of Duchamp's widow Teeny and stepson Paul Matisse, Étant donnés (known in English as Given, or, literally, “being given”) consists of a small room with a locked wooden door; through a peephole can be seen a landscape of trees, with a naked female figure at the front, her arm outstretched, holding a lamp. In this illustrated study, Julian Haladyn argues that Duchamp's intention in this final piece was similar to Raymond Roussel's in How I Wrote Certain of My Books: not, as many have maintained, to provide a neat summation of his career, but the opposite—to open his artwork (which he had made sure was fully represented in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's collection) to endless interpretation and reinterpretation. Duchamp's engagement with his legacy (by orchestrating first the purchase of his work and then the donation of those purchases to the museum) is a significant historical development in the critical relationship between artists and the institution of art—a relationship that would later be further explored by such artists as Andrea Fraser and Michael Asher. Additionally, Haladyn sees that the staging of Étant donnés—especially the way that Duchamp forces viewers to become aware of the act of looking and their bodily presence in the gallery space—foreshadowed strategies used by Minimalism as well as installation, spectatorship, and institutional critique.
About the author:
Julian Jason Haladyn is a writer and artist based in Canada. He teaches at the University of Western Ontario.
2010, English
Softcover, 496 pages, 18 x 22 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$84.00 - In stock -
The artist Francis Picabia -- notorious dandy, bon vivant, painter, poet, filmmaker, and polemicist -- has emerged as the Dadaist with postmodern appeal, and one of the most enigmatic forces behind the enigma that was Dada.
In this first book in English to focus on Picabia's work in Paris during the Dada years, art historian and critic George Baker reimagines Dada through Picabia's eyes. Such reimagining involves a new account of the readymade -- Marcel Duchamp's anti-art invention, which opened fine art to mass culture and the commodity. But in Picabia's hands, Baker argues, the Dada readymade aimed to reinvent art rather than destroy it. Picabia's readymade opened art not just to the commodity, but to the larger world from which the commodity stems: the fluid sea of capital and money that transforms all objects and experiences in its wake. The book thus tells the story of a set of newly transformed artistic practices, claiming them for art history -- and naming them -- for the first time: Dada Drawing, Dada Painting, Dada Photography, Dada Abstraction, Dada Cinema, Dada Montage. Along the way, Baker describes a series of nearly forgotten objects and events, from the almost lunatic range of the Paris Dada "manifestations" to Picabia's polemical writings; from a lost work by Picabia in the form of a hole (called, suggestively, The Young Girl) to his "painting" Cacodylic Eye, covered in autographs by luminaries ranging from Ezra Pound to Fatty Arbuckle. Baker ends with readymades in prose: a vast interweaving of citations and quotations that converge to create a heated conversation among Picabia, Andre Breton, Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others. Art history has never looked like this before. But then again, Dada has never looked like art history.
George Baker is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an editor at October magazine and October Books. He is the editor of James Coleman (MIT Press) and a frequent contributor to Artforum.
1970, Czech
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 178 pages, 26 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Odeon / Prague
$160.00 - Out of stock
First 1970 hardcover edition of the seldom seen artist's book/monograph of one of the most important representatives of the Czech avant-garde - Jindřich Štyrský (1899–1942). This book presents Štyrský's written and artistic records of dreams through his drawings, paintings and collages, alongside his poetry and other writings spanning 1925-1940. Originally published as a slim private press edition in 1941, in 1967 author/editor František Šmejkal expanded the original with an afterword and prepared it for this major hardcover edition with the publisher that Štyrský himself regularly worked for as a writer and author, Odean Press in Prague. By studying his own dreams, writings of Freud, works of symbolism, surrealism or authors such as A. Rimbaud, de Sade or Lautréamont, Jindřich Štyrský tried to understand the conditions of imagination (sources of evil, pain, sadism, condolences and hope contained in one human mind). Published in an edition of 3000 copies and now long collectable.
Jindřich Štyrský (1899 – 1942) was a Czech Surrealist painter, poet, editor, photographer, and graphic artist. Precocious, he began executing remarkable, original artwork in his teens and soon connected with soulmates Karel Teige, the painter Toyen, and the poet Vítězslav Nezval who would form the nexus of the Czech avant-garde. His outstanding and varied oeuvre included numerous book covers, illustrations and written studies of both Arthur Rimbaud and Marquis de Sade. Along with his artistic partner Toyen (Marie Čermínová), he became a member of Devětsil in 1923. He and Toyen also exhibited in Paris in the late 1920s, where they founded their own movement, Artificialism. Between 1928 and 1929 he was designer for the group's drama wing, the Osvobozené divadlo, where he collaborated with Vítězslav Nezval and others. Štyrský was also an active editor. In addition to his Edition 69 series, he edited the Erotická revue, which he launched in 1930, and Odeon, where many of his shorter texts appeared. He was a founding member of The Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia and a force of inner resistance in the German occupation.
Very Good copy with Good dust jacket.
1979, German
Softcover, 360 pages, 22 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Akademie der Künste / Berlin
$65.00 - Out of stock
First edition of Heinz Trökes : Bilder, Zeichnungen, Collagen uns Skizzenbücher 1938-1979, published on the occasion of the major survey exhibition at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1980. Profusely illustrated throughout with the paintings, collages, and drawings of German artist Heinz Trökes (1913–1997), whose work, obliged to a surrealist tendency, oscillate between biomorphic landscapes and geometrical abstraction. Trökes, who had received artistic training from, among others, Johannes Itten and Georg Muche, started his career with his first solo exhibition in 1938 at the Berlin Galerie Nierendorf being shut down by the Nazis. Banned from working as an artist and from exhibiting, he left Germany for Zurich where he earned a living designing textiles. Ordered by the authorities to return to Germany when the war broke out, Trökes was forced to work secretly and no longer signed his works with his full name. He co-founded of the Berlin gallery Gerd Rosen, the first private art gallery in Germany after the war, where he was artistic director between 1945-1946. In 1947 he was called to teach at the Bauhaus together with the painter Mac Zimmermann. A close friend of the artist Wols, Trökes lived in Paris in the 1950s and joined the Rixes group alongside Roberto Matta, Jaroslaw Serpan, Jean-Paul Riopelle, etc., a group associated with the surrealists and founded by critic Edouard Jaguer, Max Clarac-Serou and Iaroslav Serpan. He also participated in the regular meeting group, Jour fixe, around André Breton, alongside Benjamin Péret, Marcel Duchamp, Toyen, Max Ernst, Rufino Tamayo and Jacques Hérold.
Catalogues many works, with an introduction by Rolf Szymanski and a text by Eberhard Roters, biography, bibliography, photographic portraits, and more.
Texts in German.
Very Good - Fine copy.
1961, Czech
Softcover, 64 pages, 17.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
SNKLU / Prague
$70.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful and long out-of-print Vilém Reichmann monograph, published in Prague in 1961 as part of the distinctive series of Czech monographs on photographers published by SNKLU, a wing of the great Odeon publishing house. Edited by fellow photographer/painter Václav Zykmund, this beautifully printed book presents a selection of 64 of his best lyrical surreal images, printed in gravure.
Vilém Reichmann (1908-1991) was one of the premiere Czech surrealist photographers. Reichmann comes from the German-Jewish community in Brno and began photographing in 1930, whilst working as a graphic artist for numerous left-wing magazines in Czechoslovakia. Influenced by the Depression and war years, he developed a Surrealist style modelled on lyrical interpretations of reality through visual metaphors. After World War II he became a member of ‘Ra’, a Czech Surrealist art group, and his work shows the influence of textural abstraction and absurdist humor. Antonín Dufek, an erudite specialist in the field of the Czech photography, confirms Reichmann’s fundamental position in the history of the Czech photography, especially its surrealist movement.
Good copy with some moisture ripple and general wear. Moisture stain at back but not affecting contents.
1994, Czech / English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 276 pages, 23 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Foto Mida / Czech Republic
$120.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this now long-out-of-print and most comprehensive hardcover monograph the work of Czech surrealist photographer Vilém Reichmann. This exceptional volume is profusely with over 200 full-page colour and b/w plates of Reichmann's photographic works, including his incredible experimental photogram works, and a selection of rarely seen drawings and paintings. Texts throughout by accomplished curator and Czech photography specialist Antonín Dufek (b. 1943) in Czech with an inserted booklet of all texts translated to English. Includes biography, bibliography. A scarce resource on this great artist.
Vilém Reichmann (1908-1991) was one of the premiere Czech surrealist photographers. Reichmann comes from the German-Jewish community in Brno and began photographing in 1930, whilst working as a graphic artist for numerous left-wing magazines in Czechoslovakia. Influenced by the Depression and war years, he developed a Surrealist style modelled on lyrical interpretations of reality through visual metaphors. After World War II he became a member of ‘Ra’, a Czech Surrealist art group, and his work shows the influence of textural abstraction and absurdist humor. Antonín Dufek, an erudite specialist in the field of the Czech photography, confirms Reichmann’s fundamental position in the history of the Czech photography, especially its surrealist movement.
Fine copy in Fine dust jacket.
2014, English
Softcover, 162 pages, 12.6 x 21.6 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$29.00 - Out of stock
Thousand Times Broken brings together three extraordinary, previously untranslated books in which Henri Michaux's art and poetry merge in ways never seen before, composing a journey in which we----with the great visionary Michaux as our guide----are invited to hover between reading and looking, between the ineffable and the known, between body and spirit into a realm where it is possible to perceive "what one otherwise doesn't perceive, what one hardly suspects at all."
Composed between 1956-1959, during Michaux's mescaline experiments, all three books engage a dynamic struggle between the mark and the word as Michaux searches for a medium up to the task of expressing the inexpressible. Included are Four Hundred Men on the Cross, a ghostly, enigmatic contemplation of Michaux's loss of faith, Peace in the Breaking, written under the influence of mescaline, its title poem of pure ascension sent flowing into the same spine-like furrows of Michaux's India ink drawings, and Watchtowers on Targets, a singular, automatic collaboration with surrealist and abstract expressionist painter Roberto Matta. Translated from the French by noted poet Gillian Conoley.
Through travel journals, prose poems, and incantatory exorcisms, Henri Michaux (1899–1984) built an unsettling world of aggression, fear, hostility, and paranoia, whose fantastical landscapes and fabulist beings delineate a space of psychological and cognitive discomfort all too contemporary. In 1956 he continued his controlled explorations of the self with a series of mescaline experiments, which he documented in a series of books over the next decade. Michaux’s writing was paralleled by his lifelong commitment to painting and drawing.
2019, English
Hardcover, 136 pages, 14.5 x 10.9 cm
Published by
Verlag fur moderne Kunst / Nuremberg
$62.00 - Out of stock
Offering the first study of Jamaican-born American photographer Percy Rainford, this book draws from extensive archival research and interviews with the artist's family, showcasing his work and shedding light on his collaborations with Duchamp for View and Le Surréalisme.
Edited by Stefan Banz.
Text by Michael R. Taylor.
2018, English
Hardcover, 148 pages,
Published by
Verlag für moderne Kunst / Vienna
$48.00 - Out of stock
In this essay, curator Helen Molesworth pinpoints the significance of the return of the handmade in the later years of Duchamp’s oeuvre, positioning this paradigmatic shift away from the readymade as the focal point of academic debate for the very first time.
By Helen Molesworth.
Edited with preface by Stefan Banz.
2017, English
Softcover, 292 pages, 14 x 21 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$69.00 - Out of stock
Walking, that most basic of human actions, was transformed in the twentieth century by Surrealism, the Situationist International, and Fluxus into a tactic for revolutionizing everyday life. Each group chose locations in the urban landscape as sites—from the flea markets and bars of Paris to the sidewalks of New York—and ambulation as the essential gesture. Keep Walking Intently traces the meandering and peculiar footsteps of these avant-garde artists as they moved through the city, encountering the marvelous, studying the environment, and re-enchanting the banal. Art historian Lori Waxman reveals the radical potential that walking holds for us all.
Lori Waxman lives in Chicago, where she is the art critic for the Chicago Tribune and a senior lecturer at the School of the Art Institute. She performs occasionally as the “60 wrd/min art critic.”
Design by Zak Group
2006, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 14 x 21 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$35.00 - In stock -
One of the most provocative and controversial writers of his time, these essays comprise George Bataille's most incisive study of surrealism.
For Bataille, the absence of myth had itself become the myth of the modern age. In a world that had lost the secret of its cohesion, Bataille saw surrealism as both a symptom and a beginning of an attempt to address this loss. His writings on this theme are the result of a profound reflection in the wake of World War Two.
The Absence of Myth is the most incisive study yet made of surrealism, insisting on its importance as a cultural and social phenomenon with far-reaching consequences. Clarifying Bataille's links with the surrealist movement, and throwing revealing light on his complex and greatly misunderstood relationship with Andre Breton, The Absence of Myth shows Bataille to be a much more radical figure than his postmodernist devotees would have us believe: a man who continually tried to extend Marxist social theory; a pessimistic thinker, but one as far removed from nihilism as can be.
“One of the most original and unsettling of those thinkers who, in the wake of Sade and Nietzsche, have confronted the possibility of thought in a world that has lost its myth of transcendence.” – Peter Brooks, New York Times Book Review
“Bataille has survived the death of God.” – Jean-Paul Sartre
Translated by Michael Richardson
2009, English
Softcover, 197 pages, 20.9 x 13.1 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
On a crowded bus at midday, Raymond Queneau observes one man accusing another of jostling him deliberately. When a seat is vacated, the first man appropriates it. Later, in another part of town, Queneau sees the man being advised by a friend to sew another button on his overcoat. Exercises in Style retells this unexceptional tale ninety-nine times, employing the sonnet and the alexandrine, “Ze Frrench” and “Cockney.” An “Abusive” chapter heartily deplores the events; “Opera English” lends them grandeur. In 1947, when Exercises in Style first appeared in French, it led to Queneau’s election to the highly prestigious Académie des Goncourt. He once told Barbara Wright that of all of his books, this was the one he most wished to see translated. He rendered her his “heartiest congratulations,” adding: “I have always thought that nothing is untranslatable. Here is new proof. And it is accomplished with all the intended humor. It has not only linguistic knowledge and ingenuity, it also has that.”
Raymond Queneau was a French novelist, poet, critic, editor and co-founder and president of Oulipo, notable for his wit and cynical humour. Born in Le Havre in 1903, Queneau went to Paris when he was 17. In 1924 Queneau met and briefly joined the Surrealists, but never fully shared their penchants for automatic writing or ultra-left politics. Like many surrealists, he entered psychoanalysis—however, not in order to stimulate his creative abilities, but for personal reasons, as with Leiris, Bataille, and Crevel. Now, seeing Queneau's work in retrospect, it seems inevitable. The Surrealists tried to achieve a sort of pure expression from the unconscious, without mediation of the author's self-aware "persona." Queneau's texts, on the contrary, are quite deliberate products of the author's conscious mind, of his memory, and his intentionality. Although Queneau's novels give an impression of enormous spontaneity, they were in fact painstakingly conceived in every small detail.