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.
2017, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 21 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$130.00 - Out of stock
"Beksinski's powerfully unique paintings are such as I have never before seen" — H.R. Giger
Comprehensive collection Zdzisław Beksiński's sadomasochistic, biomorphic drawings from the 1960s—1970s, mostly never published before, issued in Japan as part of Treville's series of volumes on the Polish master of introvert fantasy. 140 works accompanied by interviews with Beksinski, essays and other texts in English and Japanese.
Zdzisław Beksiński (1929 – 2005) was a Polish painter, photographer and sculptor. Beksiński had no formal training as an artist. Born in Sanok, he studied architecture in Kraków and worked as a construction site supervisor before turning to his passion for art, sculpting with construction site materials for his medium. His early photography would be a precursor to his paintings, often referred to as dystopian surrealism. Beksiński claimed, "I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams". Beksiński undertook painting with a passion, working intensely whilst listening to classical music and quickly becoming a leading figure in contemporary Polish art. In the late 1960s, Beksiński entered what he himself called his "fantastic period", which lasted up to the mid-1980s, during which he created his famed images of desolate, surrealistic landscapes with intricate depictions of anxious, abstracted figures and architecture in states of decay, mutation and decomposition. Although Beksiński's art was often dark, he himself was known to be a pleasant person with a keen sense of humour. Modest and somewhat shy, he avoided public events such as the openings of his own exhibitions and almost never visited museums or exhibitions in general. He always credited music as his main source of inspiration. Beksiński avoided concrete analysis of the content of his work, saying "I cannot conceive of a sensible statement on painting". Beksiński was stabbed to death at his Warsaw apartment in February 2005 by a 19-year-old acquaintance from Wołomin, reportedly because he refused to lend the teenager money.
"In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh – whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish – thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust." — Guillermo del Toro, Mexican film director
As New copy of the revised 2017 edition.
1988, English
Softcover, 150 pages, 22 x 14 cm
Reprint,
Published by
University of Nebraska Press / Lincoln
$35.00 - Out of stock
"Mad Love" has been acknowledged an undisputed classic of the surrealist movement since its first publication in France in 1937. Its adulation of love as both mystery and revelation places it in the most abiding of literary traditions, but its stormy history and technical difficulty have prevented it from being translated into English until now.
"There has never been any forbidden fruit. Only temptation is divine," writes André Breton, leader of the surrealists in Paris in the 1920s and '30s. "Mad Love" is dedicated to defying "the widespread opinion that love wears out, like the diamond, in its own dust." Celebrating breton's own love and lover, the book unveils the marvelous in everyday encounters and the hidden depths of ordinary things.
"Mad Love is a bizarre, beautiful book. It is a novel, an autobiography, a manifesto—a highly unusual hybrid or, better yet, a 'miracle of rare device.'... [Breton] has seduced me. I have tried to make sense, using words, of his longings. I am in love with this book, but like Breton, I cannot explain my deep, irrational responses."—Review of Contemporary Fiction
Translated by Mary Ann Caws.
1997, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 20.96 x 14.61 cm
Published by
Farrar Straus & Giroux / New York
$38.00 - Out of stock
Mina Loy's technique and subjects - prostitution, menstruation, destitution, and suicide - shock even some modernists and she vanished from the poetry scene as dramatically as she had appeared on it. Roger Conover has rescued the key texts from the pages of forgotten publications, and has included all of the futurist and feminist satires, poems from Loy's Paris and New York periods, and the complete cycle of "Love Songs," as well as previously unknown texts and detailed notes.
Edited by Roger L Conover.
"[Mina Loy] may now be launched on a posthumous career as the electric-age Blake."—Hugh Kenner, The Washington Times
"Mina Loy has finally been admitted into 'the company of poets, ' the canon. As if she cared."—Thom Gunn, The Times Literary Supplement
Mina Loy was born in London in 1882, became American, and lived variously in New York, Europe, and finally, Aspen, Colorado until she died in 1966. Flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde, she was a painter, poet, novelist, essayist, manifesto-writer, actress, and dress and lampshade designer. Her life involved an impossible abundance of artistic friends, performance and spectacular adventures in the worlds of Futurism, Christian Science, Feminism, Fashion, and everything modern and modernist.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 208 pages, 21.6 x 16.7 cm
Published by
Reaktion books / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
Mina Loy was born in London in 1882, became American, and lived variously in New York, Europe, and finally, Aspen, Colorado until she died in 1966. Flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde, she was a painter, poet, novelist, essayist, manifesto-writer, actress, and dress and lampshade designer. Her life involved an impossible abundance of artistic friends, performance and spectacular adventures in the worlds of Futurism, Christian Science, Feminism, Fashion, and everything modern and modernist.
This new account by Mary Ann Caws explores Mina Loy's exceptional life, and features many rare images of Loy and her husband, the swiss writer, poet, artist, boxer and provocateur Arthur Cravan, who disappeared without trace in 1918.
About the Author
Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English, and French, Graduate School of the City University of New York. She is the author of many books including The Modern Art Cookbook and Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism, both published by Reaktion Books.
Industry Reviews
‘Much like its subject, Mina Loy: Apology of Genius runs on restlessness, fervor, and open-endedness. With it, Mary Ann Caws has gifted us yet another stirring assemblage that teaches and excites, this time blessedly dilating on a singularly complex, singularly wild figure at the heart of the modern and so much else.’
Maggie Nelson author of The Argonauts
‘Startlingly original, personal, and wonderfully refreshing in its candour. Beautifully and copiously illustrated, this bio-critical overview gives us a genuinely new perspective on the exciting poetry, critical prose, and artworks of this great avant-garde artist.’—Marjorie Perloff author of Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics
1972, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 138 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Jonathan Cape / London
$120.00 - Out of stock
Rare 1972 hardcover first edition of Georges Bataille's My Mother, published by Jonathan Cape, London, translated to English from the French by Austryn Wainhouse. Ma Mère was the first of Bataille's novels to appear in Britain. My Mother is a frank and intense depiction of a young man's sexual initiation and corruption by his mother, where the profane becomes sacred, and intense experience is shown as the only way to transcend the boundaries of society and morality. Georges Bataille was obsessed by the paradox contained in passion, the presence of joy in terror, pleasure in suffering and compulsion in repulsion. His dark and anguished study is a minor erotic masterpiece.
Georges Bataille (1897—1962) was a French philosopher, essayist and novelist, often called the "metaphysician of evil." Born in Billom, France, he converted to Catholicism, then later to Marxism. Bataille was involved on the fringes of Surrealism, f1972ounding the Surrealist magazine Documents in 1929, and editing the literary review Critique from 1946 until his death. Leading a simple life as the curator of a municipal library, Bataille wrote some of France's most famous forbidden books, and has become known as a forefather the "literature of transgression". Interested in sex, death, degradation, mysticism and the power and potential of the obscene, he rejected traditional literature and considered that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic, or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, transcendental act of communion. Fascinated by human sacrifice, he founded a secret society, Acéphale, alongside André Masson, Pierre Klossowski, Roger Caillois, and others. Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Philippe Sollers have all written enthusiastically about Bataille's work.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket with minor wear and tear.
1959, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 20.5 x 10.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
The Arts Council / London
$55.00 - Out of stock
Lovely rare 1959 catalogue produced on the occasion of the Kurt Schwitters exhibition held by The Arts Council in London. It was in England that the modest and gentle Schwitters spent his last 7 years before he passed away in 1948. Illustrated with a selection of his constructions and collages, his MERZ works, accompanied by an introduction by art historian Alan Bowness, a full catalogue of works and a biographical note, all spread across multiple paper and tissue stocks, exquisitely letter-pressed and printed by Graphis Press in London.
Kurt (Hermann Eduard Karl Julius) Schwitters (1887—1948) was a German artist, one of the great masters of 20th century art. Associated with Der Sturm in Germany, the Dadaists, Constructivists, and Surrealists, Schwitters was a pioneer of abstract art. Working across the fields of poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what came to be known as installation art., he developed his own kind of Modern Art, called MERZ.
Near Fine copy.
1971, English
Softcover, folded card, 46 x 20 cm (unfolded)
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Staempfli / New York
$25.00 - In stock -
Rare folding card invitation/catalogue published on the occasion of the two-artist exhibition of Belgian painter Paul Delvaux (1897—1994) and German painter and graphic artist Paul Wunderlich (1927—2010) at Staempfli, New York, February 16—March 20, 1971. Offset printed in Switzerland, the catalogue features a colour reproduction of each artist's work in oil on canvas on the subject of the fantastic nude, with full exhibition catalogue on verso. The exhibition comprised a large number of works in oil on canvas by each artist, the earliest of which by Delvaux from 1943.
Good copy, light wear/marking.
1969, French
Hardcover (cloth bound), 106 pages, 21 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Éditions Denoël / Paris
$120.00 - Out of stock
First Edition of the catalogue raisonné of the engraved work of German Surrealist Hans Bellmer, published in 1969 by Éditions Denoël, Paris. Wrapped in the publisher's debossed black covers featuring Bellmer's Céphalopode of 1965, this handsome volume opens with "Morale of Engraving", a four page introduction by author Andre Pieyre De Mandiargues (in French). The rest of the book is made up of 141 reproduced engraved works of Bellmer, including his exquisite works complimenting Georges Bataille, Marquis de Sade, Joyce Mansour, Louis Aragon, Charles Baudelaire, and others, followed by a 7 page catalogue raisonné index, including work title, date, process and technique, dimensions, printing justifications, editors and other details. An essential title in any Bellmer collection and important reference.
Good copy, tanning and some marks to board/page edges with age.
1978, Italian / French
Softcover, 230 pages, 27 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Mazzotta / Milan
$50.00 - Out of stock
First 1978 Mazzotta edition of this absolute classic of Surrealist collage by Max Ernst, first published in 1934. If the collage technique has become an art, it owes it to a work like this book and of course to Max Ernst, one of the masters of collage and incomparable Surrealist painter. Western art has always tried to tear apart the straitjackets of the imprisoned body with one hand: but no one has succeeded in this insurrection like Max Ernst in the novel-collages he invented and brought to climax between 1929 and 1934. These are images accompanied by rapturous captions and cropped from the illustrations of serial novels from the 19th and early 20th centuries, full of sensual and innocent girls undermined by dark pupils of Sade, and messieurs in black suits and spats who hide shameful foibles, while in the background "the city full of dreams" by Baudelaire trembles and again "the specter lures the passer-by in broad daylight". A dreamlike staging inherited from the feuilletons, therefore, but which Ernst, with his montage made up of mysterious juxtapositions and obscure cuts, the exaltation of chance and the thrill of analogy, with his slow-motion cinema and his comic strip for adults only, has been able to transform into the banner of the perennial revolt of desire.
Bi-lingual texts (French/Italian) by Jarry, Schwob, Breton, Eluard...
A masterpiece.
Very Good copy some edge wear, ageing.
1969, Japanese
Softcover, 128 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tenjō Sajiki / Tokyo
$360.00 - In stock -
Very rare copy of the first issue of Angura (Underground Theatre), the "Dramatic Theory Magazine", published in 1969 in Tokyo by Shūji Terayama's radical avant-garde theatre company Tenjō Sajiki. Strikingly designed by the great Japanese art director Ryōichi Enomoto, this issue's special feature is ‘Anti-Theater’, with contributions by Shūji Terayama, photographer Yoshihiro Tatsuki, artist Jiro Takamatsu, poet Tadaaki Mori, director and cinematographer Sakumi Hagiwara, critic Masaaki Hiraoka, critic Koichi Isoda, actor Shigeomi Satô, and many others. A very unique periodical that not only discusses in-depth the works of Angura theatre, but also the international avant-garde, inviting diverse critical perspectives on performance and anti- and living-theatre, sharing ground with Gutai and Fluxus. Illustrated throughout with drawings, diagrams and photographs, mixing themes of pop, protest, surrealism, and eros, plus texts and scripts in Japanese. A rare printed embodiment of Tenjō Sajiki, Terayama, Tadanori Yokoo and the Japanese underground.
Tenjō Sajiki was a Japanese independent theater troupe co-founded by Shūji Terayama, Kujō Kyōko, Yutaka Higashi, Tadanori Yokoo, and Fumiko Takagi. Led by Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer Shūji Terayama, the prolific group was active between 1967 and 1983 (until Terayama's death). A major phenomenon on the Japanese Angura ("underground") theater scene, the group has produced a number of stage works marked by experimentalism, folklore influences, social provocation, grotesque eroticism and the flamboyant fantasy characteristic of Terayama's oeuvre. Tenjō Sajiki benefitted greatly from collaborations with a number of prominent artists, including musicians J. A. Seazer and Kan Mikami, and graphic designers Aquirax Uno and Tadanori Yokoo.
Shūji Terayama (1935 — 1983) was a Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. His works range from radio drama, experimental television, underground (Angura) theatre, countercultural essays, to Japanese New Wave and "expanded" cinema. Terayama is considered one of the most productive and provocative creative artists to come out of Japan, with a wide-reaching influence on many artists from the 1970s onward.
Very Good copy.
2020, English
Softcover, 137 pages, 13.5 x 19 cm
Published by
Twisted Spoon Press / Prague
$36.00 - In stock -
Launched in 1931 by Jindřich Štyrský, Edition 69 consisted of six volumes of erotic literature and illustration that followed the path marked out by Louis Aragon’s Irene’s Cunt and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye. Including the first Czech translation of Marquis de Sade’s Justine and Pietro Aretino (both illustrated by Toyen), three volumes in the series were from Czech avant-garde artists, and these were all illustrated by Štyrský himself, who also contributed the text for the series' final volume. Brought together here in original English translations, Edition 69 comprises: Nezval’s “Sexual Nocturne”; Halas’s erotic poetry collection “Thyrsos”; and Štyrský’s “Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream,” including the original postscript from psychoanalyst and fellow Surrealist Bohuslav Brouk. For each, Štyrský chose a different technique for the artwork, from pen and ink drawings to graphic collages to pornographic photomontages. Influenced by Max Ernst’s collage-novels, André Masson’s illustrations, and the book as object, Štyrský’s overall conception for the Edition 69 series rank it among the notable achievements of European Surrealism, representing as well a sustained attempt by the interwar Czech avant-garde to investigate the taboos of bourgeois culture.
2021, English
Hardcover, 192 pages, 17.2 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$49.00 - Out of stock
Unica Zürn’s celebrated autobiography, plus the greatest of her short fictional texts, edited and in a revised by translation by Malcolm Green.
In the 25 years since Atlas Press first published this account by Unica Zürn of her long history of mental crises, she has come to be recognised as a great artist at least the equal of her partner, the Surrealist Hans Bellmer.
Yet her work is barely comprehensible without the texts printed here, in which she demonstrates how her familiarity with Surrealist conceptions of the psyche allowed her to welcome the most alarming experiences as offering her access to an inner existence that was the vital source for her artistic output. The introduction here was the first study to consider her life and work from this perspective.
Zürn’s initial mental collapse was initiated when she encountered her fantasy figure “the man of Jasmine” in the real world in the person of the writer Henri Michaux. Her meeting with him plunged her into a world of hallucination in which visions of her desires, anxieties and events from her unresolved past overwhelmed her present life. Her return to “reality” was constantly interrupted by alternate visionary and depressive periods, and her description of these episodes reveals how language itself formed a part of the “divinatory” method that could aid her recovery or predict a new crisis. Her compulsion for composing anagrams allowed her to dissect everyday language so as to release from it an astonishing flood of messages, threats and evocations. This method, if such it can be called, and Zürn’s eloquent yet direct style make this book a masterpiece of literature as well as providing an acute first-hand insight into extreme psychological states.
In 1970 Unica Zürn committed suicide by throwing herself from the sixth-floor apartment that she shared with Bellmer.
2023, English / French
Softcover, 219 pages, 15.2 x 21.5 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$40.00 - In stock -
Erotic-macabre poetry by an overlooked Surrealist woman from the Middle East.
"You know very well, Joyce, that you are for me—and very objectively too—the greatest poet of our time. Surrealist poetry, that's you."—André Breton
"Your poems know the essential cries, those which speak of passion in its vertigo."—Gaston Bachelard, author of The Poetics of Space
The most significant Surrealist poet to emerge in 1950s Paris was a woman, Joyce Mansour. Mansour was a Syrian Jewish exile from Egypt whose fierce, macabre, erotically charged works gave André Breton's Surrealist group a much-needed jolt after the ravages of the Second World War. Among new adherents, only Mansour wrote poems commensurate with those of Robert Desnos, René Char, Benjamin Péret, and other poets from the movement's heyday. Yet she remains curiously neglected in English translation, and even her posthumous reputation in France suffers from the patriarchal and chauvinist biases of the French literary establishment.
Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems by Joyce Mansour is a much-needed corrective to this state of affairs, a compact yet career-spanning, bilingual anthology of this incendiary poet. With a biographical introduction by translator Emilie Moorhouse, Emerald Wounds showcases the entire arc of Mansour's trajectory as a poet, from the at-once gothic and minimalist fragments of her first collection in 1953, Screams, to the serpentine power of her final poems of the 1980s. Juxtaposing the original French poems with their English translations, Mansour's voice surges forward uncensored and raw, communicating the frustrations, anger, and sadness of an intelligent, worldly woman who defies the constraints and oppression of a male-dominated society that sees women as superficial objects of desire rather than multidimensional, autonomous subjects. Mansour is a poet the world needs today.
1971, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 160 pages, 21.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Lemon Inc. / Tokyo
$90.00 - In stock -
Inaugural 1971 issue of legendary Japanese underground arts periodical, Black Magazine (or Black Notebook), a pioneering platform of the 1970s subculture in Tokyo. A magazine like no-other, each issue "a paradise of 1970's heretical culture", introduces a new wave of illustrators and photographers, radical criticism, avant-garde comics, sadistic literature, poetry, underground film and theatre, and all manner of transgressive, esoteric and erotic material, alongside well-known authors... This scarce first issue with incredible cover by Japanese illustrator Ken Katayama, features work/contributions by author Izumi Suzuki, film director Michio Okabe, artist Genpei Akasegawa, critic Junzo Ishiko, author Boris Vian, film director Eiichi Uchida, film critic Jin'ichi Uekusa, manga artist Shotaro Ishinomori, author Mieko Kanai, music critic Masaaki Hiraoka, artist Koichi Tanigawa, manga artist Shigeru Sugiura, graphic designer Mad Amano, doll artist Shimon Yotsuya, illustrator G. Akechi, art critic Junzo Ishiko, art critic Yoshida Yoshie, film director Toshio Matsumoto, graphic artist Keiichi Tanaami, author Koji Suzuki, artist Toshio Saeki, manga artist Shigeru Mizuki, manga artist Mori Masaki, manga artist Mitsuhiko Yoshida, artist Tsunehisa Kimura, playwright Jūrō Kara, and many more. A lot of great things started in the pages of this unique magazine. A highly recommended publication!
Good—Very Good copy, general wear/age.
1971, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 160 pages, 21.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Lemon Inc. / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
Third 1971 issue of legendary Japanese underground arts periodical, Black Magazine (or Black Notebook), a pioneering platform of the 1970s subculture in Tokyo. A magazine like no-other, each issue "a paradise of 1970's heretical culture", introduces a new wave of illustrators and photographers, radical criticism, avant-garde comics, sadistic literature, poetry, underground film and theatre, and all manner of transgressive, esoteric and erotic material, alongside well-known authors... This third issue, themed "Heaven and Hell", features incredible cover by renowned Japanese doll artist (and female doll actor) Simon Yotsuya, and contributions by ero guro master Toshio Saeki, artist Genpei Akasegawa, art critic Junzo Ishiko, "Funeral Parade of Roses" director Toshio Matsumoto, Butoh dancer Natsu Nakajima, poet and critic Akiko Baba, photographer Masatoshi Naitō, manga artist Ryuzan Aki, literary critic Katsutarō Isogai, illustrator Akechi Goro, writer Masaki Umehara, author Utagawa Taiga, literary critic Nobuo Kasahara, essayist Shinichi Kusamori, critic Hidetomo Kanaoka, illustrator (Flower Travellin' Band) Shinobu Ishimaru, manga artist Shigeru Sugiura, scholar Aoi Suenaga, artist Takahashi Shōtei, illustrator Yosuke Inoue, and many more. A lot of great things started in the pages of this unique magazine. A highly recommended publication!
Good copy, general light wear/age/some creasing to corners, tanning.
2023, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 17.8 x 11.4 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$29.00 - In stock -
Translated, with an introduction, by Justin Vicari.
Conceived in a hospital bed in 1917, then written a few months later after his first and fateful encounter with Lautréamont’s Maldoror, Philippe Soupault’s novella, The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle, preceded the author’s involvement with the Parisian Dada movement and the adventure of surrealism he would later launch with his friends. Inspired by a Liberian schoolmate’s sudden departure for Greenland on a whim and his subsequent disappearance into that distant country, Soupault imagines his alter ego’s adventures as entries in a journal both personal and fictional. Adopted by an Inuit tribe, Pirouelle drifts from one encounter to another, from one casual murder to another, until his life of liberty and spontaneity leads him to stasis at the edge of existence.
Floating between the romantic legacy of Arthur Rimbaud’s abandonment of literature and the banality and loss of personality and morality in the adventurer’s abandonment of society, The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle charts out a troubled tribute to wanderlust and the acte gratuit.
After taking an active part in French Dada, Philippe Soupault (1897–1990) cofounded the surrealist movement with André Breton and Louis Aragon, and authored with Breton The Magnetic Fields, the first official surrealist work. After being expelled from the movement for the crime of being “too literary,” he devoted his life to writing, travel, journalism, and political activity (for which he was put in prison by the collaborationist Vichy government).
1996, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 23 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the incredible and sadly long out-of-print Encyclopedia Acephalica, published by Atlas Press in 1996 as part of their mighty Atlas Arkhive : Documents of the Avant Garde series..
Bataille’s thought is complex, and his books make few concessions to the reader. The first series of texts here, however, were written for a wider audience by Bataille and his friends, in the form of a Critical Dictionary, and they provide a witty, poetic and concise introduction to his ideas. The Dictionary appeared in the magazine edited by Bataille, Documents, in the early 1930s, and includes entries from prominent ethnologists and cultural commentators of the day. The second series of texts here, the Da Costa Encyclopédique was published anonymously after the liberation of Paris in 1947 by members of the Acéphale group and writers associated with the Surrealists. Both cover the essential concepts of Bataille and his associates: sacred sociology; scatology, death and the erotic; base materialism; the aesthetics of the formless; sacrifice, the festival and the politics of the tumult etc: a new description of the limits of being human. Humour, albeit, sardonic, is not absent from these remarkable redefinitions of the most heterogeneous objects or ideas: Camel, Church, Dust, Museum, Spittle, Skyscraper, Threshold, Work – to name but a few.
While the Documents group was celebrated for joining together artists, authors, sociologists and ethnologists (among the most important of their time) in a literary and philosophical project, the Acéphale group was more mysterious. Until recently even its membership was only vaguely known, and its activities remained secret (these are explored in detail for the first time in English in The Sacred Conspiracy, published by Atlas Press, also available at World Food Books). The origins of the Da Costa only became known in 1993, the present volume revealed for the first time its principal compilers: Robert Lebel, Isabelle Waldberg and Marcel Duchamp, but the identity of the authors of a large part of it is still unknown.
Texts by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Marcel Griaule, Carl Einstein, Robert Desnos and writers associated with the Acéphale and Surrealist groups.
Introduced by Alastair Brotchie. Translated by Iain White, Dominic Faccini, Annette Michelson, John Harman, Alexis Lykiard.
Very Good copy, with some light edge wear.
2019, English
Softcover, 384 pages, 14 x 21.6 cm
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$69.00 - In stock -
An archive-based, in-depth analysis of the surreal nature and science movies of the pioneering French filmmaker Jean Painleve
Before Jacques-Yves Cousteau, there was Jean Painleve, a pioneering French scientific and nature filmmaker with a Surrealist's eye. Creator of more than two hundred films, his studies of strange animal worlds doubled as critical reimaginations of humanity. With an unerring eye for the uncanny and unexpected, Painleve and his assistant Genevieve Hamon captured oneiric octopuses, metamorphic crustaceans, erotic seahorses, mythic vampire bats, and insatiable predatory insects.
Zoological Surrealism draws from Painleve's early oeuvre to rethink the entangled histories of cinema, Surrealism, and scientific research in interwar France. Delving deeply into Painleve's archive, James Leo Cahill develops an account of "cinema's Copernican vocation"-how it was used to forge new scientific discoveries while also displacing and critiquing anthropocentric viewpoints.
From Painleve's engagements with Sergei Eisenstein, Georges Franju, and competing Surrealists to the historiographical dimensions of Jean Vigo's concept of social cinema, Zoological Surrealism taps never-before-examined sources to offer a completely original perspective on a cutting-edge filmmaker. The first extensive English-language study of Painleve's early films and their contexts, it adds important new insight to our understanding of film while also contributing to contemporary investigations of the increasingly surreal landscapes of climate change and ecological emergency.
1988, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 128 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rizzoli / New York
$100.00 - In stock -
First English-language hardcover edition of this major monograph on Jean Arp (1886—1966) published in 1988 by Rizzoli, New York, authored by Serge Fauchereau. Traces the life and career of the Franco-Swiss artist, lavishly illustrated throughout with wonderful colour and b/w reproductions of his collage, graphics, stone and bronze sculptures, and wooden reliefs. Jean Arp, also called Hans Arp, French sculptor, painter, and poet was one of the leaders of the European avant-garde in the arts during the first half of the 20th century, heavily associated with Dada, Surrealism and Abstract art.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
2013, English
Hardcover, 176 pages, 17.4 x 19.6 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$46.00 - In stock -
Mystery, the marvellous, the city of Paris transmuted by love, and Sanglot the Corsair’s pursuit of the siren Louise Lame: these are the essential ingredients of this masterpiece of early Surrealism. It was originally published in 1924 to immediate and lasting acclaim — except from the public authorities who immediately censored whole sections (here restored).
How describe a novel of such virtuosity and bravura, which never behaves as one would expect? Characters appear and vanish according to whim and desire, they walk underwater, nonchalantly accept astounding coincidences. It’s a hymn to the erotic, an adventure story illumined by the shades of Sade, Lautréamont and Jack the Ripper, a dream at once violent and tender, in fact the perfect embodiment of the Surrealist spirit: joyful, despairing, and effortlessly scandalous.
Desnos was one of the earliest members of the Paris Surrealist group. His remarkable talents first emerged during the “Period of Sleeping Fits”, when the group was investigating unconscious and trance states. Able to put himself in trance at will, he would pour out sonnets, prophecies, enigmatic drawings. “Desnos more than any of us got closest to the Surrealist truth,” wrote Breton in their first manifesto.
An active member of the Resistance, Desnos died of typhus two weeks after his liberation from the Nazi concentration camp at Terezin.
Translated and introduced by Terry Hale.
1979, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 76 pages, 29.7 x 29.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$85.00 - In stock -
First Japanese edition of the 1979 classic "Giger's Alien", a visually stunning and wonderfully insightful book for any fan of the art of H.R. Giger, Ridley Scott and Dan O'Bannon's Alien film or in the production of science-fiction/horror/special effects in any way. A must.
"Giger's Alien provides a complete record of the months and months of painstaking work that resulted in two hours of terrifying celluloid. Sketches, original paintings, photographs of scenery and the Alien under construction and scenes from the film are linked by Giger's detailed diary of his thoughts and actions at the time".
Very Good copy in VG original dust jacket. Only light wear/age. First edition.
1992, English
Softcover, 94 pages, 30 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Taschen / Cologne
$45.00 - Out of stock
"The more famous I get, the more I am tolerated, albeit with some head-shaking."H.R. Giger
1992 printing of A Rh+, the English edition, collecting Giger's multi-faceted career in one place: From surrealistic dream landscapes, to album cover designs, and sculpture. Lavishly illustrated with over 100 images with detailed captions, this monograph forms a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the most leading fantasy artist and ALIEN master, H.R. Giger, covering his cultural and historical importance and a concise biography.
Very Good copy with light cover wear.
1991, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 184 pages, 22.23 x 14.61 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Penn State University / Pennsylvania
$50.00 - Out of stock
“In many ways, like its subject, marvelously idiosyncratic and playful, this book will make an important contribution to our understanding of the rhetoric of mannerism.”—Ernest B. Gilman New York University
First 1991 hardcover edition of Giancarlo Maiorino's The Portrait of Eccentricity : Arcimboldo and the Mannerist Grotesque. In this companion to his The Cornucopian Mind and the Baroque Unity of the Arts, Maiorino examines the links between Renaissance and the modern versions of the Groteseque.
In this interdisciplinary study, the term "eccentricity" refers to styles of playful extravagance. Maiorino focuses on the rhetorical figures of excess employed by a critic-historian (Giorgio Vasari), on the willful artificiality of a painter (Giuseppe Arcimboldo), and on the programmatic and interpretive commentary of a theorist (Gregorio Comanini).
Maiorino draws subtle and persuasive connections between the images he discusses and the grotesque "face" of sixteenth-century poetics and rhetoric. He sets the mannerist and the grotesque against the philosophical seriousness of Renaissance humanism, interpreting them as a celebration of the ludic and fantastic possibilities of art itself. Aiming at pleasure rather than instruction, this art plays on the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, the credible and the impossible, taking delight in parody, excess, disjunction, and exaggeration.
Fine copy in Near Fine dust jacket.
1965 / 2001, English
Softcover, 253 pages, 13.9 x 20.3 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$36.00 - Out of stock
"I am the man," wrote Artaud, "who has best charted his inmost self."
Antonin Artaud was a great poet who, like Poe, Holderlin, and Nerval, wanted to live in the infinite and asked that the human spirit burn in absolute freedom. To society, he was a madman. Artaud, however, was not insane but in luciferian pursuit of what society keeps hidden. The man who wrote "Van Gogh the Man Suicided by Society" raged against the insanity of social institutions with insight that proves more prescient with every passing year. Today, as Artaud's vatic thunder still crashes above the "larval confusion" he despised, what is most striking in his writings is an extravagant lucidity. This collection gives us quintessential Artaud on the occult, magic, the theater, mind and body, the cosmos, rebellion, and revolution in its deepest sense.
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonine Artaud, was a French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theatre director, widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century theatre and the European avant-garde.
Jack Hirschman (1933 – 2021) was an American poet and social activist who has written more than 50 volumes of poetry. Dismissed from teaching at UCLA for anti-war activities in 1966, he moved to San Francisco in 1973, and was the city's present poet laureate. Hirschman translated nine languages and edited The Artaud Anthology.