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:
THU—SAT 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2006, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 27.1 x 21.4 cm
Published by
Hayward Gallery Publishing / London
$75.00 - In stock -
An exploration of the unsettling collisions of art and culture in Georges Bataille's revolutionary journal and a new consideration of twentieth-century masterpieces by Picasso, Miro, Dali, and others against the canvas of their renegade times.
In the Paris art world of the 1920s, Georges Bataille and his journal DOCUMENTS represented a dissident branch of surrealism. Bataille—poet, philosopher, writer, and self-styled "enemy within" surrealism—used DOCUMENTS to put art into violent confrontation with popular culture, ethnography, film, and archaeology. Undercover Surrealism, taking the visual richness of DOCUMENTS as its starting point, recovers the explosive and vital intellectual context of works by Picasso, Miro, Dali, Giacometti, and others in 1920s Paris.
Profusely illustrated (featuring 180 colour images) and filled with valuable English translations of original French texts from DOCUMENTS accompanied by essays and shorter descriptive texts, Undercover Surrealism recreates and recontextualizes Bataille's still unsettling approach to culture. Putting Picasso's Three Dancers back into its original context of sex, sacrifice, and violence, for example, then juxtaposing it with images of gang wars, tribal masks, voodoo ritual, Hollywood musicals, and jazz, makes the urgency and excitement of Bataille's radical ideas startlingly vivid to a twenty-first-century reader.
1982/1992, Japanese
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atelier Peyotl / Tokyo
$60.00 - In stock -
"Corpse" Special Feature Issue of cult Japanese underground magazine Yaso, first published in 1982, then re-printed in 1992, edited by Yuichi Konno and Atelier Peyotl (publishers of Night Vision/Yaso/Peyotl/Wave/Silvester Club...). Heavily illustrated with texts in Japanese that look at the theme of death and the dead in the arts, literature, occultism, ancient sciences, philosophy, mythology, poetry, film, crime, and much more. Features John Duncan, Tetsumi Kudo, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Masahisa Fukase, Franz Kafka, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Guillaume Apollinaire, Joe Potts (LAFMS), Takashi Ishii, Rudolf II — Holy Roman Emperor, Akinari Ueda, Marcel Duchamp, Chris Burden, Paul Celan, Alain Resnais, Gilyak Amagasaki, Shusaku Arakawa, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Shuji Terayama, Andy Warhol, Charles Manson, Brian Wilson, Kyoko Endoh, Princess Yongtai, Salvador Dalí, Ono no Komachi, Kiyoshi Kasai, Caravaggio, Throbbing Gristle, Takizawa Bakin, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, Manson Family, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Wu Zetian, Genesis P-Orridge, Yusuke Nakahara, Ranpo Lagrange, Mitsusada Fukasaku, Nakai Hideo, Richard Wagner, and many more.
Very Good copy.
1995, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 23 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
Long out-of-print Atlas Arkhive 2 published by the legendary Atlas Press in 1995. This anthology is the largest ever selection from the Decadent and Symbolist writers of the French fin-de-siècle — a period whose social and spiritual ills had so much in common with those of today.
The selection is based on a series of essays on contemporary writers published as The Book of Masks by the foremost critic and author of the period: Remy de Gourmont. (The "masks" are remarkable portrait drawings by Félix Vallotton.) De Gourmont's essays brilliantly evoke the pre-occupations of each author, their genius and shortcomings, while simultaneously describing, and contributing to, the literary theories of the movement. His introduction provides one of the most important overviews of Symbolism and describes its gradual subsidence into its "dark side": decadence. De Gourmont's book consisted solely of essays, but the editor of this anthology has added characteristic texts from each writer to accompany them. Nearly fifty are included, ranging from the extraordinary obscure and unjustly forgotten to the literary giants of the day. Here are works by Gide, Mallarme and Verlaine which have never before appeared in English.
Symbolism was a strange amalgam of the social turmoil of its times; its authors veer between an aesthetics based on simplicity and asceticism and the decadent debauches forever associated with Huysmans and Wilde. Their political associations were equally split, between Catholic piety and right-wing nationalism, and anarchist individualism taken to the point of bomb-throwing. What united these disparate writers was a desire to escape the confines of realism. They produced a fierce literature based on a renewed use of language, finely tuned, often astonishingly lush, which examines that mysterious region of the spirit that lies between inner and outer life. This collection should necessitate a complete re-evaluation of a school of writing that endured for several decades.
Good—Very Good copy with some wear to extremities small bump to bottom of spine, creasing to boards.
1997, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 23 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Routledge / London
$60.00 - In stock -
Rare first edition of Critchley's Very Little ... Almost Nothing, published in 1997. This remarkable book puts the question of the meaning of life back at the centre of intellectual debate. Its central concern is how we can find a meaning to human finitude without recourse to anything that transcends that finitude. A profound but secular meditation on the theme of death, Critchley traces the idea of nihilism through Blanchot, Levinas, Jena Romanticism and Cavell, culminating in a reading of Beckett, in many ways the hero of the book.
"This is a very brave book ...it makes philosophical conversation possible again after two decades of pragmatist intolerance."—Roger Poole, Parallax
"This is an often beautifully written philosophical act of mourning ... It also commands respect because it obliges one to examine the fictions one employs to avoid really doing philosophy. Critchley's steadfastly post-Kantian rejection of theological answers to the questions he asks is very welcome."—Andrew Bowie, Radical Philosophy
"Very Little ... Almost Nothing manages with some aplomb, to pull off the extraordinarily difficult task of saying something new and interesting about Beckett and Blanchot."—Martin McQuillan, New Formations
Very Good copy with some wear to extremities.
2024, English
Softcover, 88 pages, 17.8 x 11.4 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$32.00 - In stock -
Foreword by René Daumal
Translated by Terry Bradford
When published in 1928, Vulturnus represented a new direction in Léon-Paul Fargue’s writing: a shift from the lyrical post-Symbolist melancholy of his early poetry to something more grandiose, dynamic, and cosmic. A long prose poem, for lack of a better term, but one that weaves together philosophical dialogue, metaphysical meditation, and mournful reminiscence delivered in a language that spirals into scientific terminology and Rabelaisian neologism.
Jolted into a nightmare aboard a long-distance train journey, the author finds himself alone yet not alone, his mind pinned like an insect, as he sets off on a journey that takes him from his hometown to other existences, accompanied by the fanfare of the planets and two companions—Pierre Pellegrin and Joseph Aussudre—who guide him as Virgil did Dante, though not through hell, but to a sketched-out terrestrial paradise in quest of a moment of eternity: a syphilis of the ether, “one foot godward, two steps brute.”
This first English translation finally introduces an essential yet underrecognized twentieth-century voice and includes an essay on the text by René Daumal, who declares that “Vulturnus suffocates me with its obviousness … I see behind Fargue the great frame of Doctor Faustroll.”
“Vulturnus is an astonishing book.”—Paul Valéry
“A rollicking interplanetary poem.”—Eugene Jolas
Léon-Paul Fargue (1876–1947) was the archetypal poet of Paris, with ties to everyone from Alfred Jarry and Erik Satie to Colette and Maurice Ravel. His work was admired by Rilke, Joyce, and Walter Benjamin. Though his work spanned and was sometimes associated with various literary movements, a bridge of sorts from symbolism to surrealism (though he was opposed to the latter), he kept to his own path throughout his life: a night wanderer who turned his perambulations through Paris into a unique poetry and prose.
“The greatest living poet in France.”—Walter Benjamin
“One of our greatest poets.”—Rainer Maria Rilke
“Fargue taught us to sublimate the life of everyday and make the highest poetry out of it.”—Max Jacob
2024, English
Softcover, 220 pages, 20.32 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Contra Mundum Press / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
Heir of symbolism, father of surrealism, extraordinary verbal inventor, L on-Paul Fargue reveals himself to be a visionary in his prose poems. He calls High Solitude a "diorama of states of the soul."
In this work, originally published in 1941, Léon-Paul Fargue revives both the night of prehistoric times and that of the end of the world. And, between the two, this fantastic universe also: the Paris that he so loved and of which he was the unforgettable Pi ton. Paris, whose secret geography he traces, in the company of the ghosts of those who were dear to him. The Paris of white nights, stations, and cafes.
But every road, every street, leads to this high, unique place: solitude. "I work at my solitude, searching to guide it in the sea of insomnia where the long line of the dead has thrown us..."
"Fargue taught us to sublimate everyday life and make the highest poetry out of it."—Max Jacob
"Fargue transforms reality and incites it to undergo perilous metamorphoses, and eventually drives it some way toward the abyss. That is the danger of an art devoted to metaphor: it calls everything into question; but that is also its merit, and in the lament for the life of another era which Fargue readily, too readily, intones, it is right that we should hear the wrong note, the unheard of note, which intrudes into it like the cracked echo of an enigma."—Maurice Blanchot
"There is an unknown demon within Fargue that seems to drive him to the most audacious comparisons, in which he makes use of animals, cathedrals, or monsters to castigate the moral squalor of his day. It is a matter of pure poetry, an agility of spirit that leads him ceaselessly to find resemblances or associations for everything his eyes fall on."—André Beucler
LÉON-PAUL FARGUE (1876-1947) was a writer of poems, novels, and essays. He was a member of Les Apaches, an artist's group formed by Ravel and others, and a close friend of Alfred Jarry. Walter Benjamin considered Fargue the greatest poet in twentieth-century France and the two met in the 30s, with Fargue touring the philosopher around the arcades and other parts of Paris. Fargue was considered the great walker of the city of lights and recounted his perambulations in D'après Paris (1931) and Le Piéton de Paris (1939). Other books of his include Haute solitude (1941) and Déjeuners de soleil (1942).
Rainer J. Hanshe was born in Tehran, Iran, raised in New York, and has resided in Europe and elsewhere. He is the author of the novels The Acolytes and The Abdication, as well as of the hybrid entity Shattering the Muses (2016), a collaboration with visual artist Federico Gori, Closing Melodies (2023), a phantomatic encounter between Nietzsche & Van Gogh, and Dionysos Speed (2024). His translations include Baudelaire's My Heart Laid Bare (2017; 2020), Belgium Stripped Bare (2019), and Paris Spleen (2021), Évelyne Grossman's The Creativity of the Crisis, Antonin Artaud's Journey to Mexico: Revolutionary Messages, and Léon-Paul Fargue's High Solitude. as well as longer and shorter works by other authors.His newest work, Humanimality, is forthcoming in 2025. Beyond Sense, a vatic exploration of the aphasiac disintegration of Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Artaud, is due out in 2026. He is at work on a new book entitled Burn Poet Burn.
1991, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 230 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Harvester Wheatsheaf / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
First 1991 hardcover Harvester Wheatsheaf English language edition.
This book is concerned with the notion of the stranger—the foreigner, outsider, or alien in a country and society not their own—as well as the notion of strangeness within the self, a person’s deep sense of being, as distinct from outside appearance and their conscious idea of self.
Julia Kristeva begins with the personal and moves outward by examining world literature and philosophy. She discusses the foreigner in Greek tragedy, in the Bible, and in the literature of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the twentieth century. By considering the legal status of foreigners throughout history, Kristeva offers a different perspective on our own civilization.
Translated by Leon S. Roudiez
Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII. A renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, she has written dozens of books spanning semiotics, political theory, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique, as well as several novels and autobiographical works, published in English translation by Columbia University Press. Kristeva was the inaugural recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004 “for innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture, and literature.”
NF copy in NF dust jacket preserved under mylar wrap.
2003, English
Softcover, 458 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$45.00 - In stock -
While many acknowledge that Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault have redefined our notions of time and history, few recognize the crucial role that “the infinite relation” between seeing and saying (as Foucault put it) plays in their work. Gary Shapiro reveals, for the first time, the full extent of Nietzsche and Foucault’s concern with the visual.
Shapiro explores the whole range of Foucault’s writings on visual art, including the theory of visual resistance, the concept of the phantasm or simulacrum, and his interrogation of the relation of painting, language, and power in artists from Bosch to Warhol. Shapiro also shows through an excavation of little-known writings that the visual is a major theme in Nietzsche’s thought. In addition to explaining the significance of Nietzsche’s analysis of Raphael, Dürer, and Claude Lorrain, he examines the philosopher’s understanding of the visual dimension of Greek theater and Wagnerian opera and offers a powerful new reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Archaeologies of Vision will be a landmark work for all scholars of visual culture as well as for those engaged with continental philosophy.
Fine copy.
1985, English
Softcover (w. paste-ins), 224 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$120.00 - In stock -
"A chrestomathy of dicey enchantments.'—CITY LIMITS
Now rare, long out-of-print 1985 Atlas Anthology 3, edited by Alastair Brotchie & Malcolm Green. "Benign Pollution, Enthused Writing". The third production from the legendary Atlas Press, the third general anthology and the first book to be actually typeset (a very expensive business in those days).
Features: Hans Carl Artmann, Pierre Albert-Birot, Wolfgang Bauer, Konrad Bayer, Pierre Bettencourt, Peter Blegvad, Andre Breton, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Günter Brus, René Crevel, David Gascoyne, Alfred Jarry, James Kirkup, Karl Kraus, Jean Lorrain, Harry Mathews, Gustave Meyrink, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Georges Perec, Benjamin Peret, Oskar Panizza, Raymond Queneau, Jacques Rigaut, Herbert Rosendorfer, Raymond Roussel, Paul Scheerbart, Mathew Phipps Shiel, Kurt Schwitters, Boris Vian, Austryn Wainhouse, Robert Walser, Unica Zürn, Etcetera Etc.
"Here is a prose based on Romanticism, in this century focused around the early Expressionism and the Surrealist movement. It is a literature of unusual beauty and bitter humour, political (in the widest sense), it asserts a complete freedom of form and content. Neither 'cool', restrained nor boring! An important collection of unjustly neglected authors, past and present, which includes many who are seldom translated into English."
Highest recommendation.
Good—Very Good copy complete with all the paste-ins. General wear and tanning.
2002, English / German
Softcover, 144 pages, 29 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Hatje Cantz / Berlin
$80.00 - In stock -
First edition of this major survey catalogue of the great Austrian draftsman, illustrator and author Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) from The Leopold Collection, Vienna, published by Hatje Cantz in 2002. Long out-of-print and one of the best catalogues on the master of the macabre.
Alfred Kubin, an accomplished draughtsman, was inspired by his fascination with the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; and influenced by the artists Goya, Klinger, Ensor, Redon, Rops and Munch. Kubin called his dreamlike imagery a vital "escape into the unreal": ghostly figures, hybrid creatures, variants of torture and self-torture, dream, vampirism, spiritualism, decadence, sex, death and birth. His extraordinary oeuvre comprises more than 20,000 drawings, a large part of it consist of pen drawings, portfolio pieces and illustrations from more than 70 books. This book features a representative selection of master sheets by the bizarre multi-talented artist.
Very Good copy with light wear.
1999, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 13.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Creation Books / London
$45.00 - In stock -
Dead Brides contains the vampire cycle of live stories, written between 1835 and 1842, which in many ways forms the nucleaus of Poe's prose work: Berenic, Montella, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Oval Portrait. In these classic tales, Poe investigates the vampiric nature of human relationships, including love and lust both normal and incestuous, and develops his theme to observe the vampiric qualities inherent in the creative or artistic process.
Vampirism, with its terrible energy exchanges and lesions, is ultimately Poe's analogy for a love that persists beyond the grave - an all-consuming passion that knows no peace until an undead reconciliation is effected.
With a preface by Jeremy Reed, Dead Brides is illustrated by the lithographs of the Symbolist Odilon Redon, who was compelled to reproduce the most insane images from his unconcious through the inspiration of Baudelaire, Huysmans, and other dangerous writers of his age.
Near Fine copy.
1991, English
Softcover, 88 pages, 23.5 x 15.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$55.00 - In stock -
Scarce Creation Classics 1991 illustrated edition of Arthur Machen's first book, "The Great God Pan", once described by The Westminster Gazette as "An incoherent nightmare of sex..." upon its publication in 1894. An unwittingly complimentary description for one of the greatest works of weird horror and decadence, in which Machen unfurls with his singular eye for the bizarre and macabre the tale of a young girl cursed by her unnatural parentage to become a creature of shape-shifting polysexual demi-human evil. This special paperback edition with illustrations throughout by the great Austin Osman Spare. Includes bibliography and introduction by Iain S. Smith.
Good—VG copy with some cover wear.
1993, English
Softcover, 126 pages, 13.5 x 21.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$60.00 - Out of stock
"An incoherent nightmare of sex..." That was The Westminster Gazette's description of Arthur Machen's first book, The Great God Pan, upon its publication in 1894. An unwittingly complimentary description for one of the greatest works of weird horror and decadence, in which Machen unfurls with his singular eye for the bizarre and macabre the tale of a young girl cursed by her unnatural parentage to become a creature of shape-shifting polysexual demi-human evil.
Wonderful collectable 1993 Creation Books reprint, with illustrations throughout by the great Austin Osman Spare.
Arthur Machen (1863 – 1947) was a Welsh author and mystic of the 1890s and early 20th century. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan (1890; 1894) has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror, with Stephen King describing it as "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language."
Very Good copy.
2025, English
Softcover, 312 pages, 20.3 x 13.3 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$42.00 - In stock -
Joris-Karl Huysmans’s semi-autobiographical third novel, first published in French in 1881, signaled the beginning of his break from the naturalism of Émile Zola and his turn toward a “new naturalism” that laid out the negative consequences of determinism and embraced a disgust for human existence and an all-out war against respectability.
Domesticity tells the tale of novelist André Jayant and artist Cyprien Tibaille, two men struggling between the urges of their body and the urges of their soul—between the comforts of coupledom and the ideals of art—and with the failure of matrimony or the artistic endeavor to fulfill the needs of either. More than a psychological character study, though, Domesticity stands as one of the most memorable portraits of late-nineteenth-century Paris: its shops, its eateries, its apartments, and its sad, futile affairs of the heart.
Steeped in sardonic pessimism, this ode to sterility was one of the author’s own favorite novels of his career.
Earning a wage through the French civil service, Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) quietly explored the extremes of human nature and artifice through a series of books that influenced a number of literary movements: from the gray and grimy naturalism of Marthe and Downstream, to the cornerstones of the decadent movement, Against Nature and the Satanist classic Down There, to the dream-ridden surrealist favorite, Becalmed, and his Catholic novels, The Cathedral and The Oblate.
Translated, with an afterword, by George MacLennan.
?, Japanese
Softcover, 174 pages, 20.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Surugadai Shobo / Tokyo
$55.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of A Bizarre Pictorial, a one off, undated (looks to be late 1960s/very early 1970s) publication possibly affiliated with Erotica, Japan's erotic magazine for bibliophiles, published in the 1960s—1970s by Misaki Bookstore. A Bizarre Pictorial, published by Surugadai Bookstore, is "The Museum of Beauty, Mystery, and Perversion; The House of Pranks, The House of Cruelty, and The House of Nonsense". A books of Eros and Thantos — packed with heavily illustrated (colour and b/w) features, articles, photo and illustration galleries around the aforementioned chaptered themes, heavy with sadism, demonology, kinbaku, medieval perversions, history of misery, corpses, crime, possessions, black humour, Shunga artworks, and Japanese monsters (yokai). Essentially an illustrated book of weird and macabre world histories, phenomenons, perversions and customs, care of Kiyoshi Sumida, legendary bondage artist and editor Ueda Seishiro, artist Kawanabe Kyosai, and many more.
G—VG copy with light general edge-wear to covers and spine.
2005, English / French
Softcover, 496 pages, 23.6 x 16.2 cm
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$45.00 - In stock -
The enfant terrible of French letters, Jean-Nicholas-Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) was a defiant and precocious youth who wrote some of the most remarkable prose and poetry of the nineteenth century, all before leaving the world of verse by the age of twenty-one. More than a century after his death, the young rebel-poet continues to appeal to modern readers as much for his turbulent life as for his poetry; his stormy affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine and his nomadic adventures in eastern Africa are as iconic as his hallucinatory poems and symbolist prose.
The first translation of the poet’s complete works when it was published in 1966, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters introduced a new generation of Americans to the alienated genius—among them the Doors’s lead singer Jim Morrison, who wrote to translator Wallace Fowlie to thank him for rendering the poems accessible to those who "don’t read French that easily." Forty years later, the book remains the only side-by-side bilingual edition of Rimbaud’s complete poetic works.
Thoroughly revising Fowlie’s edition, Seth Whidden has made changes on virtually every page, correcting errors, reordering poems, adding previously omitted versions of poems and some letters, and updating the text to reflect current scholarship; left in place are Fowlie’s literal and respectful translations of Rimbaud’s complex and nontraditional verse. Whidden also provides a foreword that considers the heritage of Fowlie’s edition and adds a bibliography that acknowledges relevant books that have appeared since the original publication. On its fortieth anniversary, Rimbaud remains the most authoritative—and now, completely up-to-date—edition of the young master’s entire poetic ouvre.
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Wallace Fowlie
Updated, Revised, and with a Foreword by Seth Whidden
1969, English
Softcover, 206 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Dover / New York
$24.00 - In stock -
Full, unabridged Dover 1969 English paperback edition of Huysmans' famous "A Rebours" from 1884, with Huysmans' original 1903 preface and introduction by Havelock Ellis.
"Because of his extreme sensitivity to the absurd and grotesque in human affairs, the protagonist of this masterpiece of decadence has estranged himself from society and savors the most bizarre aspects of human existence in his quest for novelty. This landmark novel is filled with weird images and biting wit."
Infamous as the inspiration for the novel which slowly corrupts Oscar Wilde's "Dorian Gray", Joris-Karl Huysmans' A Rebours ("Against The Grain" or "Against Nature") is the original handbook of decadence. A wildly original fin-de-siecle novel, Against Nature contains only one character. Des Esseintes is a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. Against Nature, in the words of the author, exploded 'like a grenade' and has enjoyed a cult following to this day.
Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) is now recognized as one of the most challenging and innovative figures in European literature and an acknowledged principal architect of the fin-de-siecle imagination. He was a career civil servant who wrote ten novels, most notably "A Rebours and La-Bas". Huysmans died in 1907.
Good copy, light wear.
1974, Japanese
Hardcover (cloth-bound w. original illustrated card box and dust jacket) 160 pages, 21 x 21.6
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$140.00 - In stock -
Stunning boxed first printing of the Japanese edition of "Surrealist Drawings" by František Šmejkal, printed and bound in cloth-covers in Japan in 1973. A beautiful clothbound hardcover folio of drawings by artists affiliated with Surrealism. What makes this lovely collection special is the inclusion of many of the Czech Surrealists, and a generally broad European scope of artists. Czech art historian František Šmejkal has collated a wonderful selection of works on paper by Toyen, Jindřich Štyrský, Wolfgang Paalen, Giorgio de Chirico, Hans Bellmer, Alfred Kubin, Francis Picabia, Jacques Hérold, Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Josef Istler, Max Ernst, André Breton, František Muzika, Paul Delvaux, Wilfredo Lam, Richard Oelze, Mikuláš Medek, Joan Miró, Josef Sima, Kurt Seligmann, Odilon Redon, Andre Masson, Max Walter Svanberg, Salvador Dali, Arshile Gorky, Victor Brauner, Rene Magritte, and many more.
Very Good copy in original slipcase and plastic jacket over cloth. Almost Fine, but with corner bumping to top.
2003 / 2006, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 494 pages, 24 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Shinchosha / Tokyo
$45.00 - Out of stock
Lovely hardcover Japanese edition of this tremendous survey of Egon Schiele's Drawings & Watercolors, authored by Jane Kallir and edited by Ivan Vartanian, published in this translated edition in 2006. An almost entirely visual book, Schiele's works are lavishly reproduced across almost 500 pages in colour, with very minimal accompanying text in Japanese.
"Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele produced a prolific body of work before his early death at the age of twenty-eight in the flu epidemic of 1918. As well as a few hundred oil paintings, he created nearly 3,000 drawings and watercolours. Limited access to these fragile works and dispersion among several collections have made a comprehensive survey of his work a rarity. This volume assembles this master draughtsman's works on paper, providing a unique opportunity to study his rapid artistic development over the course of his brief twelve years of activity. Jane Kallir, the author of Schieles catalogue raisonne, introduces each year of the artists output, discussing his step-by-step progression from child prodigy to master of the human form and expression."
Near Fine copy in NF dustjacket.
1992, English
Softcover, 302 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Cornell University Press / New York
$100.00 - In stock -
First 1992 edition.
"This brilliant and substantial study will be required reading for critics of Gothic literature and for feminist theorists. Unlike other psychoanalytic readers who localize the 'horror' in Gothic fiction by interpreting it as an effect of repressed anxiety about motherhood or genital sexuality, Massé regards the horror as systemic and actual, and for this reason her study is far more radical, comprehensive, and satisfying. In the Name of Love is challenging and engaging reading that opens out onto new critical territory all the way through." -Claudia L. Johnson, Marquette University
"Massé handles an important topic in a thorough, clear, and interesting fashion. I especially liked the book's combination of theoretical analysis and original readings of texts. In the Name of Love will make a significant contribution in all the areas it treats-feminism, psychoanalysis, and literature."-Shirley Nelson Garner, Department of English, University of Minnesota
The Gothic woman is taught to believe that self-abnegation will be rewarded by love; her experience clearly proves otherwise. Although Gothic fiction has characteristically been written by and for women, this sophisticated and venturesome book is one of the first to examine the contradictions of the Gothic pact in the light of contemporary feminist and psychoanalytic theory. Michelle A. Massé looks at selected British and American novels from the eighteenth century to the present, focusing on the theme of masochism as an element of women's identity. Approaching the Gothic novel by way of psychoanalysis, she also identifies a Gothic plot within psychoanalytic theory itself.
In fiction that ranges from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, and Daphne de Maurier's Rebecca to Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills, Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle, and Pauline Réage's Story of O, Massé explores the narrative of women being trained to embrace their own subordination. She begins by asserting that the stylistic and structural repetitions of the Gothic constitute both symptoms of this trauma and attempts to work it through. Massé delineates the pattern of women's ego formation in the courtship plot and discusses what she calls "marital Gothic." She then addresses the complicated issues raised by the classic beating fantasy in which the young girl must choose to accept the role of victim, aggressor, or spectator. In her conclusion, she con- siders modes of resistance to this triangular drama and to the related fantasy of romance.
In the Name of Love will be essential reading for scholars and students in the fields of gender studies, critical, psycho-analytic, and novel theory, as well as Victorian and contemporary fiction.
MICHELLE A. MASSÉ is Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. A graduate of Anna Maria College, she received her Ph.D. degree from Brown University.
Cover illustration: King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, by Edward Burne-Jones. Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York.
Good copy, light spine tanning/creasing, crease to front cover corner, light wear.
1964 , French
Hardcover, 192 pages, 30.5 x 24.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Pont Royal Del Duca - Laffont
Paris
$100.00 - Out of stock
First 1964 hardcover edition of Histoire de l'insolite (History of the Unusual) by Romi. Preface by Philippe Soupault, artistic design by Pierre Chapelot. An incredible visual survey of the weird and wonderful from the history of occultism to the absurd, the cabinet of curiosities to the voyages of science fiction, demonology to psychosis, the Fin de siècle, Futurists, Surrealists, Dadaists, Pataphysicians, the visionaries, the mediums, the curios, the macabre, the bizarre. Profusely illustrated in mono and duotone with many pasted-in lush colour plates, this is a beautiful visual reference of the fantastic throughout history. Chapters include (translated from French): The Sources of the Unusual - A Legendary Bestiary - Fantastic Voyages - The Design to Surprise - Unusual Enterprises, featuring Alfred Jarry, Giuseppe Arcimbaldo, P.T. Barnum, Edward Lear, Hélène Smith, Raymond Roussel, Alessandro Cagliostro, Stanislao Lepri, Hieronymus Bosch, Ferdinand Cheval, and hundreds of other artists, poets, mystics and unknowns. With a preface by none other than Surrealist founder, Dadaist, writer, poet, novelist, critic, political activist, Philippe Soupault (1897-1990).
Very Good copy, highly recommended.
2004, English
Softcover, 480 pages, 23.4 x 15.5 cm
Published by
Duke University Press / North Carolina
$62.00 - Out of stock
Published in English for the first time, Didier Eribon' s well-received and celebrated work on a philosophy of and examination of gay life.
A bestseller in France following its publication in 1999, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an extraordinary set of reflections on "the gay question" by Didier Eribon, one of France's foremost public intellectuals. Known internationally as the author of a path-breaking biography of Michel Foucault, Eribon is a leading voice in French gay studies. In explorations of gay subjectivity as it is lived now and as it has been expressed in literary history and in the life and work of Foucault, Eribon argues that gay male politics, social life, and culture are transformative responses to an oppressive social order. Bringing together the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and Erving Goffman, he contends that gay culture and political movements flow from the need to overcome a world of insult in the process of creating gay selves. Eribon describes the emergence of homosexual literature in Britain and France at the turn of the last century and traces this new gay discourse from Oscar Wilde and the literary circles of late-Victorian Oxford to Andre Gide and Marcel Proust.
He asserts that Foucault should be placed in a long line of authors—including Wilde, Gide, and Proust—who from the nineteenth century onward have tried to create spaces in which to resist subjection and reformulate oneself.
Drawing on his unrivaled knowledge of Foucault's oeuvre, Eribon presents a masterful new interpretation of Foucault. He calls attention to a particular passage from Madness and Civilization that has never been translated into English. Written some fifteen years before The History of Sexuality, this passage seems to contradict Foucault's famous idea that homosexuality was a late-nineteenth-century construction. Including an argument for the use of Hannah Arendt's thought in gay rights advocacy, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an impassioned call for critical, active engagement with the question of how gay life is shaped both from without and within.
Didier Eribon is a philosopher, historian, and journalist in France, where he writes frequently for the weekly news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. In addition to his biography Michel Foucault, he is the author of books including Une morale du minoritaire: Variations sur un thème de Jean Genet and Hérésies: Essais sur la théorie de la sexualité.
Michael Lucey is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (published by Duke University Press) and Gide’s Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing.
1993, English
Softcover, 346 pages 21.5 x 13.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Northwestern University Press / Evanston
$50.00 - In stock -
In her seminal study, first published in 1981, Marjorie Perloff argues that the map of Modernist poetry needs to be redrawn to include a central tradition which cannot properly be situated within the Romantic-Symbolist tradition dominating the early twentieth century. She traces this tradition from its early "French connection" in the poetry of Rimbaud and Apollinaire as well as in Cubist, Dada, and early Surrealist painting; through its various manifestations in the work of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound; to such postmodern "landscapes without depth" as the French/English language constructions of Samuel Beckett, the elusive dreamscapes of John Ashbery, and the performance works of David Antin and John Cage.
Very Good copy of 1993 second edition.
1983, English
Hardcover, 184 pages, 24 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
UMI Research Press / Ann Arbor
$50.00 - Out of stock
First 1984 hardcover edition of Jane Block's Les XX and Belgian Avant-Gardism 1868-1894, published by UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor.
"This study attempts both offer a comprehensive view of Belgian avant-garde art from 1868 to 1894 and to relate its artistic aims to the political and social milieu while charting the path of Les XX in the avant-garde groups, its reaction to the academic tradition, and its internal aesthetic evolution which ranged from Impressionism to the decorative arts. This research should also serve to illuminate the strong reciprocal nature of the ties between artistic centers, especially Paris and Brussels, and reveal the unique contribution of Les XX modern art. What the study does not do is follow the careers of the 32 individual artists who were members of Les XX nor even attempt to identify all the works actually shown at Les XX. This would be impossible because of the insufficient descriptions in the Les XX catalogs and in the contemporary press. Instead, this study seeks to discuss the contribution of the group as a whole and its impact on Belgian art and the artistic establishment. It describes how and why Les XX came to be one of the most avant-garde groups in Europe during its time."
Very Good copy with light wear to cloth covers and light tanning.