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—FRI 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.
1978, Japanese
Softcover, 80 pages, 26 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Tenjō Sajiki / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of Angura (Underground Theatre) issue 12, 1978, the "Dramatic Theory Magazine" published in Tokyo by Shūji Terayama's radical avant-garde theatre company Tenjō Sajiki. With iconic cover photography by Shūji Terayama, this issue's special feature is ‘Body Language and the Theatrical Body’, with contributions by Terayama, philosopher Hiroshi Ichikawa, musicologist Fumio Koizumi, film critic Masao Matsuda, illustrator Ryōichi Enomoto, musician J. A. Seazer, 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.
1979, Japanese
Softcover, 26 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tenjō Sajiki / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of Angura (Underground Theatre) issue 14, 1979, the "Dramatic Theory Magazine" published in Tokyo by Shūji Terayama's radical avant-garde theatre company Tenjō Sajiki. With iconic cover photography by Shūji Terayama, this issue's special feature is ‘Drama Lemming / Machine Dramaturgy’, with contributions by Terayama, scenographer Nobutaka Kotake, playwright Rio Kishida, artist Panamarenko, producer Michi Tanaka, 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. Illustrated throughout with drawings, diagrams and photographs, texts, scripts in Japanese.
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.
1996, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), unpaginated, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Uplink / Japan
$80.00 - In stock -
Issued in 1997 and long out-of-print, this tremendous little publication collects and reproduces every issue of 天井桟敷 "Ceiling Pier" newspaper, published by Shūji Terayama's experimental theatre troupe Tenjō Sajiki between 1967—1983. Ceiling Pier (a term for the cheap seats in a theatre, furthest from the stage) was the voice-piece for the "Theatre Laboratory" activities of Tenjō Sajiki and their associates, published throughout their entire existence, now all impossibly rare. Lovely document of this printed history, from issue No. 1 May 3, 1967 through to No. 26 March 15, 1983, all pages, all reduced to the size of a jacket pocket. Includes the work of collaborators musician J. A. Seazer, graphic artists Aquirax Uno and Tadanori Yokoo, playwright Yutaka Higashi, actress Eiko Kujo, art director Ryōichi Enomoto, illustrator Makoto Wada, playwright Jūrō Kara, and many more. Texts in Japanese.
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 with light wear and one fold to cover.
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 264 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$56.00 - Out of stock
Essays on media systems and contemporary art by a leading theorist of modern visual culture.
Tricks of the Light brings together essays by critic and art historian Jonathan Crary, internationally known for his groundbreaking and widely admired studies of modern Western visual culture. This collection features a compelling selection of Crary's responses to modern and contemporary art and to the transformations of twentieth-century media systems and urban/technological environments. These wide-ranging and provocative texts explore the work of painters, performance artists, writers, architects, and photographers, including Allan Kaprow, Eleanor Antin, Ed Ruscha, John Berger, Bridget Riley, J.G. Ballard, Rem Koolhaas, Gretchen Bender, Dennis Oppenheim, Paul Virilio, Robert Irwin, and Uta Barth. There are also reflections on filmmakers Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc-Godard, David Cronenberg, and others. The book is enhanced by several expansive essays on the unstable status of television, both amid its beginnings in the 1930s and then during its assimilation into new assemblages and networks in the 1980s and 90s. These assess its many-sided role in the reshaping of subjectivity, temporality, and the operation of power. Like all of Crary's work, his writing here is grounded in the acuteness of his engagement with perceptual artifacts of many kinds and in his nuanced reading of historical processes and their cultural reverberations.
2023, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 20.2 x 13.7 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$36.00 - In stock -
A remarkable time capsule of Simi Valley, 1979, written before the author would become one of LA's most influential artists of subsequent decades.
When Sean DeLear died prematurely in Vienna in 2017, his friends discovered-among other treasures-an extensive diary kept at the age of fourteen. Still living with his Christian parents in the notoriously racist Los Angeles suburb of Simi Valley, Sean wrote almost every day about crushes and hustling, waterbeds, blackmail, Donna Summer, gloryholes, racism, and shoplifting gay porn.
DeLear would go on to become the frontman for the Los Angeles punk/powerpop band Glue. He was a punk musician, visual artist, intercontinental scenester, video vixen, party host, marijuana farmer, and sometime-collaborator of artists such as Kembra Pfahler and Vaginal Davis.
DeLear's forgotten diaries capture a moment in Los Angeles underground and queer history when, as his friend the writer Cesar Padilla notes, "It wasn't cool at all to be trans, gay, queer or whatever. Those words weren't even in the vocabulary." I Could Not Believe It, Padilla continues, "is a raw fearless innocent gay Black kid's journey coming out into life at an incredible pre-AIDS period. It's not cognizant of being literature. It's as naïve and forthcoming as it gets. It wasn't written with the desire to be published so Sean didn't hold back. Sean's goal was to be true to himself."
"What I love about this 'potent historical artifact of Black youth,' as Brontez Purnell describes it in his introduction, are its notes of uncertainty, lack of pretention and its persistent faith in tomorrow."—Andrew Durbin, Frieze
1986 / 1988, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
St. Martin's Press / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
"What is the postmodern scene? Baudrillard's vision of excremental culture par excellence or a final coming home to a mediascape which even as a 'body without organs' (Deleuze and Guattari), a 'negative space' (Krauss), a 'pure implosion' (Lyotard) or 'a symbolic experience' (Kristeva) is now first nature, and thus the terrain of a new political refusal?"
THE POSTMODERN SCENE is a series of major theorisations about key artistic and intellectual tendencies in the postmodern condition. A variety of texts, ranging from Nietzsche's The Will to Power, Serres' Hermes, Baudrillard's Precession of Simulacra, the visual art of Fischl, Hopper, Colville, and Magritte and recent performance art are used as probes of the human fate in the contemporary century. Here, theoretical reflection is viewed as a privileged artistic act: simultaneously a critical encounter with the 'shock of the real', and a meditation in the form of a lament over the 'intimations of deprival' which speak to us now of postmodern culture, art, and philosophy in ruins.
Arthur Kroker is the founding editor of the Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory. He teaches political science and the humanities at Concordia University, Montreal.
David Cook teaches political theory at Erindale College, University of Toronto.
Good copy, Second 1988 expanded edition. Light general wear, tanning to spine edge.
2013, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 336 pages, 20.8 x 13.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Verso / London
$60.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of Fredric Jameson's The Antinomies of Realism, a history of the nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it impossible to recreate. The works of Zola, Tolstoy, Perez Galdos, and George Eliot are in the most profound sense inimitable, yet continue to dominate the novel form to this day. Novels to emerge since struggle to reconcile the social conditions of their own creation with the history of this mode of writing: the so-called modernist novel is one attempted solution to this conflict, as is the ever-more impoverished variety of commercial narratives - what today's book reviewers dub "serious novels," which are an attempt at the impossible endeavor to roll back the past.
Fredric Jameson examines the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism, approaching the subject himself in terms of the social and historical preconditions for realism's emergence. The realist novel combined an attention to the body and its states of feeling with a focus on the quest for individual realization within the confines of history.
In contemporary writing, other forms of representation - for which the term "postmodern" is too glib - have become visible: for example, in the historical fiction of Hilary Mantel or the stylistic plurality of David Mitchell's novels. Contemporary fiction is shown to be conducting startling experiments in the representation of new realities of a global social totality, modern technological warfare, and historical developments that, although they saturate every corner of our lives, only become apparent on rare occasions and by way of the strangest formal and artistic devices.
In a coda, Jameson explains how "realistic" narratives survived the end of classical realism. In effect, he provides an argument for the serious study of popular fiction and mass culture that transcends lazy journalism and the easy platitudes of recent cultural studies.
"Fredric Jameson is America's leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction."—Terry Eagleton
1996, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 432 pages, 22.8 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Columbia University Press / New York
$80.00 - Out of stock
First 1996 hardcover edition of Julia Kristeva's "Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature". Not only a meditation on Proust, this is a commentary on how the experience of literature is manifested in time and sensation. Kristeva uses Proust as a starting point to reflect upon broader notions of character, time, sensation, metaphor, and history.
"Kristeva as always brings a resourceful and sophisticated theoretical awareness to her interpretive work. By translating much of Proust's post-symbolic discourse on literature into her own psychoanalytic idiom, she invites us to reread him with an innocence and an enthusiasm that today, in this age of suspicion we call our own, are becoming rare."—Modern Philology
Fine copy in NF dust jacket
2023, English
Softcover, 78 pages, 20 x 29.9 cm
First edition, edition of 150,
Published by
no more poetry / Naarm
$28.00 - In stock -
no more poetry presents nmp.18
SOMETHING WRITING
the debut anthology by Carmen-Sibha Keiso
Carmen-Sibha Keiso is an Arab-Australian artist, writer and facilitator working in performance, video, and text. Through a socially-collaborative and research based process, Keiso approaches their practice as a subjugated, intersectional mise-en-scéne in order to delineate how we utilise place to further understand the self. This is their debut publication.
cskeiso.com
readtheroom.info
First edition, edition of 150
2023, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 20.32 x 15.24 cm
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$68.00 - Out of stock
Examining this innovative collaboration as a turning point in the history of photography and in queer American culture.
Body Language is the first in-depth study of the extraordinary interplay between photographer George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa (painters Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoening French). These enigmatic photographs—issuing from intimate private networks and queer sexualities—helped ground friendships and also found their way into the public worlds of fashion and fame.
Nick Mauss and Angela Miller offer timely readings of how practices of staging, collaboration, and psychological enactment through the body arced across the boundaries of art and life, private and public worlds, anticipating contemporary social media. For these audacious artists, the camera was used not to capture, but to actively perform. Renouncing photography's conventional role as mirror of the real, Lynes and PaJaMa energized forms of worldmaking via a new social framing of the self.
2020, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$34.00 - In stock -
McKenzie Wark invents a new genre for another gender: not a memoir but an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.
Another genre for another gender.
What if you were trans and didn't know it? What if there were some hole in your life and you didn't even know it was there? What if you went through life not knowing why you only felt at home in your body at peak moments of drugs and sex? What if you expended your days avoiding an absence, a hole in being? Reverse Cowgirl is not exactly a memoir. The author doesn't, in the end, have any answers as to who she really is or was, although maybe she figures out what she could become.
Traveling from Sydney in the 1980s to New York today, Reverse Cowgirl is a comedy of errors, chronicling the author's failed attempts at being gay and at being straight across the shifting political and media landscapes of the late twentieth century. Finding that the established narratives of being transgender don't seem to apply to her, Wark borrows from the genres of autofiction, fictocriticism, and new narrative to create a writing practice that can discover the form of a life outside existing accounts of trans experience: an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.
2023, English
Hardcover, 160 pages, 22.9 x 14.6 cm
Published by
Art issues Press / Los Angeles
$58.00 - In stock -
"If this book of shocking intelligence and moral hope is read widely and above all well, word for word, it will help the world."—Peter Schjeldahl
An expanded edition of Hickey's controversial and exquisitely written apologia for beauty—championed by artists, reviled by art critics, and as powerful as ever 30 years on.
The 30th anniversary cloth edition brings back into print Dragon's four essays on beauty and commingles them with newly discovered essays by the MacArthur Foundation "genius." Art by Caravaggio, Bellini, Velázquez, Raphael, Warhol and Mapplethorpe is complemented by Hickey's tributes to Dolly Parton and Richard Pryor, outing of John Rechy's gay novel Numbers, essays on the art of writing and witty analysis of paintings by Ed Ruscha. An afterword by Hickey's friend and Dragon's editor queers the brash, heterosexual gambler as it situates the creation of Dragon squarely within the AIDS plague. At the time, the book made beauty visible under the looming presence of death and bodily decay. Today, Hickey's prescient diagnosis of the "therapeutic institution" resonates even louder and artists respond by harnessing beauty as a source of meaning and of joy.
Dave Hickey (1938-2021) was one of the preeminent arts and cultural writers of the turn of the 21st century. A MacArthur "Genius" Fellow known as the "beauty guy" in the popular press, Hickey opened A Clean, Well-Lighted Place gallery in Austin, Texas, in the 1960s, before becoming executive editor at Art in America magazine. In the 1970s, he was a songwriter in Nashville, Tennessee, where he coined and helped create the "Outlaw country" music movement. By the 1990s, Hickey had made a home in Las Vegas, from where he regularly traveled to speak with audiences worldwide.
1997, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by
Art issues Press / Los Angeles
$40.00 - In stock -
"Compared to enjoying Dave Hickey—who writes like a Raymond Chandler blessed with Giovanni Morelli's eye—reading any other art critic (and I mean any other art critic) is like doing your taxes'." — Peter Plagens
David Hickey (1938—2021), nicknamed "The Bad Boy of Art Criticism" and "The Enfant Terrible of Art Criticism", was a prolific American art critic and professor who wrote for many American publications including Artforum, Art in America, frieze, Parkett, Interview, The London Review of Books, ARTnews, Harper's Magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Nest, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and many more.
Air Guitar is Dave Hickey's "memoir without tears"—23 essays or "love songs", a journey through the vernacular cultural landscape of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Looking back from the vantage-point of his adopted hometown of Las Vegas, Hickey speculates on everything from jazz and rock-and-roll to basketball and professional wrestling—from magic and psychedelia to gambling and the culture of "little stores"—from automotive design to series television to Saturday-morning cartoons. The emphasis in these 23 essays is on the way the arts function in the drift of everyday life, outside the venues of official culture, and on singular "lives in the arts," lived outside those venues, with meditations on the careers of Liberace, Hank Williams, Chet Baker, Andy Warhol, Johnny Mercer, Norman Rockwell, magicians Siegfried & Roy, and wrestler Lady Godiva. Underlying Hickey's writing is an abiding belief that cultural life in a democracy can (and occasionally does) function in a democratic manner, sustained by the whims of affection and the commerce of opinion.
2023, English
Softcover, 408 pages, 20 x 14 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$38.00 - Out of stock
The early writings of renowned poet and critical theorist Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog.
Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang's trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping out of an MFA program, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and writing her trenchant book Carceral Capitalism. Alien Daughters charts the dream-seeking misadventures of an "odd girl" from Florida who emerged from punk houses and early Tumblr to become the powerful writer she is today. Anarchic and beautifully personal, Alien Daughters is a strange intellectual autobiography that demonstrates Wang's singular self-education- an early life lived where every day and every written word began like the Tarot's Fool, with a leap of faith.
"Jackie Wang is dissolute. She refuses the word "work" so her writing is full of location and devoid of it, continuing I guess what was really ripe in the '70s about what a sentence is and what "my" mind is doing today. It's not all lost territory but Alien Daughters, most of all, is just profoundly beautiful, hellish new writing. I feel fucking lucky to have this suitcase of Jackie's, these pets of hers, deflating and surging, bobbing & rocking here right now. Something glorious. What can it be?"—Eileen Myles
"Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun is a patchwork epic of feral girlhood, faithful to the subterranean dignity of its materials—dreams, zines, and Tumblr posts. Jackie Wang has written a book I've been waiting my whole life to read."—Anne Boyer
"Absolutely personal, like a plant or a dream, Jackie's handbook of how to live backwards tumbles through the tumult of a dying and resurrecting world. Jackie appears in these pages as a playful high-priestess spider holding together the weave of a web that leads to the punk house and the prison and the university library and the inner world and the underworld and so on. This writing is very alive as in decomposing into the cosmos. To quote her: “the gift of the word has been given to women who are not afraid of the rapture of turning themselves inside out."—Hannah Black
Jackie Wang is a poet, scholar, multimedia artist, and Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (2021), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; the critical essay collection Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018); and the chapbooks The Twitter Hive Mind Is Dreaming (2018) and Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb (2016). Her research is on racial capitalism, surveillance technology, and the political economy of prisons and police.
2023, English
Softcover, 180 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Uh Books / Amsterdam
KW Institute for Contemporary Art / Berlin
$25.00 - In stock -
Riffing off the title, this volume includes Catherine Damman interviewing Carolyn Lazard – an artist whose conceptual and often spare videos, sculptures, installations, and performances explore the full amplitude of relation, in addition a feature on contemporary artist Tishan Hsu, whose practice examines the “embodiment of technology”, plus contributions by time-based media artist Silvia Kolbowski, for whom political resistance, the unconscious, and structures of spectatorship are a central concern of all her projects; choreographer and dancer Yvonne Rainer; and science fiction author Octavia Butler. [...] Lee Lozano, Sturtevant, Margarethe Raspé, Jef Geys, Martin Wong, Bernadette Mayer, Louise Lawler, Sarah Rapson, Ketty La Rocca, Stanley Brouwn, Lutz Bacher, Hanne Darboven, Pope L., Silvia Kolbowski, Ilmari Kalkkinen, Henrik Olesen, Otto Wagner...
1975, English
Softcover (glassine covers, staple-bound), 30 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Arts Council of Great Britain / London
$55.00 - In stock -
Scarce copy of Order and Experience — a guide to the exhibition of American minimalist prints, published by Arts Council of Great Britain in 1975 in the occasion of a group exhibition featuring the works of Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Edda Renouf, Dorothea Rockburne. Authored by Norbert Lynton (1927—2007), professor of the History of Art at the University of Sussex, this handsomely designed oblong catalogue, with printed glassine covers, is illustrated by works by the featured artists, Lynton provides two introductions, a discourse upon "Minimalism" in print-making.
Very Good copy.
1997, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Serpent's Tail / London
$85.00 - Out of stock
"Cookie Mueller was a writer, a mother, an outlaw, an actress, a fashion designer, a go-go dancer, a witch-doctor, an art-hag and above all, a goddess.... It was much later in life that I realized Cookie's biggest talent was her writing. Even the worst experiences in her life were neutralized by retelling them in print as tall tales; she could become a sort of fractured but hilarious Uncle Remus for the brave but culturally wounded."—From the Introduction by John Waters
Rare first 1997 edition of the long out-of-print collection, Ask Dr. Mueller — The Writings of Cookie Mueller, published by High Risk Books / Serpent's Tail, with introduction by John Waters.
"Ask Dr. Mueller captures the glamour and grittiness of Cookie Mueller's life and times. Here are previously unpublished stories—wacky as they are enlightening—along with favorites from Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black and other publications. Also, the best of Cookie's art columns from Details magazine, and the funniest of her advice columns from the East Village Eye, on everything from homeopathic medicine to how to cut your cocaine with a healthy substance. This collection is as much an autobiography as it is a map of downtown New York in the early '80s—that moment before Bright Lights, Big City, before the art world exploded, before New York changed into a yuppie metropolis, while it still had a glimmer of bohemian life."
Cookie Mueller was a fiction writer, columnist, cult movie star who appeared in several of John Waters films, and an art critic. She died of Aids in 1989.
Very Good copy with light tanning to pages.
1969, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 54 pages, 23.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
ATG / Tokyo
$25.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of issue 64 of Tokyo's ATG (Art Theatre Group) publication, published in 1968/1969, with extensive cover features on the works of Japanese director Yoshida Yoshishige and French director Jean-Luc Godard. Includes many photographs, as well as filmographies on both directors, plus in-depth articles on Yoshishige's Farewell to the Summer Light (1968) and Godard's Le petit soldat (1963). Also includes an article and advertisements for Diary of a Shinjuku Thief by Nagisa Ōshima, listing for the ATG program, galleries and more.
Good—VG copt with some cover/spine wear.
1979, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 40 pages, 22.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Facets Multimedia Center / Chicago
$45.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of "Images at the Horizon": A Workshop with Werner Herzog, a staple-bound publication that transcribes a far-reaching interview with German film director Werner Herzog conducted in 1979 by film critic Roger Ebert, followed by a group discussion between Herzog and attendees of the Facets Multimedia Center workshop. Excerpts from this revealing discussion are frequently quoted in essays about Herzog. Illustrations in b/w throughout texts, filmography, portrait of W. H.
Average copy. Average cover due to bug-nibbling front and back boards, light tanning, internally Good throughout with no bug damage.
1981, English
Softcover, 250 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tanam Press / New York
$80.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this anthology of texts on the work of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, published in New York in 1981 by Tanam Press.
Illustrated throughout with stills from his filmography spanning 1965-1980. Full filmography is included, along with biography and the following major chapters and essays:
"History of Anti-Teater : The Beginnings" by Yaak Karsunke; "The Impact-Maker" by Peter Idem; "The Doll in the Doll : Observations on Fassbinder's Films" by Wilfried Wiegand; Interview with Rainer Werner Fassbinder by Wilfried Wiegand; "Fassbinder's Reality: an Imitation of Life" by Ruth McCormick; "Franz, Mieze, Reinhold, Death and the Devil : Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz" by Wolfram Schulte; "Annotated Filmography" by Wilhelm Roth; "Documentation" by Hans-Helmut Prinzler.
The influential Tanam Press was founded in 1980 by Reese Williams with the release of LP recordings featuring talks by Buckminster Fuller and Susan Sontag. Over the course of five years, Tanam published lively individual and collaborative projects from writers, visual and media artists that utilize the page in innovative ways. Playing across genre, the publications incorporate critical essays, poetry, experimental prose, photography, film, video and television.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945 – 1982) was a West German filmmaker, actor, playwright and theatre director, who was a catalyst of the New German Cinema movement. Although Fassbinder's career lasted less than fifteen years, he was extremely productive. By the time of his death, Fassbinder had completed over forty films, two television series, three short films, four video productions, and twenty-four plays, often acting as well as directing. Fassbinder was also a composer, cameraman, and film editor. Fassbinder died on 10 June 1982 at the age of 37 from a lethal cocktail of cocaine and barbiturates.
2023, English
Softcover, 200 Pages, 19.6 x 14.2 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$36.00 - In stock -
A kaleidoscopic study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, and mystery, Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman's long-awaited first full-length book: a kaleidoscopic study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Written over a short period "in the spirit" of RWF, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as Penman's equivalent of what Baudelaire was to Benjamin: an urban poet in the turbulent, seeds-sown, messy era just before everything changed. Beautifully written and extraordinarily compelling, echoing the fragmentary works of Roland Barthes and Emil Cioran, Eduardo Galeano and Alexander Kluge, this story has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema, and revolution.
1979 / 1983, English
Softcover, 90 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$18.00 - Out of stock
One of America's most brilliant writers examines the mythology of disease.
1979 Penguin edition, 1983 print of Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as "one of the most liberating books of its time."
This is Sontag's penetrating analysis of the social attitudes toward various major illnesses — chiefly TB and cancer, and its symbolic use as a romantic tool in writing. A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is — just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed. Illness as Metaphor has been translated into many languages and continues to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.
VG copy with tanning, light age, sticker on back cleanly removed.
1982, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 20 x 13.5 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$18.00 - Out of stock
1982 Penguin edition of Susan Sontag's On Photography - a seminal and groundbreaking work on the subject of photography.
Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere, and the 'insatiability of the photographing eye' has profoundly altered our relationship with the world. Photographs have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. In these six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives.
'Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites' - The Times
'A brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have made in our way of looking at the world, and at ourselves' - Washington Post
'The most original and illuminating study of the subject' - New Yorker
One of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics.
Good copy.
1980, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 204 pages, 21.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Farrar Straus & Giroux / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition from 1980 of Sontag's exploration of the most important artists of our time. Susan Sontag's third essay collection brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980. In these provocative and hugely influential works she explores some of the most controversial artists and thinkers of our time, including her now-famous polemic against Hitler's favourite film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, and the cult of fascist art, as well as a dazzling analysis of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler, a Film from Germany. Along with essays on Paul Goodman and Antonin Artaud, there are also highly personal and powerful explorations of death, art, language, history, the imagination and writing itself.
VG copy in Good dust jacket. Small previous owner's inscription to blank endpaper, some tanning/small chip/marking to jacket otherwise nicely preserved.