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:
CLOSED FOR SUMMER
RE—OPENING JAN 16
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
ORDERS SHIP FROM JAN 6
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
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Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2021, English
Softcover, 242 pages, 10.9 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Short Flight—Long Drive / USA
$38.00 - Out of stock
Beginning with a story of an ex sex-worker drifting through a small rural town in the south, and ending with a young woman’s wedding night, who learns from her new husband what it takes to kill a man, Nash writes across the complications of working class women, rendering their desires with visceral prose and psychologically dissecting the fundamental root that threads her work: craving and the conflicts within.
2018, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 13.72 x 21.34 cm
Published by
Dzanc Books / Ann Arbor
$33.00 - Out of stock
"Nash writes with psychological precision, capturing Lilith’s volatile shifts between directionless frustration, self-destructiveness, ambivalence, and vulnerable need. A complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
In this stunning and powerful debut, a girl with no name embarks on a fraught three-way relationship with Matt, a Satanist and a tattoo artist, and his girlfriend Frances, a new mom. The liaison is caged by strict rules and rigid emotional distance. Nonetheless, it’s all too easy to surrender to an attraction so powerful she finds herself erased, abandoning even her own name in favor of a new one: Lilith.
As Lilith grows closer to Matt, she begins to recognize the dark undertow of obsession and jealousy that her presence has created between Matt and Frances, and finds herself balancing on a knife’s edge between pain and pleasure, the promise of the future and the crushing isolation of the present. With stripped-down prose and unflinching clarity, Nash examines madness in the wreckage of love, and the loss of self that accompanies it.
"Elle Nash's Animals East Each Other is a desire map, a cartography of eros. Two women and a man weave their contradictions and obsessions and aches into one another until names, bodies, and selves dissolve and reconstitute in ways they could not have imagined. Mirrorings, doublings, triplings, and reproductions bring the right questions to the surface: who are we when we enter into love stories? Does anyone know? A heartbomb."—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan
2023, English
Softcover, 266 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$42.00 - In stock -
"Abnormal Statistics takes us on a desolate walking tour of the everyday American nightmare. Come see what’s happening behind the closed doors and shuttered windows of your neighbors, your best friends, the people you trust most. Bleak and bloody horror that’s as raw and immediate as a pile of yellowed teeth, roots and all."
—Trevor Henderson, creator of Siren Head
"A tightly written and devastating collection. Abnormal Statistics grabs the reader by the throat with each tale, from the stellar opener 'Indiana Death Song' to the harrowing 'Video Nasties.' Throughout the collection, Booth performs a sort of emotional autopsy that's impossible to look away from, even as we're handed our own viscera to hold. Horror, sorrow, fury and dark humor are woven throughout with an expert hand, and by the end, it hurt more of my feelings than I ever knew I possessed."
—Laurel Hightower, author of Crossroads and Below
Suburban decay, familial horror, bleak lullabies. Abnormal Statistics is the debut story collection from Max Booth III.
Bad times are waiting for you.
Featuring 10 reprints and 3 stories original to this collection (including a brand-new novella called "Indiana Death Song").
2021, English
Softcover, 244 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$40.00 - In stock -
"Meghan Lamb's debut novel is a marvel. It's an indelible portrait of a nearly forgotten place, full of stunted lives and desperate hopes, decaying homes and fading memories, ghostly presences brought vividly to life. It's a timely exploration of the failures that seep into our lives like slow leaks and the systems that intensify them. It's a haunted landscape made luminous by Lamb's exquisite prose."—Jeff Jackson, author of Destroy All Monsters
“Failure to Thrive captures slow collapse like nothing else I've read. It is packed with heartbreakingly acute observation, and yet it is uncrowded and spacious, with a gauzy, hallucinatory quality. Both expansive and economical, it does more with the form of the novel than most books will ever attempt. It's a gem glittering in the dark.”—Lindsay Lerman, author of I'm From Nowhere
“Meghan Lamb is such an exquisite, comprehensively intelligent, dreamy writer. Failure to Thrive exudes utmost pleasure and a defying ache from every dot of its ink, like the sun.” —Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm
Failure to Thrive follows the interconnected stories of three families as they navigate issues of disability, illness, and substance abuse in a former coal town: a landscape that is itself sick. A married couple argues over how to raise their neuroatypical child. A former nurse cares for her aging father, processing guilt over her addiction. A young man returns home after experiencing a traumatic brain injury, rediscovering a space where the past and present bleed uncannily together. Meanwhile, a two hundred-year mine fire burns beneath the town, a whispering dread that pervades the atmosphere.
Meghan Lamb is the author of Failure to Thrive (Apocalypse Party, 2021), All of Your Most Private Places (Spork Press, 2020), and Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, 2017). She recently served as the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, and has led workshops at Eötvös Loránd University, Interlochen Center for the Arts, and Washington University in St. Louis. Her work has appeared in Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, Redivider, Passages North, and The Rumpus, among other publications. She currently serves as the nonfiction editor Nat. Brut, a Whiting Award-winning journal of art and literature dedicated to advancing inclusivity in all creative fields.
2017, English
Softcover, 300 pages, 12.8 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Repeater Books / London
$30.00 - In stock -
What exactly are the Weird and the Eerie? In this new essay, Mark Fisher argues that some of the most haunting and anomalous fiction of the 20th century belongs to these two modes. The Weird and the Eerie are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties. Both have often been associated with Horror, yet this emphasis overlooks the aching fascination that such texts can exercise. The Weird and the Eerie both fundamentally concern the outside and the unknown, which are not intrinsically horrifying, even if they are always unsettling. Perhaps a proper understanding of the human condition requires examination of liminal concepts such as the weird and the eerie. These two modes will be analysed with reference to the work of authors such as H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Wells, M.R. James, Christopher Priest, Joan Lindsay, Nigel Kneale, Daphne Du Maurier, Alan Garner and Margaret Atwood, and films by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer and Christoper Nolan."
2014, English
Softcover, 536 pages, 11.5 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Merve Verlag / Berlin
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$69.00 - Out of stock
Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.
The term was coined to designate a certain nihilistic alignment of theory with the excess and abandon of capitalist culture, and the associated performative aesthetic of texts that seek to become immanent to the very process of alienation. Developing at the dawn of contemporary neoliberal consensus, the uneasy status of this impulse, between subversion and acquiescence, between theoretical purchase and aesthetic enjoyment, constitutes the core problematic of accelerationism.
Since the 2013 publication of Williams's and Srnicek's #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, the term has been adopted to name a set of new theoretical enterprises that aim to conceptualise non-capitalist futures outside of traditional marxist critiques and regressive, decelerative or restorative solutions.
#Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and anonymous units like CCRU and SWITCH, across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, Terminator and Bladerunner) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike.
On either side of this largely unexplored central sequence, the book includes texts by Marx that call attention to his own 'Prometheanism' and key works from recent years document the recent extraordinary emergence of new accelerationisms steeled against the onslaughts of neoliberal capitalist realism, and retooled for the twenty-first century.
At the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this disputed, problematic term, #ACCELERATE activates a historical conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment and Kapital. This is a legacy shot through with contradictions, yet urgently galvanized today by the poverty of 'reasonable' contemporary political alternatives.
Contents
ANTICIPATIONS
Karl Marx - Fragment on Machines
Samuel Butler - The Book of The Machines
Nikolai Fyodorov - The Common Task
Thorstein Veblen - The Machine Process and the Natural Decay of the Business Enterprise
FERMENT
Shulamith Firestone - On the Two Modes of Cultural History
Jacques Camatte - Decline of the Capitalist Mode of Production or Decline of Humanity?
Gilles Deleuze + Félix Guattari - The Civilized Capitalist Machine
Jean-François Lyotard - Energumen Capitalism
Gilles Lipovetsky - Power of Repetition
JG Ballard - Fictions of All Kinds
CYBERCULTURE
Nick Land - Circuitries
Nick Land + Sadie Plant - Cyberpositive
Iain Hamilton Grant - LA 2019: Demopathy and Xenogenesis
CCRU - Cybernetic Culture
CCRU - Swarmachines
ACCELERATION
Mark Fisher - Terminator vs Avatar
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams - #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics
Antonio Negri - Reflections on the Manifesto
Tiziana Terranova - Red Stack Attack!
Luciana Parisi - Automated Architecture
Patricia Reed - Seven Prescriptions for Accelerationism
Reza Negarestani - The Labour of the Inhuman (Extended Mix)
Benedict Singleton - Maximum Jailbreak (Extended Mix)
Ray Brassier - Prometheanism and its Critics
Nick Land - Teloplexy: Notes on Acceleration
Diann Bauer - 4xAccelerationisms
1995, English
Softcover (staplebound), 28 pages, 34 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Morpheus International / US
$60.00 - In stock -
It was a good year, 1995, and with each month a new full-colour depiction of H.R. Giger's universe of the grotesque fantastic. 15 large-format reproductions, including never before published works, his hommage to Gustave Moreau, Biomechanoids and Biomechanical Landscapes, designs for the unreleased films "The Tourist" and "Dune" (by Jodorowsky). Unused copy ready for the wall.
Very Good copy with light wear.
2023, English
Softcover, unpaginated, 21 x 15 cm
Published by
Endless Lonely Planet / Melbourne
$15.00 - In stock -
Endless Lonely Planet 11, guest edited by Sean McMorrow and featuring contributions by McMorrow, Eva Birch, Zach Malakonas, Cooper Bowman, Aida Azin, Eli Partridge, Christopher L G Hill...
2022, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 20.3 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Sweat Drenched Press / US
$24.00 - Out of stock
Kenji Siratori's texts are time-machines accelerating the reader into futural enclaves where eternity is always behind us. Like the mad time of Quentin Meillassoux the future is always now, a dimension of epistemic creation rather than some vector of a passive equation. Do not confuse it with the old constructivist agendas, this is a time-machine situated neither in nor out of time but rather in the in-between. Welcome to Alice's grand adventure... the black mirror of reality was never so fun as it is now."—Steven Craig Hickman
"In Kenji Siratori’s Paracelsus, the text itself is a regenerating dead thing cutting into itself to release the chaos of the astral dimensions. It says, "i am a corpse i can start your decentralised thing organ death is dramatic schizophrenia as necromancy." this is the alchemical art in the skin of a demonic grimoire to infect you with the magical alphabet, turning you inside out - to glimpse the solar anus. A truly unique startling work."—Tom Bland, author of Camp Fear
Kenji Siratori is a Japanese avant-garde artist who has style that not only breaks with tradition, it severs all cords. His first novel Blood Electric (Creation Books) was acclaimed by David Bowie and Dennis Cooper. And he collaborated with David Toop and Andrew Liles as sound artist. His first art book Witzelsucht is embracing the image mayhem of the digital age, his relentless painting is nonsensical and extreme, avant-garde and confused, with precedence given to twisted imagery, pace and experimentation. With unparalleled stylistic terrorism, he unleashes his art attack. An unprovoked assault on the senses. Enter his dark dream-world, both whimsical and baleful.
2022, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 20.3 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$30.00 - Out of stock
“It could actually be told in ten words. That is what makes it so awful.”—Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence.
“All of this seems irrelevant next to that one sentence.”—Bret Easton Ellis, Less than Zero.
“Thanks for writing! Til Deth.”—Dave Mustaine, Megadeth.
NO LIFE ‘TIL LITERATURE
Paul Curran was born in England, grew up in Australia, and lives in Japan. As a teenager, he played drums in heavy metal and alternative bands before switching to guitar as a founding member of Gravel Samwidge. His previous book is Left Hand. Other recent writing has appeared on SELFFUCK and in the Infinity Land Press Anthology. He’s currently writing a book about the Setagaya Murders.
1992, English
Softcover, 608 page, 20 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Minerva / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer were written between 1912 and 1917, during which time they were twice engaged to be married. This complex relationship, which coincided with a period of great productivity for Kafka, gave him both hope and strength, but gradually disillusionment and the onset of illness drove them apart. These letters remain as a monument to the inner life of a unique creative artist.
"Letters to Felice, written without the faintest idea that they would be published, read like a well-constructed novel—a somewhat harrowing one"—Anthony Powell
Good copy of scarcer Minerva edition from 1992.
1991, English
Softcover, 88 pages, 23.5 x 15.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$65.00 - Out of 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 copy. Some light cover corner wear, tiny touch of foxing to edge.
1972, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 18.5 x 10.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Mudra / Prague—San Francisco
$35.00 - Out of stock
Lovely first 1972 English edition of Gustav Meyrink's gothic masterpiece The Golem, published by Mudra, Prague / San Francisco, with an afterword by poet and social activist, Jack Hirschman.
First published in serial form as Der Golem in the periodical Die weissen Blätter in 1913–14, The Golem, also known as the Satan from Prague, is a haunting Gothic tale of stolen identity and persecution, set in a strange underworld peopled by fantastical characters. The red-headed prostitute Rosina; the junk-dealer Aaron Wassertrum; puppeteers; street musicians; and a deaf-mute silhouette artist.
Lurking in its inhabitants’ subconscious is the Golem, a creature of rabbinical myth. Supposedly a manifestation of all the suffering of the ghetto, it comes to life every 33 years in a room without a door. When the jeweller Athanasius Pernath, suffering from broken dreams and amnesia, sees the Golem, he realises to his terror that the ghostly man of clay shares his own face...
The Golem, though rarely seen, is central to the novel as a representative of the ghetto's own spirit and consciousness, brought to life by the suffering and misery that its inhabitants have endured over the centuries. Perhaps the most memorable figure in the story is the city of Prague itself, recognisable through its landmarks such as the Street of the Alchemists and the Castle.
"A superbly atmospheric story set in the old Prague ghetto featuring The Golem, [...] this extraordinary book combines uncanny psychology of doppelganger stories with expressionism and more than a little melodrama... Meyrink's old Prague - like Dicken's London - is one of the great creations of City writing, an eerie, claustrophobic and fantastical underworld where anything can happen."—Phil Baker, The Sunday Times
Gustav Meyrink (1868—1932) was the pseudonym of Gustav Meyer, an Austrian author, novelist, dramatist, translator, and banker, most famous for his novel The Golem. He has been described as the "most respected German language writer in the field of supernatural fiction".
Good copy with heavy cover wear.
1981, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 504 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Avenel Books / New York
$30.00 - In stock -
First 1981 hardcover edition of A Treasury of Fantasy: Heroic Adventures in Imaginary Lands, published in 1981, edited by Cary Wilkins. An anthology collecting eleven stories by William Morris, Mrs. Andrew Lang, Francisco de Moraes, Johann Ludwig Tieck, John Ruskin, George Mac Donald, Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Ursula K. Leguin. Illustrated throughout by various illustrators. Dust jacket illustration by Russ Hoover.
Very Good copy, Good dust jacket.
1974, English
Softcover, 567 pages, 19 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Pan / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
1974 Pan paperback edition of John Fowles' The Magus, first published in 1966.
This daring literary thriller, rich with eroticism and suspense, is one of John Fowles's best-loved and bestselling novels and has contributed significantly to his international reputation as a writer of the first degree. At the center of The Magus is Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who accepts a teaching position on a remote Greek island, where he befriends a local millionaire. The friendship soon evolves into a deadly game, in which reality and fantasy are deliberately manipulated, and Nicholas finds that he must fight not only for his sanity but for his very survival.
Good copy, general wear and ageing.
1984, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 222 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Jonathan Cape / London
$50.00 - In stock -
1984 Jonathan Cape hardcover edition of English author J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World, featuring jacket design by Brian Robbins. A science fiction masterpiece, The Crystal World is regarded as the best of Ballard's "catastrophe novels."
J. G. Ballard’s fourth novel tells the story of a physician trying to make his way deep into the jungle to a secluded leprosy treatment facility. While trying to make it to his destination, his chaotic path leads him to try to come to terms with an apocalyptic phenomenon in the jungle that crystallises everything it touches.
Ballard previously used the theme of apocalyptic crystallisation in the 1964 short story "The Illuminated Man" (included in The Terminal Beach), which is also set in the same locations.
Good copy. Very Good, unread copy but ex-libris with library covering to dust jacket and minimal library markings to front endpaper and title page. Otherwise a perfect clean copy throughout.
1975, English
Softcover, 205 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Panther / London
$12.00 - In stock -
Clans of the Alphane Moon is a 1964 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It is based on his 1954 short story "Shell Game", first published in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine.
No man in their rightful mind would kill their wife miles from home.
Chuck Rittersdorf has recruited some robot help, and now, in the madness and dysfunction of the Alphane moon, there seems no better place to carry out his cruel plans unless he too is part of a much larger conspiracy.
Alpha Centauri, a star within the closest star system to earth, has several orbiting moons, among which is Alpha III M2. On this remote moon, a colony, originally set up to provide respite for the mentally ill is about to become the focus of a secret invasion plan.
Among them is Chuck Rittersdorf, a 21st century CIA robot programmer, who has decided to kill his own wife via a remote control simulacrum. He enlists the aid of a telepathic Ganymedean slime mould called Lord Running Clam, an attractive female police officer and various others both witting and unwitting.
But when Chuck finds himself in the midst of an interplanetary spy ring on the Alphane moon inhabited entirely by certified maniacs, his personal revenge plans begin to awry as the nature of reality itself is called into question in this brilliantly inventive tale of interstellar madness, murder and violence.
An astutely shrewd and acerbic tale that blurs all conventional distinctions between sanity and madness.
Philip K. Dick (1928—2007) was born in Chicago and lived most of his life in California. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write numerous novels and short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten of his stories have been adapted into popular films since his death, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke.
Very Good copy of 1975 Panther edition.
1976, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 18 x 12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harper Collins / New York
$28.00 - Out of stock
First 1976 paperback edition of Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said grapples with many of the themes Philip K. Dick is best known for— identity, altered reality, drug use, and dystopia—in a rollicking chase story that earned the novel the John W. Campbell Award and nominations for the Hugo and Nebula.
Jason Taverner—world-famous talk show host and man-about-town—wakes up one day to find that no one knows who he is—including the vast databases of the totalitarian government. And in a society where lack of identification is a crime, Taverner has no choice but to go on the run with a host of shady characters, including crooked cops and dealers of alien drugs. But do they know more than they are letting on? And just how can a person’s identity be erased overnight?
"Dick skillfully explores the psychological ramifications of this nightmare."—The New York Times Review of Books
Very Good copy, light wear, tanning.
1986, English
Softcover, 464 pages, 18 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Grafton / UK
$28.00 - Out of stock
First 1986 Grafton paperback edition of Samuel R. Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.
A stunning, many-layered speculation on the future of humanity, on interaction between cultures, on love and sex, on religion and politics, STARS IN MY POCKETS LIKE GRAINS OF SAND is an enduring masterpiece by one of science fiction's greatest writers.
The only survivor when his home is utterly destroyed, Rat Korga is transported to a new life on the planet Velm. Escaping a society that suppressed and enslaved him, Korga joins a vast, rich interstellar culture and finds himself sharing a world with Marq Dyeth, the person this civilization's officials have calculated to be his perfect partner.
"Sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, Delany invites the reader to collaborate in the process of creation. The reader who accepts this invitation has an extraordinarily satisfying experience in store"—New York Times Book Review
"A rocket launch, a phoenix reborn, a new Delany novel-three wonderful, fiery events"—Ursula K. Le Guin
Very Good copy, light wear, ageing.
1977, English
Softcover, 18 x 12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sphere / UK
$28.00 - Out of stock
First 1977 Sphere paperback edition of Samuel R. Delany's The Einstein Intersection.
A nonhuman race reimagines human mythology.
The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967. The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are "different" must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey's mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and hallucinated language, it explores what new myths might emerge from the detritus of the human world as those who are "different" try to seize history and the day.
"When Delany describes to us what he has seen, what he can compute, adduce, intuit or smell in the underbrush, our reaction is to sit bolt upright and cry out, 'Of course, I have that very wound myself!' The ability to produce this reaction in people is one of the commonly accepted and apparently valid appurtenances of genius... I look forward to the explosion reading this will create within you."—A. J. Budrys (Galaxy Magazine)
Very Good copy, light wear, tanning.
1972, English
Softcover, 266 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord by Olaf Stapledon, first published in 1944.
Sirius is a tale of immense and tragic pathos in which Olaf Stapledon evokes the terrible loneliness of a dog born with the mind of a man. Thomas Trelone's life-work was to explore the possibilities of producing a superman by experimenting with hormone injections into various mammals. Sirius himself is infinitely the most successful of these trials. He is the only viable puppy born with the train capacity of a human being, but he still has the senses, the instincts, and the physique of a dog. Born at the same time as Plaxy, Thomas's youngest daughter, the child and puppy are brought up together, share the same lessons, and develop an intense understanding of one another's humanness and dogness.
It is the inevitable conflict between Sirius's intellect and instincts and its effects upon the girl, Plaxy, which has produced one of the most moving of the 'Wonder Stories' we call Science Fiction.
William Olaf Stapledon (1886—1950) – known as Olaf Stapledon – was a British philosopher and author of science fiction. In 2014, he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Very Good copy of the 1972 Penguin edition.
1989, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 726 pages, 21.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Guild America Books / New York
$120.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first hardcover edition of Xenogenesis by Octavia E. Butler, comprising her acclaimed trilogy Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, collected in this now out-of-print volume published in 1989. Later known as Lilith's Brood, Xenogenesis, a profoundly evocative, sensual — and disturbing — epic of human transformation, is multiple Hugo and Nebula award-winner Octavia E. Butler at her best.
Lilith Iyapo is in the Andes, mourning the death of her family, when war destroys Earth. Centuries later, she is resurrected — by miraculously powerful unearthly beings, the Oankali. Driven by an irresistible need to heal others, the Oankali are rescuing our dying planet by merging genetically with mankind. But Lilith and all humanity must now share the world with uncanny, unimaginably alien creatures: their own children. This is their story.
Octavia Estelle Butler (1947-2006) was an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. Butler was the renowned author of numerous ground-breaking novels and recipient of the Locus, Hugo and Nebula awards, and a PEN Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work, in 1995 she became the first science-fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship ‘Genius Grant’. A pioneer of her genre, Octavia’s dystopian novels explore myriad themes of Black injustice, women’s rights, global warming and political disparity.
Very Good—Fine copy in VG dust jacket.
1977, English
Softcover, 155 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Pan / London
$28.00 - In stock -
1977 Pan edition of Galactic Pot-Healer, a science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, first published in 1969. The novel deals with a number of philosophical and political issues such as repressive societies, fatalism, and the search for meaning in life.
The Glimmung wants Joe Fernwright. Fernwright is a pot-healer - a repairer of ceramics - in a drably utilitarian future where such skills have little value. And the Glimmung? The Glimmung is a being that looks something like a gyroscope, something like a teenaged girl, and something like the contents of an ocean. What's more, it may be divine. And, like certain gods of old Earth, it has a bad temper.
What could an omnipresent and seemingly omnipotent entity want with a humble pot-healer? Or with the dozens of other odd creatures it has lured to Plowman's Planet? And if the Glimmung is a god, are its ends positive or malign? Combining quixotic adventure, spine-chilling horror, and deliriously paranoid theology, Galactic Pot-Healer is a uniquely Dickian voyage to alternate worlds of the imagination.
Philip K. Dick (1928—2007) was born in Chicago and lived most of his life in California. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write numerous novels and short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten of his stories have been adapted into popular films since his death, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke.
Good copy.
1982 , English
Softcover, 320 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Panther / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
1982 Panther edition of Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Dispossessed".
Le Guin called her 1974 novel an “anarchist utopia”, a reaction to the Vietnam war. Originally “a very bad short story” according to Le Guin, “there was a book in it, and I knew it, but the book had to wait for me to learn what I was writing about and how to write about it. I needed to understand my own passionate opposition to the war that we were, endlessly it seemed, waging in Vietnam, and endlessly protesting at home,” she writes in an introduction.
The Dispossessed is set in the fictional universe of the seven novels of the Hainish Cycle, e.g. The Left Hand of Darkness, about anarchist and other societal structures. The book won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1974, won both the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1975, and received a nomination for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1975. It achieved a degree of literary recognition unusual for science fiction due to its exploration of themes such as anarchism (on a planet called Anarres) and revolutionary societies, capitalism, and individualism and collectivism.
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) was an American author of speculative fiction, realistic fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, librettos, essays, poetry, speeches, translations, literary critiques, chapbooks, and children's fiction. She was primarily known for her works of speculative fiction. These include works set in the fictional world of Earthsea, stories in the Hainish Cycle, and standalone novels and short stories. Though frequently referred to as an author of science fiction, critics have described her work as being difficult to classify.
Very Good copy.