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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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.
1974, English
Softcover, 156 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Panther / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
1974 Panther edition of Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Lathe of Heaven".
The plot of 1971's The Lathe of Heaven concerns a character whose dreams alter past and present reality. George Orr, a draftsman, has long been abusing drugs to prevent himself from having "effective" dreams, which change reality. After having one of these dreams, the new reality is the only reality for everyone else, but George retains memory of the previous reality. Under threat of being placed in an asylum, Orr is forced to undergo "voluntary" psychiatric care for his drug abuse. George begins attending therapy sessions with an ambitious psychiatrist and sleep researcher named William Haber. Orr claims that he has the power to dream "effectively" and Haber, gradually coming to believe it, seeks to use George's power to change the world. His experiments with a biofeedback/EEG machine, nicknamed the Augmentor, enhance Orr's abilities and produce a series of increasingly intolerable alternative worlds, based on an assortment of utopian (and dystopian) premises. The story was first serialized in the American science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. The novel received nominations for the 1972 Hugo and the 1971 Nebula Award, and won the Locus Award for Best Novel in 1972. Theodore Sturgeon, reviewing Lathe for The New York Times, praised Le Guin for "produc[ing] a rare and powerful synthesis of poetry and science, reason and emotion."
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.
Good copy. General page tanning / cover wear.
1978, English
Softcover, 175 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Panther / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
1978 Panther Granada edition of Ursula K. Le Guin's Orsinian Tales, a collection of eleven short stories, most of them set in the imaginary country of Orsinia.
Orsinia ... a land of medieval forests, stonewalled cities, and railways reaching into the mountains where the old gods dwell. A country where life is harsh, dreams are gentle, and people feel torn by powerful forces and fight to remain whole. In this enchanting collection, Ursula K. Le Guin brings to mainstream fiction the same compelling mastery of word and deed, of story and character, of violence and love, that has won her the Pushcart Prize, and the Kafka and National Book Awards.
Very Good copy.
1987, English
Softcover, 246 pages, 17.5 x 10.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ace Books / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
1987 Ace paperback edition. Nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, Count Zero is a science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer William Gibson, originally published in 1986. It is the second volume of the groundbreaking cyberpunk Sprawl trilogy, which begins with Neuromancer and concludes with Mona Lisa Overdrive.
They set a Slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the colour of his hair.
When the Maas Biolabs and Hosaka zaibatsus fight it out for world domination, computer cowboys like Turner and Count Zero are just foot soldiers in the great game: useful but ultimately expendable.
When Turner wakes up in Mexico - in a new body with a beautiful woman beside him - his corporate masters let him recuperate for a while, then reactivate his memory for a mission even more dangerous than the one that nearly killed him: the head designer from Maas Biolabs says he wants to defect to Hosaka, and it's Turner's job to deliver him safely.
Count Zero is a rustbelt data-hustler totally unprepared for what comes his way when the designer's defection triggers war in cyberspace. With voodoo gods in the Net and angels in the software, he can only hope that the megacorps and the super-rich have their virtual hands too full to notice the amateur hacker with the black market kit trying desperately to stay alive . . .
William Gibson (b. 1948) began writing in 1977 and burst upon the literary world with his acclaimed first novel, Neuromancer, the book that launched the cyberpunk generation, and the first novel to win the holy trinity of science fiction, the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards. Although best known for his early cyberpunk novels, Gibson's work has continued to evolve over the ensuing years, always casting an astute critical eye on modern societal trends.
Very Good copy. Scarcer first Ace ed.
1968, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 18 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Panther / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
First 1968 Panther paperback edition of English author J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World, featuring the cover artwork of Max Ernst. 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.
Very Good copy of this scarcer edition, with light wear and tanning.
1968, English
Softcover, 172 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$45.00 - In stock -
1968 Penguin British edition with cover design by British graphic designer Richard Hollis.
First published in 1962, British science fiction author J.G. Ballard's mesmerising and ferociously prescient novel "The Drowned World" imagines a terrifying future in which solar radiation and global warming have melted the polar ice caps and Triassic-era jungles have overrun a submerged and tropical London. Set during the year 2145, the novel follows biologist Dr. Robert Kerans and his team of scientists as they confront a surreal cityscape populated by giant iguanas, albino alligators, and endless swarms of malarial insects. "The Drowned World" is the second of a series of classic early Ballard novels dealing with scenarios of natural disaster.
James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist who first became associated with the New Wave of science fiction for his post-apocalyptic novels such as The Wind from Nowhere (1961) and The Drowned World (1962). In the late 1960s, he produced a variety of experimental short stories (or "condensed novels"), such as those collected in the controversial The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). In the mid 1970s, Ballard published several novels, among them the highly controversial Crash (1973), a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism, and High-Rise (1975), a depiction of a luxury apartment building's descent into violent chaos.
Good copy with some cover creases and tanning.
1984, German
Softcover, 116 pages, 21 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
ABC Verlag / Zürich
$140.00 - Out of stock
The original first Swiss German edition of H.R. Giger's Retrospektive 1964-1984, published by ABC Verlag, Zürich, printed and bound in Switzerland in 1984. H.R. Giger — Retrospektive 1964-1984 presents over 150 artworks, spanning 20 years in the career of the world's most renowned fantasy artist, are gathered chronologically in this one rich and detailed volume. Carefully rendered reproductions of Giger's paintings, drawings, designs, videos, sculptures, costumes and furniture are accompanied by his own commentary and portraits of the artist at work and with Dali, Fuchs, Harry and other colleagues.
Fantastic Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor and set designer Hans Rudolf “Ruedi” Giger was born in 1940, the son of a chemist. He spoke of a father who viewed art as a "breadless profession", and strongly encouraged his son to enter into pharmaceutics. Despite this, in 1962, he moved to Zürich, where he studied Architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts until 1970. Giger's style and thematic execution have been hugely influential. His design for the Alien was inspired by his painting Necronom IV and earned him an Oscar in 1980. His books of paintings, particularly Necronomicon and Necronomicon II (1985) and the frequent appearance of his art in Omni magazine continued his rise to international prominence. Giger is also well known for artwork on several music recording albums. His most distinctive stylistic innovation is that of a representation of human bodies and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship, he described as "biomechanical". His paintings often display fetishistic sexual imagery. His main influences were painters Ernst Fuchs and Salvador Dalí. He was also a personal friend of Timothy Leary. Giger suffered from night terrors and his paintings are all to some extent inspired by his experiences with that particular sleep disorder, making his first paintings as a means of art therapy. In 1998 Giger acquired the Château St. Germain in Gruyères, Switzerland, and it now houses the H. R. Giger Museum, a permanent repository of his work.
Good—Very Good copy of the original Swiss edition with light cover creasing/corner bump to top-right.
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 608 pages, 22 x 14 cm
Published by
Knopf / New York
$68.00 - Out of stock
A sensational new novel from the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho that tracks a group of privileged Los Angeles high school friends as a serial killer strikes across the city.
Bret Easton Ellis's masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.
Seventeen-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret's obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with the Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them--and Bret in particular--with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends--or his own mind--to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between the Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.
Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero L.A., The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret's life at seventeen--sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting, and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best.
2013, Japanese
Softcover, 255 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Million Publishing / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
"Videoshop of Horrors, Violence and Disgusting!! Welcome To A World Without Value!"
An Introduction to Bad Taste Video Studies in the 80's! is a labor of VHS love committed to publication by editor Keiji Yamazaki and a group of movie fans/critics in 2013, in Japan only, of course. During the 1980's VHS explosion, when the movie rental business was booming, so too was a demand for what is considered "bad taste" video. Splatter! Thriller! Rape and Revenge! Gore! Budget Sci-Fi! Ero Guro! Mondo! Exploitation! This in-depth compendium collects a unique moment in movie culture, celebrating the true identity of the long-lost, straight-to-video independent genre movies of the 1980's, from misunderstood director masterpieces to neighbourhood camcorder legends. "Revive the trauma-class film that should have disappeared from the bottom of hell without being recommended by anyone." (rough translation)... Illustrated throughout with posters and video cover art, this book documents the rarely documented, presenting many criminally overlooked works given serious reflection across many genres from the vantage point of Japan's unparalleled licensing and distribution of all things esoteric, cult, even prohibited, from the wildest recesses of the VHS imagination.
A graveyard of over 90 VHS corpses, re-animating hard-to-find productions from all over the globe (Italy, Britain, China, Australia, US...), spanning early, lesser-known examples of the "so bad it's good" from the 1970s into the 80's V-Zone... Baby Blood (1990), The Milpitas Monster (1975), Slithis (1978), Evil Clutch (1980), Copkiller (1983), Bodymelt (1993), The Pit (1981), Nail-Gun Massacre (1985), Doctor Gore (1975), Fight for Your Life (1977), Neon Maniacs (1986), Scalps (1983), Without Warning (1979), The Prey (1977), Sleepaway Camp (1983), Edge of the Axe (1989), True Gore (1988), Being Different (1981), Britannia Hospital (1982), to name but a few. Thematic chapters are punctuated by small articles on British Video, Horror magazines of the period, a roundtable between directors discussing the "golden age", and much more.
Warning — all texts in Japanese, so this comes with an extra layer of translation detective work. But, the most essential titles and dates are in English, making it a valuable guide whichever way you slice it.
Very Good, almost As New copy.
2022, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi-strip), 160 pages, 21.5 x 15 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Tatsumi / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
An unprecedented book documenting the world of eccentric B-grade video works ("Tondemo VHS") that proliferated in the Japanese market at the height of the video boom during the Shōwa era!
Once upon a time there were video rental shops in every city, but amongst the famous Hollywood blockbusters and popular cinema, mysterious videos were lined up like mountains ready for the more adventurous viewer. These videos came to define an era. An era of crazed killers, cyborgs, mystics, ninjas, biker gangs, and demented libido. The V-Zone! This book is devoted to this new wild unknown of the video era and a unique aspect of popular culture in Shōwa era Japan, the "Tondemu VHS". "Tondemu" is a Japanese expression derived from the term "dangerous," referring to things that deviate from reality and common sense. This encyclopaedic study celebrates these VHS deviations — the B-grade, the shocking, the trashy, the cheap, the vulgar, the unexplainable, the sleazy, the unintelligible, the incomprehensible, and the laughable — horror, sci-fi, action, exploitation, comedy, erotic, Japanese V cinema...
Profusely illustrated with hundreds of video cover artworks from the Japanese editions of films such as Microwave Massacre (1979), Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985), Driller Killer (1979), Guzoo: The Thing Forsaken by God - Part I (1986), Body Melt (1993), Prey (1977), Vampire's Kiss (1988), Monster Dog (1984), The Nail Gun Massacre (1985), The Park Is Mine (1986), Alapaap (1984), Body Count (1986), The New York Ripper (1982), Trancers (1984), Parasite (1981), The Keep (1983), Edge of The Axe (1987), 2019: After the Fall of New York (1983), Futurekill (1984), Coolie Killer (1982), The Missionary (1982), Polyester (1981), "Hungry Ghosts" (1985), Robowar (1988), TC 2000 (1993), Bad Taste (1987), Igor and the Lunatics (1985), Endgame (1983), Mutanthunt (1987), The Glove (1979), Picasso Trigger (1988), Project Shadowchaser (1992), Run and Kill (1993), Don't Go In The Woods... Alone (1981), Evil Heart (1985)... accompanied by commentary, plus chapters of features on everything from Hong Kong Noir, crazy pink movies, Troma films, the Emmanuelle film franchise, animal attack movies, director Toru Muranishi, Kazuo Umezu, cyber videos, video collections, Japanese video stores and mags, profiles, interviews, and much more. An must for any die-hard VHS head.
As New.
2000, English
Hardcover, 120 pages, 22.3 x 27.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
The Drawing Center / New York
Merrell Publishers / London
$140.00 - Out of stock
Beautiful hardcover volume exploring every aspect of the art of the celebrated Belgian/French writer and artist Henri Michaux, published to accompany the major exhibition Untitled Passages, curated by Catherine de Zegher and Florian Rodari for The Drawing Centre, New York. Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux investigates Michaux’s graphic works in tandem with his poetic practice, addressing the artist-poet’s research into the passages between “writing” and “drawing”, taking its title from Michaux’s extensive body of untitled drawings and from Passages, his book of poetic writings. Profusely illustrated with an interview with Michaux by John Ashbery. Edited with texts by Catherine de Zegher, also Raymond Bellour, Henri Michaux, Laurent Jenny, Florian Rodari, Richard Sirburth.
Fine copy, almost As New. Out-of-print.
2022, English
Softcover, 180 pages, 20.3 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Clash Books / US
$32.00 - Out of stock
Through diaristic ellipses, Nash crafts an origin story of obsessional masochism
Drawing on the nostalgia of a nascent digital age and grappling with an eating disorder, indie cult author Elle Nash paints a realistic and poignant portrait of a teenager's quest for self-identification on both sides of the computer screen. Using Livejournal entries, we meet our protagonist, in her messy transition into adulthood in the midst of grappling with calorie counts, boys, and being honest with who she is only online. Following up her cult fiction debut Animals Eat Each Other, Nash shows she belongs in the same camp along with exciting feminist literary disrupters the likes of Melissa Broder and Alissa Nutting.
It's 2005. Lucy shambles through the last weeks of her senior year of high school, jonesing for a thinner body, desperate to connect with another human. Who is reflected back at her when she is sleeping with someone, when she is puking into the toilet bowl? Who is reflected back when she's alone? Only the internet knows, where she muses on the concept of her "self" through her Livejournal, with a cadre of online friends who are definitely NOT pro-anorexic. Everyone's sick here, but at least they understand.
2015, English
Softcover (letterpress boards), 93 pages, 11.1 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Univocal Publishing / Minneapolis
$52.00 - In stock -
Limited letterpress edition.
In Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, Quentin Meillassoux addresses the problem of chaos and of the constancy of natural laws in the context of literature. With his usual argumentative rigor, he elucidates the distinction between science fiction, a genre in which science remains possible in spite of all the upheavals that may attend the world in which the tale takes place, and fiction outside-science, the literary concept he fashions in this book, a fiction in which science becomes impossible. With its investigations of the philosophies of Hume, Kant, and Popper, Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction broadens the inquiry that Meillassoux began in After Finitude, thinking through the concrete possibilities and consequences of a chaotic world in which human beings can no longer resort to science to ground their existence. It is a significant milestone in the work of an emerging philosopher, which will appeal to readers of both philosophy and literature.
Translated by Alyosha Edlebi.
The text is followed by Isaac Asimov's essay "The Billiard Ball."
2017, English
Softcover, 299 pages, 13.5 x 19.5 cm
Published by
Twisted Spoon Press / Prague
$40.00 - Out of stock
I Burn Paris has remained one of Poland's most uncomfortable masterstrokes of literature since its initial and controversial serialization by Henri Barbusse in 1928 in L'Humanité (for which Jasieński was deported for disseminating subversive literature). It tells the story of a disgruntled factory worker who, finding himself on the streets, takes the opportunity to poison Paris's water supply. With the deaths piling up, we encounter Chinese communists, rabbis, disillusioned scientists, embittered Russian émigrés, French communards and royalists, American millionaires and a host of others as the city sections off into ethnic enclaves and everyone plots their route of escape. At the heart of the cosmopolitan city is a deep-rooted xenophobia and hatred — the one thread that binds all these groups together. As Paris is brought to ruin, Jasienski issues a rallying cry to the downtrodden of the world, mixing strains of "The Internationale" with a broadcast of popular music.
With its montage strategies reminiscent of early avant-garde cinema and fist-to-the-gut metaphors, I Burn Paris has lost none of its vitality and vigor. Ruthlessly dissecting various utopian fantasies, Jasienski is out to disorient, and he has a seemingly limitless ability to transform the Parisian landscape into the product of disease-addled minds. An exquisite example of literary Futurism and Catastrophism, the novel presents a filthy, degenerated world where factories and machines have replaced the human and economic relationships have turned just about everyone into a prostitute. Yet rather than cliché and simplistic propaganda, there is an immediacy to the writing, and the modern metropolis is starkly depicted as only superficially cosmopolitan, as hostile and animalistic at its core.
This English translation of I Burn Paris fills a major gap in the availability of works from the interwar Polish avant-garde, an artistic phenomenon receiving growing attention with recent publications such as Caviar and Ashes.
Translated from the Polish by Soren A. Gauger & Marcin Piekoszewski
Artwork by Cristian Opriș
"In Soren Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski’s translation, Jasieński’s description of a contagion infecting, paralyzing, and eviscerating a large metropolis is vivid, and now feels darkly prophetic."—Pasha Malla, The New Yorker
2018, English
Softcover, 228 pages, 13.6 x 20.8 cm
Published by
Grove Press / New York
$32.00 - Out of stock
30th anniversary edition with introduction by Alexandra Kleeman.
Originally published in 1988, Empire of the Senseless marked a turning point in Acker's wild, inimitable style. Considered one of her more accessible works, here Acker candidly addresses her lifelong obsessions: childhood and trauma, language and sexuality, criminality and corruption, oppression and rebellion. Abhor (part human, part robot) and her lover Thivai (a pirate) traverse Paris in a dystopian future, in search of a mysterious drug that Thivai needs in order to maintain his ability to love. Navigating the chaotic city, they encounter mad doctors, prisoners, bikers, sailors, tattooists, terrorists, and prostitutes, while a band of Algerian revolutionaries take over, and the C. I. A. plots to thwart them all.
Sexually explicit, graphically violent, Empire of the Senseless resists the desensitizing of cultural consciousness and the disintegration of interpersonal communication. A timeless, prescient parable, it speaks profoundly to our social and political history as well as our present reality.
“Set in the present and near future, this is an apocalyptic tale that makes Clockwork Orange look tame.” – Publishers Weekly
Kathy Acker (1948 – 1997) was an influential postmodernist writer and performance artist, whose many books include Blood and Guts in High School; Don Quixote; Literal Madness; Empire of the Senseless; In Memoriam to Identity; My Mother: Demonology; Pussy, King of the Pirates; Portrait of an Eye; and Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective.
1978, English
Softcover, unpaginated, 20.5 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this volume of 41 colour plates depicting the works of Dutch/Netherlandish fantastic painter Hieronymus Bosch (1450—1516), published by Thames and Hudson, London, 1978, accompanied by texts by Gregory Martin.
Hieronymus Bosch (1450—1516) was a Dutch/Netherlandish painter from Brabant. He is one of the most notable representatives of the Early Netherlandish painting school, his work, generally oil on oak wood, mainly contains fantastic illustrations of religious concepts and narratives. His pessimistic fantastical style cast a wide influence on northern art of the 16th century, with Pieter Bruegel the Elder being his best-known follower. Within his lifetime his work was collected in the Netherlands, Austria, and Spain, and widely copied, especially his macabre and nightmarish depictions of hell. Little is known of Bosch's life. He spent most of it in the town of 's-Hertogenbosch, where he was born in his grandfather's house. Today, Bosch is seen as a hugely individualistic painter with deep insight into humanity's desires and deepest fears. Attribution has been especially difficult; today only about 25 paintings are confidently given to his hand along with eight drawings. About another half-dozen paintings are confidently attributed to his workshop. His most acclaimed works consist of a few triptych altarpieces, including The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Good copy but with some edge wear and tanning to back colour, delicate spine, light markings.
2022, English
Softcover, 446 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$44.00 - Out of stock
Incorporating hundreds of characters and cultural entities, spanning innumerable locations and billions of years, Aannex is a future-hacker's maze-map meant to have already been mass-burned; a fakebook full of retroneuroviruses disguised as ecstasy for the condemned; a post-Joycean neo-slipstream sci-fi cult dream encyclopedia composed as algorithmic code compiled in-soul. Designed in a far future where the twin grandsons of Satan-Danad and Nadan-have retroactively rewritten the Holy Bible and therefore the course of human history in its wake, the precarious distinction between mass entertainment and mind control has gone so wonky even the zits who think they run the show can't trace what's what. Laced in the code: a bio-hybrid ex-contract killer travels through space-time seeking immortal vengeance on her autocratic overseers for their crimes...a claims specialist for Garko*Farx, the last remaining megacorporation, unpacks the kickback of finally investigating her bureaucratic complicity in the psycho-spiritual dissolution of all mankind...a former Top 40 producer turned warmonger laments the transmutation of his once aesthetic aspirations into the most formidable fascistic global death-dream ever conceived...all while the fundamental meta-rigging of a divine imagination reels for reformat against the collapsing cavity of narrative events, obfuscating fact and memory in the same process it might have used to set us free. Pressed to the virtual edges of an existence itself already pressed far beyond the revelation that nothing truly can be known, what else exists beyond the bleeding-rainbow-daze of logic's hope? How might we aspire from beyond our future meaning's mythic limits, or is it already too late?
1994, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 15.6 x 23.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Manchester University Press / Manchester
$30.00 - Out of stock
First 1994 edition, out-of-print.
This book presents an analysis of the phenomenon of the aesthetics of sexual and political violence, a central theme in European culture of the early 20th century. Presenting a synthesis of a wide range of material across disciplines and an analysis of the sources of such ideas in their political, historical and cultural context, this volume presents a broad treatment of the theme of violence during this turbulent period. The major cultural movements and individuals of the early 20th-century avant-garde are examined for their use of violence as inspiration in their artistic production. Themes explored include violence and the body; machinery and technology; Vorticism; Dada; Italian Futurism; Surrealism; violence in the avant-garde cinema; military defeat and the representation of war; the relationship of creativity and violence. Exploring the work of English, German, Italian, French, Spanish and Russian painters and writers, including Georges Sorel, Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash, Brecht and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the contributors provide an insight into the early 20th-century European avant-garde.
Very Good copy.
English
Softcover, 56 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$25.00 - Out of stock
Marcel Schwob's 1896 novella The Children's Crusade retells the medieval legend of the exodus of some 30,000 children from all countries to the Holy Land, who travelled to the shores of the sea, which – instead of parting to allow them to march on to Jerusalem – instead delivered them to merchants who sold them into slavery in Tunisia or delivered them to a watery death. It is a cruel and sorrowful story mingling history and legend, which Schwob recounts through the voices of eight different protagonists: a goliard, a leper, Pope Innocent III, a cleric, a qalandar and Pope Gregory IX, as well as two of the marching children, whose naive faith eventually turns into growing fear and anguish. Though it is a tale drawn from the early 13th century, Schwob presents it through a modern framework of shifting subjectivity and fragmented coherency, and its subject matter and its succession of different narrative perspectives has been seen as an influence on and precursor to such diverse works as Alfred Jarry's The Other Alcestis, Ryunosuke Akutagawa's “In a Grove,” William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Jerzy Andrzejewski's The Gates of Paradise. It is a tale told by many yet understood by few, a mosaic surrounding a void, describing a world in which innocence must perish.
Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was a scholar of startling breadth and an incomparable storyteller. A secret influence on generations of writers, from Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges to Roberto Bolaño, Schwob was as versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the poetry of Walt Whitman. His allegiances were to Rabelais and François Villon, Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe. Paul Valéry and Alfred Jarry both dedicated their first books to him, and in doing so paid tribute to the author who could evoke both the intellect of Leonardo da Vinci and the anarchy of Ubu Roi. He was also the uncle of Lucy Schwob, better remembered today as the Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun.
2020, English
Softcover, 136 pages, 14 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Zero Books / UK
$34.00 - Out of stock
This short book engages the myriad dimensions of Night, through ancient rituals, medieval storytelling, modern philosophy, and futuristic images, in order to explore the human experience of the after-dark. It thereby tracks Night through the prisms of its most fascinating practitioners: namely, those who keep strange hours and navigate the various potentialities of nocturnal experience (both of terror and enchantment). The Thief's Night; The Runaway's Night; The Drunkard's Night; The Insomniac's Night; The Revolutionary's Night; The Lunatic's Night; The Sorcerer's Night. Undoubtedly, each of these conceptual figures provides a unique gateway into understanding the powerful sensorial effects of evening, as well as its vast connections to larger questions of time, space, fear, nothingness, desire, death, forgetting, vision, secrecy, criminality, monstrosity, and the body.
1982, English / French
Offset printed, 60 x 40 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Z-Films / US
$60.00 - In stock -
Original 1982 vintage film poster produced to promote the gender-bending NYC cult science fiction film Liquid Sky, directed by Slava Tsukerman and starring Anne Carlisle and Paula E. Sheppard, featuring the wonderful artwork of costume and production designer Marina Levikova. Offset printed French cinema version.
Dimensions : 60 x 40 cm
(Not a reproduction, original issue for theatre release)
Good copy, with some wear, standard folds and light marks to verso not affecting the art.
1979, English
Softcover, 159 pages, 28 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
Published by Abrams in 1978, Images of Horror and Fantasy by art historian Gert Schiff expanded on a major group exhibition guest curated by Schiff at the Bronx Museum in 1977. The resulting publication is a perceptive critical and psychological analyses of a variety of nineteenth-and twentieth-century art that "unfolds simultaneously on the level of historical and social reality and on the level of dreams. Its purpose is to expose some of the principal anxieties of modern man and their resolution in utopian reveries and escapist fantasies." Profusely illustrated in colour and b/w throughout with the works of Alfred Kubin, James Ensor, George Grosz, Paul Thek, Sibylle Ruppert, Henry Fuseli, Paul Delvaux, Nancy Grossman, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, Fernand Khnopff, Rudolph von Ripper, Max Klinger, H. R. Giger, Jonah Kinigstein, Edward Keinholz, Jean Delville, Lucas Samaras, Miriam Beerman, Willem de Kooning, Man Ray, Oskar Kokoschka, Salvador Dali, Paolo Soleri, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Georges Rouault, Otto Dix, Pablo Picasso, Philip Evergood, William Blake, Giorgio de Chirico, Ivan Albright, Yves Tanguy, Paul Klee, Jasper Johns, Germaine Richier, Francisco de Goya, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, Max Ernst, Francis Bacon, Rene Magritte, Illya Repin, Antoine Wiertz, Odilon Redon, Edward Burra, Larry Rivers, George Segal, Thomas Cole, Léon Frédéric, Matthias Grünewald, Rico Lebrun, Bruce Connor, Edvard Munch, and many more.
Gert Schiff (1926 — 1990, b. Oldenburg, Germany) was an art historian, critic, lecturer and professor at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. A specialist in the Romantic movement, particularly the work of Henry Fuseli and William Blake, Mr. Schiff was also very much involved with 20th-century art, organising many major exhibitions around his interests whilst authoring important studies on the arts from his dwellings at the Chelsea Hotel.
Very Good copy.
1993, Japanese
Softcover, 292 pages, 26 x 18.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Seirindo / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
Rarest special issue of cult underground manga periodical GARO, showcasing the work of legendary artist Suehiro Maruo (b. 1956), the master of ero-guro (erotic grotesque) manga. This May 1993 issue features cover artwork by Maruo, a gallery of Maruo's full-colour paintings, comic panels, a rare in-depth illustrated interview with the artist, and a photographic bibliography of his work (to date). Founded by Katsuichi Nagai in 1964 amidst a politically turbulent climate in Japan, GARO was a ground-breaking monthly anthology showcasing dark, experimental manga. Established in a period when manga only circulated through a kashi-hon book rental system, GARO was quickly recognised as Japan’s most notorious alternative manga source, where a new generation of artists ventured unhesitatingly into difficult existentialist, transgressive and difficult socio-political subject matter through gekiga (dramatic adult-themed comics) and ero-guro (the erotic grotesque). The editors of GARO allowed absolutely anything to be published, however ominous in tone or critical of the status quo, introducing the phenomenal work of many of manga history’s most distinguished names, including Shigeru Mizuki, Sampei Shirato, Yoshiharu Tsuge, Seeichi Hayashi, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Mimiyo Tomozawa, Michio Hisauchi, Maki Sasaki, Suehiro Maruo, Kiriko Nananan, Kotobuki Shiriagari, Oji Suzuki, King Terry... Though never commercially successful in its time, GARO is unanimously hailed as the hidden pillar of Japan’s manga industry—its illimitable nature sowing the seeds of contemporary manga and Japanese pop culture at large.
This issue also includes contributions by Michio Hisauchi, Oji Suzuki, Akio Jissoji, Mimiyo Tomozawa, Marie Abiko, Kotobuki Shiriagari, and so many more.
Good copy with light wear.
2022, English
Softcover, 190 pages,
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$38.00 - Out of stock
An hallucinatory SF novel painted in overloaded electronic prose and absolute poetic mayhem. Imagine William S. Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade contemplating the end of the world from a flophouse on 42nd Street. A bruising love letter to language and lysergic lycanthropy. AS SF is here.
Seismic shocks throughout the bigger cities of Earth. A plane crash in San Francisco. Sexology as detailed by American nymphomaniacs. Drugs manufactured from Hindu guidelines. Outdoor furniture burning on the lawns of Indianapolis. I take a deep breath. My filthy hand full of numerous ideas. They administer the medical treatments to Madhab. His skin smells burnt ... he is stabbed by unknown substances ... all rubber shuffling upon him. Tropical fruit eaten around campfires. Coyotes constructed from human bones. Carnal worlds involving shampoo and soiled beds. We strangle in the stairwells at night. We strangle in hotel rooms and on patios ... beneath bed sheets or brown paper. We invite the hotel staff to join us. The brutal lunge of a foam head. Soda bubbles as the blood drools. Index finger in the red mist. Dark-haired soldier with an unidentifiable accent. Madhab wears dark glasses and hangs out with big drug users. Madhab thinks that obedience is an adrenaline rush. He likes tugging off relief workers and U.N. peacekeepers in the toilet facilities. When I was fifteen I use to give back massages on East 14th Street. I’d lick the oil smells from Madhab’s underarms. Memories of the cool night air at the open swimming pavilion. The red lacquer corner pillars by the change rooms. Madhab gets me back to the hotel room. White shirt tight against his chest. I burn up. He opens his mouth. Moss and plaque. Dry toothpaste on lip. Dangerous gang members flood tribal areas. SWAT team in Kandahar. The gorgeous mountains of Afghanistan. Toadlike fingers over the strategic footholds. Negative forces infiltrate Madhab’s psychic energy. Machine guns against the dark blue sky. White stabs of lightning. The electrical world. Kidnappings and suicide bombings. Super-computers cancelling gene therapy programs. It is an early morning in Manhattan ...
Illustrated by Steven Purtill.
2020, English
Softcover, 408 pages 21.6 x 15.5 cm
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$40.00 - Out of stock
“Andrea’s gore was dark red, nearly brown, and smelled of meat and piss. She must have wet herself on account of all the drugs…”
California brings out the fucking worst in people. Makes them junkies, whores, killers - failed saints, predatory sinners. Must be something in the land or maybe the water. Something old and evil. Waiting. The Magician is an incantatory trip to this cursed heart of darkness. A modern horror tale of sexual violence and deep psychological harm. Unflinchingly narrated in spare, economic prose climaxing in hallucinatory brutality, Christopher Zeischegg has conjured a dark fable of the American dream as it slides into unending nightmare.
Christopher Zeischegg is a writer, musician, and filmmaker who spent eight years working in the adult industry as performer Danny Wylde. His other books include The Wolves That Live in Skin and Space and Body to Job. He lives in Los Angeles.