World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
info@worldfoodbooks.com
Art
Theory / Essay
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Photography
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LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
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Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
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Sculpture / Installation
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Curatorial
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Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
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Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2024, English
Softcover, 448 pages, 20.5 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$29.00 - Out of stock
"The Magician is an incredibly nuanced, unsettling novel that, like magic itself, remakes our understanding of reality by delving deep into the cracks between personal narrative and what takes place only unseen. Armed with arcane experience, seminal insight, and a magnetic knack for splicing LA noir with autofiction on the fly, Christopher Zeischegg is a 1-of-a-kind creative icon, the kind you’ll have a hard time ever forgetting no matter how it makes you feel."—Blake Butler, author of Molly
"One of the most exciting living writers. Reading a Christopher Zeischegg book is like stepping into a dream in which anything can happen—his particular combination of sex, death, beauty, and horror often feels downright transcendent."—Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I'm Someone Else
"In tight staccato paragraphs, Christopher Zeischegg’s The Magician conjures a late night kerosene huff where death and desire intersect. A gothic, black-clad love child nestled between Gira’s The Consumer and the purer 1965 version of John Fowles’ The Magus, The Magician is a dirty hypodermic slipped under the Botoxed skin of sunny Los Angeles recovery literature that would have you believe redemption is possible—Zeischegg knows otherwise."—James Nulick, author of Plastic Soul
2023, English
Softcover, 218 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$26.00 - In stock - Add to cart
"Gary J. Shipley's So Beautiful and Elastic entwines elegant prose, blistering suspense, and art criticism, all shot through with a dark secret. Exploring creators as diverse as René Magritte, Clarice Lispector, David Lynch, Dennis Cooper, Bruno Dumont, and Gary Indiana, Shipley claims his spot as a singular disciple of this genealogy of experimental art. Ann's voice will stay with you long after you exit her mind's haunted house. You won't even realize its cursed magic until it has already swallowed you whole."—Claire Donato, author of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts
"Recalling Barnes' Book of Repulsive Women and Hadean in its academic waste, this miserabilist's trance of "fed-on thinas" dons a destructive getup. Cogitating on the "ignominy of actually having to exist." toxicity is king and identity gets tricked-up, looted from philosophy, film, art, plus porn. The metamuck of the erudite sex worker. The punk muck of the abused stray. The gothic muck of the terrible secret from the terrible past. Shipley's anti-heroine thinks, thinks, thinks her way into and outta existence. So Beautiful and Elastic is a visceral and psychological portrait of disguise. If Wuornos were on a spree with Cioran; if their stops were mapped by Magritte; if the map was an appointment for Die Familie Schneider."—Kim Gek Lin Short, author of China Cowboy
"This brutal book is one of the best-worst nightmares l've ever had—as if Kathy Acker had written a movie novelization of a grimy true crime documentary and then studded it with exactly the kind of art-historical and countercultural references I love. Or as if Katherine Faw's Ultraluminous had an evil twin."—Philippa Snow, author of Which As You Know Means Violence
2024, English
Softcover, 300 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$29.00 - In stock - Add to cart
"Creation is a stunning new collection by one of the most exciting living writers. Reading a Christopher Zeischegg book is like stepping into a dream in which anything can happen—his particular combination of sex, death, beauty, and horror often feels downright transcendent."—Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I'm Someone Else
“A phantasmagoria of the violences comprising an artist’s life. The pursuit of clout a violence of hemorrhage, of taint, of rotting from chest outward. The pursuit of intimacy a violence of sculpting, of repair, of transforming one toward divinity. How the 'art world' violates the divinity of creation. You can let art kill you, let it skin you and sell your hide to the highest bidder (like you have a choice). Or you can take your flayed muscle and pile it into cathedral. Here, you may find another—a surrogate twin, skinned as you’ve been—and press your blood into theirs, intermingle your capillaries, and claim, 'Oh yes, I know you now. I always have. The rhythm of your true heart.' It may not be truth (in fact, you know deep down for certain it cannot be), but it’s enough of a lullaby to soothe your aches; a siren's call to rouse you to wake, to push you to your feet and move you about the world for at least another day."—B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space
"Creation asks the bold questions that force us to understand the why and the how of what we create and that which we connect with. It is also a tremendously tender work showcasing Zeischegg's masterful command over his craft. Whether it's combing the depths of personal experience or charting the complexities of the true and false self, plunging into edifices of fiction and storytelling or examining the power and propulsiveness of friendship, Christopher Zeischegg writes from between realms, and his latest is a must-experience tome as vast as the entire spectrum of creativity itself."—Michael J. Seidlinger, author of The Body Harvest and Anybody Home?
"Christopher Zeischegg’s new book is a fascinating combination of essay, memoir and fiction. It opens with a new novella, which starts at the logical point to pick up from Zeischegg’s previous book, the blank and raw LA noir that was The Magician. Dark, transactional affairs are informed by selfishness and self-survival.
From then on, we are given a masterclass in dissection as the writer examines and pulls apart relationships of all kinds in all kinds of ways. We are shown the relationship between an artist and their work. We are made to think about the relationship between art and the viewer--we are all pulled in.
One of the main focuses seems to be on the body. The bodies that we all have. How do we use these bodies? How are our bodies used? What happens when there is no pleasure left in the body that we have and what if there never was?
Ultimately though, Creation casts its view on friendship. Using the artist Luka Fisher as a muse, a character, a subject of documentary, Zeischegg can consider the notion of platonic friendship—what it means to have a friendship without transaction, and how do you really know someone? It’s a powerful thing to be witness to, and it’s a moving thing.
Creation is an excitingly original book made by one of our sharpest contemporary writers. It is a book with so much going on inside it that it is still with me now, after multiple reads. And each time the reader rethinks it, they can’t help but rethink themselves."—Thomas Moore, author of Forever
Christopher Zeischegg is a writer and filmmaker who spent eight years working in the adult industry as performer, Danny Wylde. He is the author of Creation: On Art and Unbecoming, The Magician, Body to Job, The Wolves that Live in Skin and Space, and Come to My Brother. Zeischegg lives in Los Angeles.
2020, English
Softcover, 382 pages, 20 x 12.5 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$38.00 - Out of stock
"Like smoke off a collision between Dennis Cooper’s George Miles Cycle and Beyond The Black Rainbow, absorbing the energy of mind control, reincarnation, parallel universes, altered states, school shootings, obsession, suicidal ideation, and so much else, B.R. Yeager’s multi-valent voicing of drugged up, occult youth reveals fresh tunnels into the gray space between the body and the spirit, the living and the dead, providing a well-aimed shot in the arm for the world of conceptual contemporary horror."
—Blake Butler, author of Three Hundred Million
“Ever wonder where teenage children go at night? Perhaps it’s best not knowing the answer. There’s something amiss in Kinsfield, a drab, boring city much like your own, except for the teenage suicide epidemic, stagnant, ineffectual parents, cultish behavior that borders on psychosis, and strings, strings everywhere. B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space is a hypnotic collage of message boards, memes, and ruined bodies twisting at the end of a rope. Most modern novels have lost all concept of magic. B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space is a stunning refutation of the quotidian.”
—James Nulick, author of Haunted Girlfriend & Valencia
2024, English
Softcover, 236 pages, 20.5 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$28.00 - In stock - Add to cart
Stab Frenzy is a brilliant, brutal satire of the art world, but it's more than that, too: it's a work of art in itself, an ingenious and gory paean to the author's favourite artists—the shut-ins, the suicides, the spree killers, the daydreamers who dream of destroying the day. Art bleeds into bodies and bodies bleed into the book: Gary J. Shipley's an artist à la the artists he loves, a force for delightful deformation. This book deformed me, and for that I give thanks.—Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot
Stab Frenzy is about four members (once five) of an art collective bent on destroying their own identities, the complacency of humans, and art itself. It is a book about art and writing as art, and how our destructive impulses can sometimes be manifestations of a begrudging love.
Unrelentingly creative, Gary J. Shipley is our most important experimental writer: a true heir to J. G. Ballard, Christine Brooke-Rose, and B. S. Johnson.—David Roden, author of Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human
2023, English
Softcover, 132 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$24.00 - Out of stock
"One of my favorite contemporary writers. Each of these vicious little stories is a perfect articulation of the madness of being a conscious entity. Elsby’s voice winds its way into your head and smashes about like a trapped heron."—B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space
"Elsby's easy tone and accessible prose conceals a complex malignant design. The naked mind speaks from an isolated place inside the cruelty of everyday power structures with flat affect, leaving the reader to sort out the relentless inequity, outrage, and pain. Bedlam is exactly the kind of brilliant and unapologetic trauma I crave."—Joe Koch, author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands and Convulsive
"In a series of scathing monologues, Bedlam is searching for an exit, craving for escape while stuck detailing the minutiae that keep us in place (the hairdos, the joggers, the dick pics, the doors, the death, the men...), as our new lives wait indefinitely—aging badly, somewhere in the near distance, before they’ve even begun." —Gary J. Shipley, author of Terminal Park
"Elsby taps into the worst parts of ourselves and presents them as mundane grotesquery. The cruel things people do to one another daily are presented in a chilling, matter of fact way alongside passages of interiority that terrify because one might see them as a mirror. That's the true, wicked power of Bedlam."—Anthony Dragonetti, author of Confidence Man
Charlene Elsby wrote Hexis, Psychros, Affect and Musos. Her essays have appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Bustle Books, and the LA Review of Books Philosophical Salon.
2023, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 20.4 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$36.00 - In stock - Add to cart
"Explosive and propulsive, The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty proves Charlene Elsby to be a formidable talent. This book will haunt you."—Juliet Escoria, author of Juliet the Maniac
"Depraved, stark, and dripping in blood, The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty by Charlene Elsby is an experience that demands to be felt. Unique prose, dark musings, and an experimental structure blend beautifully with the layers of grief and bodily autonomy. In the main character's labyrinthine mind, readers will find themselves seduced into what I can only describe as a really messed up coming-of-age story (in all the best, gory ways)."—Sara Tantlinger, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Devil's Dreamland
"The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty is an astonishing mirage, a novel full of dish soap and restaurant clothes, of summer months and arcane sex, of trailer parks and dishcloths, or cocks and thighs and food processors, fryer grease and the coal-black bodies of Erinyes, of maintenance fees and telephone bills. Elsby taunts and teeters on the rock face of reality and delirium, chaos carnivals where words transmute into data dumps of unreliable memory, into unapologetic rebellion against the literary mundane. A supernatural work of cigarette attitude and wit that shatters the cosmic rollercoaster, a seismic flare-up that left me exhilarated and questioning my own framework of despondency. A welcome addition to the Charlene Elsby manifest. Take a cool walk among the home decor of the Devil, it's lustful, you'll quite like it."—Shane Jesse Christmass, author of Belfie Hell
"Unlike Plato's realm of eternal forms, which he associates with the sun, Charlene Elsby's Devil lurks in the solar eclipse, in the eternal shadows that undergird existence. A bildungsroman unlike any other, The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty had me laughing out loud & deeply disturbed. Through surgically precise prose, Elsby conjures a lean & mighty novel set in a trailer park full of memorable characters, devilish disruptions, & a plot that thickens towards an unforgettable finale. I read it in one sitting."—Logan Berry, author of Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake
"As the unnamed narrator of Charlene Elsby's The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty so wisely observes, "We do define people according to what's been done to them, not what they've done." There are those who fuck, and there are those who are fucked. There are performers and there are objects. And at the center of it all, like the brilliant, blinding core of a burning star, there is the image of Marilyn Monroe, whose beauty belonged only to those around her. With intense and direct language, Elsby reminds us that corrupting forces are always at work, howling mockery at our very desire to be loved."—David Peak, author of Corpsepaint
2021, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 12.7 x 20.5 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$38.00 - In stock - Add to cart
Interrogating the Abyss is the first volume in the collected interviews, essays, and fictions of Chris Kelso. It’s an exploration of darkness and a dissection of human relationships and obsession, featuring conversations with writers such as Dennis Cooper and Matthew Stokoe, and culminating in Voidness, ten sessions of psychic intervention by some of literature's most compelling storytellers.
Chris Kelso is a multi-translated bestselling author and editor from Scotland. His short fiction has been nominated for a British Fantasy-Award, and he is the two-time winner of the Ginger Nuts of Horror Novel of the Year (2016/17). You can find his work in 3:AM, Sensitive Skin, Invert/Extant, The Scottish Poetry Library, Locus, Black Static and many more.
2023, English
Softcover, 380 pages, 12.7 x 20.32 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$42.00 - Out of stock
She asks for a light. You reach in your pocket and dig out your Bic, strike the flint, and touch the flame to her cigarette. She inhales. The tip roils cinder. A line of flame draws down the paper, crossing the band, down the filter. It touches her lips and her entire face is a blaze. Engulfing, disappearing her hair, climbing down her throat, down her shoulders and arms and chest and belly, down her pants to her shoes. Washed in pumpkin light. She waves her arms, spinning in circles and howling.
You run.
Collected fiction.
2023, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$29.00 - Out of stock
"How can a tale be brutal and tender, grotesque and beautiful all at the same time? I don't know, but Sara Tantlinger achieves it in To Be Devoured. Hypnotic, erotic, and gory, this is a novella that will sear itself into your imagination. Highly recommended!"—Jonathan Janz, Author of Marla and The Siren and the Specter
"Sara Tantlinger's To Be Devoured capitalizes on our macabre preoccupation with the uglier side of nature, with love that topples into obsession, and with madness that is strangely beautiful in its barbarity. Her writing is equivalent to those unremitting avian beings her protagonist is so enamored of: It will hook its talons through your flesh, sink its neck into the ribboned edges of your wounds, and only relinquish your blighted body when it has swallowed your very soul."—Christa Carmen, author of Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, winner of the Indie Horror Book Awards for Best Debut Collection
"Vultures, obsession, and an unnatural hunger: What more can you want in a horror story? With To Be Devoured, Sara Tantlinger has done it again as she ratchets up the terror in wonderfully surprising ways while crafting prose that's always a heady blend of the vicious and the vibrant. A book that's absolutely not to be missed!"—Gwendolyn Kiste, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens
2022, English
Softcover, 140 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$40.00 - Out of stock
"Maggie understands that splatter for splatter's sake is boring. Psychopathy is boring. Coldness is boring. She's interested in feeling, and when her stories turn violent (as they frequently do), it's with a surreal emotional barbarity that distorts the entire world. You can mop up blood with any fabric. Maggie's concern is with the wound left behind, because the wound never leaves-it haunts. As a result, each of these stories leaves a wound of its own. Some weep, watching as you try (and fail) to recover. Others laugh. But never without feeling."
-B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space
2023, English
Softcover, 266 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$42.00 - In stock - Add to cart
"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
$39.00 - Out of 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.
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.
2022, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 20.3 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$36.00 - In stock - Add to cart
"Joe Koch is a phenomenal talent who writes with poetic fury. Heart-rending and fearsome, Convulsive joins a handful of collections that show off the range and importance of contemporary horror."—Laird Barron, author of Swift to Chase
"The stories of Convulsive dazzle and stun the reader with brutal beauty and surreal intensity. This collection's deftly subversive themes and stylistic complexity dare you to witness its unique and transgressive radiance."—Tiffany Morris, author of Havoc In Silence
"I'm awestruck by Joe Koch's nonstop spellbinding, almost paralyzingly inventive and yet propulsive, ultra-focused prose. The Wingspan of Severed Hands is a truly amazing find."—Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm, I Wished, The Sluts
"Prose so evocative black letters on white pages become as vivid as leaves of an illuminated manuscript. If human bodies are temples, The Wingspan of Severed Hands is holy writ delivering the glorious news that the dawn of flesh and blood and dreams of grotesque wonder has arrived. Stunning book."—Christopher Slatsky, author of The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature
"Convulsive is packed with stories that are as bloody as they are poetic. This is at once a celebration of horror, an exploration of humanity, and an explosion of beautiful language. Darkness rarely shines so bright. Koch will sear their name inside your heart."—Gabino Iglesias, author of Coyote Songs
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?
2020, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 21 x 13 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$30.00 - Out of stock
Gary J. Shipley's fascinating mixture of horror, apocalypse, and experimental theory-fiction.
"Shipley's Terminal Park pounds fiction into entirely new shapes. Disintegrating and blissful. Highly Recommend."—Tony Burgess, author of Pontypool Changes Everything
"Gary J. Shipley's writing has a way of making every form he works within advance, in an overarching sense, such that the next exciting thing you read, no matter how advanced, is rendered a jalopy."—Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm
"The world is a void and there are no more prophets left to serve. There is still vision, however, and Shipley's is one we might all surrender to."—Travis Jeppesen, author of The Suiciders
"Shipley's writing is important because it's a fearless attempt to advance the art of literature, to force us to breathe something, to drown in something, to bloody our hands. It's an unforgettable experience."—3: AM Magazine
Gary J. Shipley is a writer and philosopher based in the UK. He has published work in various philosophy journals and literary journals.