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First 1979 popular edition of VELVET EDEN: The Richard Merkin Collection of Erotic Photography, a book of playful and now classic sepia-toned erotic photography from the first half of the 20th century, published by F & S, produced and edited by Harris Lewine, with commentary by Richard Merkin and Bruce McCall, designed with Louise Fili. The seed for this now classic, very playful volume of erotica was planted when an art director (Harris Lewine) required a photograph the book jacket design of Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus. Where did this photograph come from?

Average—Good copy, general wear/age, light cover creasing, previous owner's name to first page.

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Early 1986 pocket book of medical fetish illustration by Romain Slocombe, "Sad Vacations". Fifteen full colour works by Slocombe are accompanied by texts (in French) by François Landon and descriptions of each work by Jacques Peeters.

A French cartoonist, illustrator, book author, translator, photographer and filmmaker, Romain Slocombe, born in Paris in 1953, began his career as an illustrator working on comics and counter-culture magazines such as Métal Hurlant in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As an artist, he was closely involved with the punk Bazooka collective, with Kiki Picasso, Bernard Vidal, Natsuko, Yoshi Ichimura, Fred Chalmer, Loulou Picasso, and others, having studied alongside many of its members at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He became known as a comic strip author and published his first bondage album, Prisoner of the Red Army, which caused a scandal. While bandaging women, the artist develops an aesthetics of upheaval, of which J.G. Ballard became the cult writer. Seizing the dark side of Japanese fetishism to invent a new genre of artistic SM — "surgical bondage", Slocombe's medical fetishised "broken dolls" would enter into subcultural history forever through the 1996 publication City of Broken Dolls. Slocombe's distinctive paintings, drawings and photographs of women in medical bondage — tied, injured, bandaged, imprisoned and hospitalised, often combining a re-working of historical political revolution, WW2, noir fiction, and Japanese photographic SM imagery with the graphic language of bande dessinée comic-roman and new wave expressionism, became some of the most strikingly original and influential erotic art of the subcultural 1990s.

Very Good copy, light wear/age.

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A dark and compelling work by a new voice in Australian – and world – literary fiction.

A nomad swallows poison and drowns himself. Resuscitated by a paramilitary bandit named Aslan, Figure is nursed back into a world of violence, sexuality and dementia. Together, Figure and Aslan traverse a coastline erupting in conflict. When the nearest city is ethnically cleansed, Figure escapes on the last ship evacuating to the other isle of the sea. Crossing village to village largely on foot, a slew of outcasts and ghosts guide him as he navigates states of cultural and metaphysical crisis.

Scott McCulloch’s debut novel, Basin, explores the axis of landscape and consciousness. Echoing the modernist tradition, and written in an incendiary yet elliptical prose style, Basin maps the phenomenon of a civilisation being reborn – a hallucinatory elegy to the inter-zones of self and place.

Born in Melbourne, based between Ukraine and the Caucasus since 2014, and currently dividing his time between Lebanon and Georgia, Scott McCulloch works with prose, essay and sound. His writings have appeared in various magazines and journals worldwide. Basin is his debut novel.

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First edition of this excellent first German monograph on Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri, published by Prestel in 1998. Profusely illustrated with Spoerri's incredible artistic history of installations, performances, studio photos, editions, and other activities across important associations with Fluxus, Nouveau réalisme and Eat Art; works across sculpture, assemblage, action, and relief, including a great number of his iconic "snare works". Includes an exhibition history, bibliography and extensive text in German by Heidi E. Violand-Hobi.

Daniel Spoerri (b. 1930) is a Swiss artist and writer born in Romania. Spoerri is best known for his "snare-pictures". In 1960, Spoerri made his first "snare-picture": "objects found in chance positions, in order or disorder (on tables, in boxes, drawers, etc.) are fixed (‘snared’) as they are. Only the plane is changed: since the result is called a picture, what was horizontal becomes vertical. Example: remains of a meal are fixed to the table at which the meal was consumed and the table hung on the wall." His first "snare-picture", Kichka's Breakfast was created from his girlfriend's leftover breakfast. The piece is now in the collection in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. One snare-picture, made in 1964, consists of the remains of a meal eaten by Marcel Duchamp. He also is widely acclaimed for his book, Topographie Anécdotée* du Hasard (An Anecdoted Topography of Chance), a literary analog to his snare-pictures, in which he mapped all the objects located on his table at a particular moment, describing each with his personal recollections evoked by the object, with illustrations by the great Roland Topor. In the 1950s he was active in dance, studying classical dance with Olga Preobrajenska and in 1954 becoming the lead dancer at the State Opera of Bern, Switzerland. He later staged several avant-garde plays including Ionesco's The Bald Soprano and Picasso's surrealist Desire Trapped by the Tail. During that period he met a number of Surrealist artists, including Meret Oppenheim, Jean Tinguely, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, and also a number of artists subsequently associated with the Fluxus movement, including Robert Filliou, Dieter Roth and Emmett Williams. Closely associated with the Fluxus art movement, a movement "characterized by a strongly Dadaist attitude, [whose] participants were a divergent group of individualists whose most common theme was their delight in spontaneity and humor." It has been said that his Anecdoted Topography of Chance "seems perfectly to embody aspects of its spirit." Spoerri was also one of the original signers of the manifesto creating the Nouveau réalisme (New Realism) art movement, which involved artists such as Yves Klein, Arman, Martial Raysse, Pierre Restany, Niki de Saint Phalle, César, Jean Tinguely, Mimmo Rotella, Gérard Deschamps, and the Ultra-Lettrists, Francois Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Jacques de la Villeglé, an avant garde endeavor begun in 1960. His use of everyday life as the main subject-matter of his art reflects his involvement in the New Realism movement. A major theme of Spoerri's artwork is food, and he has called this aspect of his work "Eat Art." This is seen not only in his snare-pictures of eaten meals, but in restaurant performance pieces, for which he cooks for guests and art-critics take on the role of waiters, playing on the idea of the critic bringing the art to the consumers and giving them an understanding of the work.

Good—Very Good copy with light wear and light fading to dust jacket edges.

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1982 English hardcover edition of The Autobiography of George Grosz: A Small Yes and a Big No, first published by Dial Press in New York City, translated by Lola Sachs Dorin. In 1982, this new translation by Arnold Pomerans of the 1955 German edition was published by Allison and Busby in London.

The autobiography of George Grosz (1893—1959), the great German artist and satirist, is crammed with unique anecdotes and reminiscences. More than just a chronicle of his own life, it becomes in effect a history of the modern movement and is, says the Stuttgarter Zeitung, "a glorious, exciting book".

Grosz recalls his Pomeranian childhood, army life during the First World War, revolution and hunger in its aftermath, the frenzied, disjointed world of Dadaism and Nazism in the Weimar Republic. He describes the cafés, beer-cellars and studios of Paris and Berlin, a dangerous but optimistic journey to Soviet Russia and final emigration to the United States — less than a month before the Nazis came to power.

He conjures up an exciting period and the central figures, the intellectual outsiders, who were responsible for shaping it — a colourful and unforgettable crowd, the artists and writers and film people and political activists, Dali, de Chirico, Rosa Luxemburg, Thomas Mann, Lenin, Brecht, Dos Passos, Joseph von Sternberg, Trotsky, and many others.

Grosz was the most rebellious and explosive of artists, the scourge of militarism, capitalism and the bourgeoisie in the 1920s, whose lines "tore like barbed wire" and whose life and work became a legend. His autobiography is a rich, enjoyable book, here fully available in English for the first time.

Very Good copy, VG dust jacket.

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1977 printing of this definitive monographic study of German painter and printmaker, Otto Dix (1891—1969). Written by Fritz Löffler in the original German language, the books presents a large plate section of reproduced paintings and drawings in colour and b/w, including fold-out panels, spanning his entire career. One of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), which also attracted George Grosz and Max Beckmann in the mid 1920s. Dix was noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of German society during the Weimar Republic and the brutality of war. A veteran haunted by his experiences of WWI, his first great subjects were crippled soldiers, but during the height of his career he also painted nudes, prostitutes, and often savagely satirical portraits of celebrities from Germany's intellectual circles. His work became even darker and more allegorical in the early 1930s, and he became a target of the Nazis, defining Dix as one of Germany's most 'degenerate' artists. Through his art, he had committed a 'violation of the moral sensibilities' of the nation and forced to promise to paint only inoffensive landscapes. His paintings that were considered "degenerate" were discovered in 2012 among the 1500+ paintings hidden away by the son of Hitler's looted-art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt.

Very Good copy in VG dust jacket, light wear to extremities (preserved under mylar wrap).

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First (out-of-print) Amphetamine Sulphate edition.

“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.

Very Good copy with light wear to extremities.

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Quickly out-of-print, inaugural and solitary volume of the UK noise music magazine, As Loud As Possible, published in 2010 and edited by Chris Sienko and Steve Underwood (Harbinger Sound). Not surprisingly an instant collector's item, this first ambitious issue (named after the Incapacitants 1995 album) is packed with articles, interviews and reviews with both "seminal and newly emerging sound artists that specialize in atonal sonic brutality." Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, Broken Flag (Maurizio Bianchi, Unkommuniti, Mauthausen Orchestra, Satori, Controlled Bleeding, Irritant, JFK, Mauro Teho Teardo (M.T.T.), Con-Dom Sigillum S, Agog, Giancarlo Toniutti, Vortex Campaign, Le Syndicat, Krang....), No Fun, Putrefier, Sewer Election, The Haters, The Rita / Sam McKinlay, Zone Nord / Jean-Luc Angles (Blowhole, Prick Decay, Small Cruel Party), Cheapmachines, Climax Denial, Interchange fanzine, Alien Brains / Storm Bugs / Anti-Messthetics, and much more...

Contents: “Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock: “Artaud, Aktionkunst, Abreaction and Eb.er” : texts by Alice Kemp, accompanied by new drawings from Rudolf Eb.er, and a detailed “Aktiongraphy”; The Broken Flag Story: An extensive indepth interview with Gary Mundy, covering the career of Ramleh, the complete output of his legendary Broken Flag record label, and also featuring new interviews with the artists responsible for those releases, including: Maurizio Bianchi, Unkommuniti, Mauthausen Orchestra, Satori, Controlled Bleeding, Irritant, JFK, Mauro Teho Teardo (M.T.T.), Con-Dom Sigillum S, Agog, Giancarlo Toniutti, Vortex Campaign, Le Syndicat, Krang and many more, plus unseen artwork and photographs; No Fun: Festival curator Carlos Giffoni talk about the New York festival's past, present and future, and covers his work with the No Fun Productions label. The Politics of HNW: The Rita’s Sam McKinlay talks about the obsessive nature of the harsh-head. Includes a list of Sam's essential Wall Noise picks spanning the past two decades. An excellent introduction to wall-riding; 30 Years of The Haters: G.X. Jupitter - Larsen provides a personal history, as well as a delineation of his ideas, methods, and tricks accrued over three decades. The inside story from the man who has made entropy his life's work. Putrefier: An interview with Mark Durgan, covering his twenty years in the UK's wilderness, from Birthbiter's heyday to the present-day. Includes reminiscences from Andy Bolus about their infamous duo project, Olympic Shit Man! Sewer Election: Sweden's loudest, Dan Johansson talks about his music, ideas, art and running a tape label. Interview by Mikko Aspa of Grunt; Zone Nord: An album -by- album look at the discography of this retired French noise legend, including brief commentary from Mr Zone Nord himself, Jean-Luc Angles; Apraxia: An interview with Patrick Barber, the man behind the label. Covers the output of this legendary label who released Blowhole, Prick Decay, Small Cruel Party and others in the early '90s; Cheapmachines: An interview with London sound-sculpter and all-'round sonic chameleon Phil Julian.
Climax Denial: An interview with this Milwaukee-based Power Electronics lecher, including an album-by-album analysis; Alien Brains, Storm Bugs and Anti-Messthetics: A study of the non-careers of two early eighties UK outfits that were very much connected. Includes input from some of the key players, plus lots of vintage artwork; Interchange: A look at this influential UK fanzine from the mid-80s, plus an interview with its creator, John Smith. Tunnel Canary: G. X. Jupitter - Larsen tells us about his first memories in Vancouver of this volatile bunch. IDES: An overview of the primary output of this American tape label, and an interview with its owner, Nicole Chambers; Classic Albums: A regular feature dedicated to both in-depth analysis and memories of overlooked but not forgotten gems from yesteryear. Issue #1 features articles on The Lemon Kittens (We Buy A Hammer For Daddy), XX Committee (Network) and RJF (Greater Success In Apprehensions & Convictions). A collection of thoughts and interviews, including an exclusive interview with ex- XX front-man, Scott Foust. Opinion Columns: A regular feature from a rotating pool of participatory players with the music they ponder. Includes John Olson (Wolf Eyes), Andy Ortmann (Panicsville), Mikko Aspa (Grunt), Steve Underwood (Harbinger Sound), Hicham Chadly (Nashazphone), Jonas Kellagher (Segerhuva), C. Spencer Yeh (Burning Star Core) and Mark Wharton (Idwal Fisher) amongst others. Covering artists including Masonna, Vomir, and The Black Phelgm, and ranging from Bizarre Uproar all the way to Christian bluegrass bluegrass music! Extensive reviews section. Back cover artwork by Richard Rupenus (The New Blockaders).

Very Good copy with light wear.

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Super rare, MILES DAVIS special Autumn 1973 issue of ADLIB, Japan's magazine for jazz / fusion fans, published by Swing Journal. Heavy volume packed with Miles from all periods, loads of Electric Miles, Miles at home, Miles in the studio, Miles on tour, Miles live, an illustrated history of Miles' fashion styles by Yasuhiko Kobayashi, loads of rare photographs from around the world, a pull-out colour Miles Davis poster, interviews, in-depth articles, extensive discographies, history of collaborations, chronology, biography, records reviews, news, wild illustrations, and excellent Japanese home stereo and instrument advertising, many featuring Miles endoresments, naturally. A must for any fan!

Very Good copy.

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Very rare copy of the first edition of Windfall Light: The Visual Language, edited by Lars Müller and published in 2010.

ECM Since its founding in 1969, ECM has been dedicated primarily to jazz and contemporary classical music and is a leading international label in both these fields. ECM has also received acclaim for its unique cover designs, which have always been an integral part of its productions. Over the years, the collaboration between Manfred Eicher, the label's founder and producer, and designers including Barbara Wojirsch, Dieter Rehm and Sascha Kleis has produced an aesthetic of the cover that initiates a dialogue between the photographic image and the music. After the highly acclaimed “Sleeves of Desire” of 1996, which offered an overview of ECM cover art, this volume presents the covers that have been created since then. These covers are arranged here in the form of a visual score that invites personal interpretations and individual discoveries. The entire collection of ECM cover art chronicles a program that has written modern music history — it is also a manifesto declaring the congruence of the visible and the audible in the form of the CD.

A veritable art book, beautifully designed and printed, “Windfall Light” is an insightful exploration of ECM’s visual aesthetics. This 448 page soft-cover book includes approximately 1300 colour and black and white illustrations, as well as penetrating essays by leading writers.

The volume includes a fully-illustrated catalogue of all of ECM's releases to date, incorporating all of the artwork featured in “Sleeves of Desire”, and offering an invaluable resource to collector's and enthusiasts of one of the world's most significant record labels.

Near Fine copy.

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First 2019 edition of New Juche's fast out-of-print Amphetamine Sulphate book of The Devils.

"Adieu all you Judges. New Juche returns with his book of ‘The Devils.’

An unsparing look into the dark rotten heart of Midlothian. Part true-crime narrative, part explicit memoir, ‘The Devils’ charts strange topographies and bloody histories.

‘Ever a fish out of water, ever a cunt,’ this is a vital occult dispatch from one of the most challenging and unnerving writers at work today."

Good—Very Good copy with storage curl to cover edge, light cover wear otherwise As New.

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From 1972 to 1973, Gordon Matta-Clark took over fifteen hundred photographs of graffiti in New York City. These pictures are some of the earliest documentation of an emerging art form, and are an under-recognized body of work from Matta-Clark—an artist who used the city’s crumbling infrastructure to reveal the social and political implications of architecture and urban design. This publication features every frame from every roll of film Matta-Clark shot, organized according to the sequence of contact sheets in the artist’s archive. Taken together, these pictures demonstrate Matta-Clark’s obsession with the graffiti that had exploded across the city’s walls, subways, and buses, and show him growing bolder as he moved from photographing on the streets and subway platforms, to trespassing in outer borough train yards. While he was out on these documentary missions, Matta-Clark also photographed abandoned architecture, infrastructure, and the social life of the city. Those pictures are included as well, as they show the relationship between graffiti and themes that are more commonly associated with the artist’s work.

The title of this publication comes from a text he wrote in a notebook a few years before he started taking these photographs. He could be describing his own artistic process, or the experience of a kid sneaking into a subway tunnel late at night with a can of paint:

PASSING THROUGH THE BOUNDARIES
PASSING AWAY WITH A PIECE TO GO
CHOOSING AND CLEARING OUT. A CRITICAL POINT IN
STRESS AND WORKING BETWEEN FAILURE
AND MINIMALISM REDUCTION AND
COLLAPSE. KEEPING EYES OPEN FOR
A NEW HIT
THE JOY OF GETTING AWAY WITH IT
A COMPLETE DEVOTION TO GETTING
AWAY WITH IT.
PASSING THROUGH MOVING IN
AND GETTING AWAY WITH IT

An essay by Antonio Sergio Bessa and a text by Jonathan Lethem accompany the photographs.

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Two of the greatest collections of Rousseau’s work come together in a new exhibition that offers fresh insights into the painter’s art and life

The Barnes Foundation is home to the world’s largest collection of works by the self-taught artist Henri Rousseau (1844–1910). Many of them were bought by Dr. Albert C. Barnes from the Paris art dealer Paul Guillaume, also an avid collector of Rousseau’s works. This publication offers a comprehensive study of the eighteen works at the Barnes and places them in dialogue with works from around the globe, including those from Guillaume’s collection (now housed at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris). This unprecedented overview of the artist’s work reunites paintings that have been apart for more than one hundred years, marking the first time that works from the Foundation’s galleries will form part of an exhibition devoted to Rousseau.

Working closely with Barnes Foundation conservation staff, Christopher Green and Nancy Ireson consider Rousseau’s novel artistic practice and explore his process of adapting works to new purposes. They also examine how Rousseau navigated the art world, driven by the need to market his works in the hope of furthering his career. Richly illustrated with Rousseau’s idiosyncratic jungle scenes, landscapes, portraits, and still lifes, this volume presents new findings and includes essays that discuss the market for the artist in the 1920s and the veiled eroticism of the painter’s jungle scenes

Christopher Green is professor emeritus at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Nancy Ireson is deputy director for collections and exhibitions and Gund Family Chief Curator at the Barnes Foundation.

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A vibrant account of both the sensuous cultural scene of postwar Paris and the life of an alluring icon of modern art.

Isidore Isou was a young Jew in war-time Bucharest, and barely survived the Romanian Holocaust. He made his way to Paris where in 1945 he founded the avant-garde movement Lettrism, described as the missing link between Dada, Surrealism, Situationism and May '68.

In Speaking East Andrew Hussey presents a colourful picture of the post-war Left Bank, where Lettrist fists flew in avant-garde punch-ups in Jazz clubs and cafes and Isou, as sexy and as charismatic as the young Elvis, gathered around him a group of hooligan disciples who argued, drank and had sex with the Parisian intellectual elite.

This is a vibrant account of the life and times of a pivotal figure in the history of the avant-garde.

"A sympathetic account of an extraordinary life. Hussey has the depth of historical understanding necessary to do justice both to Isidore Isou's glamorous, sometimes absurd, life as a hero of the Left Bank and to the horrors of the Romanian Holocaust he had escaped. This is an expertly told story about Paris, Europe, and the interplay of private passion and public trauma."—Sebastian Faulks, author of "Birdsong"

"Isou's life is at once tragic and farcical: a whirling reprise of all of the twentieth century's artistic avantgardes played out against the backdrop of Paris's Left Bank in its heyday. Hussey is the ideal chronicler, and his biography, with its exuberant prose, both channels Isou's restless creativity and positions it within the main currents of postwar French thought. Essential reading."—Will Self, author of "The Quantity Theory of Insanity" and "Umbrella"

"Like Antonin Artaud before him, Isou lived his art. He also paid the price for it. In Hussey's account he emerges as a man always on the brink. As his disciples betrayed him and his movement disintegrated, so too did his mind... Hussey writes kindly about this chapter of Isou's life, without romanticising Isou's illness or naively criticising psychiatry..."—London Review of Books

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One of the most important avant-garde movements of postwar Paris was Lettrism, which crucially built an interest in the relationship between writing and image into projects in poetry, painting, and especially cinema. Highly influential, the Lettrists served as a bridge of sorts between the earlier works of the Dadaists and Surrealists and the later Conceptual artists.

Off-Screen Cinema is the first monograph in English of the Lettrists.

Offering a full portrait of the avant-garde scene of 1950s Paris, it focuses on the film works of key Lettrist figures like Gil J Wolman, Maurice Lemaître, François Dufrêne, and especially the movement's founder, Isidore Isou, a Romanian immigrant whose "discrepant editing" deliberately uncoupled image and sound. Through Cabañas's history, we see not only the full scope of the Lettrist project, but also its clear influence on Situationism, the French New Wave, the New Realists, as well as American filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage.

This is a monograph in English on the Lettrists.

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Scarce and wonderful, out-of-print, comprehensive monographic catalogue on François Dufrêne (1930 – 1982), the French Nouveau realist visual artist, Lettrist and Ultra-Lettrist poet. Francois Dufrene joined Isidore Isou and the Lettrist movement in 1946 and continued to participate until 1964. Dufrene's talent was evident in the fact that he was already a member of the Lettrist Group at only 16 years old. He is primarily known as a pioneer in sound poetry and for his use of décollage within Nouveau réalisme, the art group he helped found in 1960 with friends Pierre Restany, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Arman, Hains and Villeglé. He is considered one of the important artists in that Neo-Dada art movement. Published in 2007 on the occasion of a major survey exhibition at Museu Serralve, Porto, this volume is profusely illustrated in colour and b/w with Dufrêne's works alongside many texts in English, Portuguese, French by Alain Jouffroy, Guy Schraenen, Joao Fernandes, and others, accompanying audio CD of sound works.

Very Good copy of book and CD.

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Ancient Mesopotamia, the Zodiac, and the land of the dead feature in this wildly surrealistic adventure story—Leonora Carrington's revolutionary second novel, long out of print.

The Stone Door is an omen, an incantation, and an adventure story rolled into one. Built in layers like a puzzle box, it is the tale of two people, of love and the Zodiac and the Kabbalah, of Transylvania and Mesopotamia converging at the Caucasus, of a mad Hungarian King named Böles Kilary and of a woman's discovery of an initiatory code that leads to a Cyclopean obstacle, to love, self and awareness, to the great stone door of Kescke and beyond.

Written at the end of World War II but not published until 1977 and long unavailable, The Stone Door is at once a celebration of the union of the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington and her husband, the Hungarian-born photographer Chiki Weisz, and an argument for the unification of the male and the female as a means of liberating the human race.

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An audacious, unabashedly transgressive memoir about two acts of escape by the author: rebelling aginst his family to seek a freer life in Paris and then, later, from the French military during the Algerian War.

Translated by Peter Behrman De Sinéty.

Pierre Guyotat was one of the most radical and uncompromising writers of the twentieth century, a literary successor to Sade, Bataille, and Genet whose visceral fictions and bold experiments with language have earned him cult status in France and abroad. Idiocy is his searing memoir of coming of age between 1958 and 1962, when he discovered his burgeoning sexuality and aptitude for rebellion—first against his father, whom he escaped to become a writer in Paris, then against the French military authorities as a conscript in the Algerian War.

Guyotat recounts the atrocities he witnessed first-hand in Algeria, as well as his own harrowing experience of being arrested for inciting desertion and imprisoned in a hole in the ground for three months. Guyotat wields his language like a scalpel, merciless in his exploration of human brutality in all its horrible, granular detail. Yet his generous depictions of camaraderie and friendship are just as unflinching.

The winner of the 2018 Prix Médicis, Idiocy is an incisive condemnation of violence and colonialism, and a bracing, hallucinatory late masterpiece from a writer hailed by Edmund White as “one of the few geniuses of our day.”

"Pierre Guyotat is the prince of prose."—Alain Badiou

"Guyotat renders the obscene violence of colonialism with unflinching honesty. His writing is gorgeous, brutally poetic without pretense or over-aestheticization. 'Insects scuttle between my fingers like words that escape me.' I didn't just read Idiocy, I was captured by it. It is a book that throws off your blinders, that changes you."—Dodie Bellamy

"Idiocy, as a work of memoir, maintains an uncanny sobriety throughout its reportage, indulgent in its poetical description . . . As a medium intended to survey war and warmongering, Idiocy becomes more than a simple pulling back of the curtain of atrocity; it would, instead, pull down the whole damned rigging, lights, cameras, and all."—Blake Butler

"[Guyotat is] anti-authoritarian, pushing the French language to its limits of meaning, and fascinated by the filth of fighting, illness, and recovery. . . An ugly, terrifying memoir of childhood, war, and violation, rendered into nightmarish English."—Kirkus Reviews
About the Author

Pierre Guyotat (1940-2020) was a French writer. In 1960, he was conscripted into the Algerian War, the inhumanity of which would become a recurring theme throughout his oeuvre. He is the author of Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers, Eden, Eden, Eden, which was banned in France upon its publication in 1970, and Coma, which won the 2006 Prix Décembre. In 2018, he was awarded the Prix Femina spécial for lifetime achievement.

Peter Behrman de Sinéty grew up in Maine and lives in Paris. He was lecteur d'anglais at the École Normale Supérieure, where he has taught since 2011. His translations include Éric Chevillard's QWERTY Invectives and Maël Renouard's Fragments of an Infinite Memory.

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Selected cassette tape and vinyl artwork from experimental electronic music of the 1980s. Touching on industrial, noise, new wave, minimal, drone, sound art, ambient and more. A visual archive of the xerox scanned imagery, disorderly type and hand illustration used to present the decade's boundary-pushing music and abstract compositions.

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The New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s opened two potential paths for French cinema to follow. The first would turn its youthful exuberance into a reproducible style, while the other would take up its principles of experimentation and self-reflexivity in new directions, and through an increasingly political and ethical interrogation of the image. This book explores the potentialities of that second path, with eight essays on films of the post-New Wave moment, focussed upon the principle of critical experimentation in particular—critique through experimentation, and experimentation through critique—that these films put at stake, through their difficult inheritance of the New Wave and the history of the image.

“From the metaphysics of Le Pont du Nord and the relation of Racine to L’Amour fou to the rich diversity of Marc’o’s career, not to mention the challenges of Jeanne Dielman, this is a compact illustration of the unrecognised brilliance and sheer liveliness of the best Australian film criticism.”—Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic at the Chicago Reader 1987–2008

“French filmmakers who emerged in the ’50s and ’60s (including Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda) collectively proclaimed in 1967 that they were, in every sense, “far from Vietnam.” In Australia today, a like-minded group of film scholars and critics declare that they are geographically far from France, and especially far in time from its glorious Nouvelle Vague. So, their curiosity and intellectual inventiveness fastens, by identification, on the intriguingly “belated” phenomenon of post-New Wave French cinema: that loosely bundled generation including Chantal Akerman, Marc’o, Maurice Pialat, and Patrick Deval—without forgetting the post-68 experiments of Varda, Jacques Rivette, and François Truffaut—who forcefully questioned the limits of cinema and opened new ways of thinking and feeling. Far from the Masters is an indispensable assemblage of superbly written, inquisitive, and trail-blazing essays.”—Adrian Martin, Australian film critic far from Australia

“What does it mean to come “after”? Far from the Masters is a book marked by two belated arrivals: first, the generation of French filmmakers who emerged in the wake of the nouvelle vague, figures like Maurice Pialat, who extended and contested the work of his still better-known precursors; and second, a group of Australian critics who, two decades into the twenty-first century, took a collective look back at that earlier moment. Out of this temporal décalage, new perspectives open—not only on some of the most important French filmmakers of the era, but equally on a present moment of cinephilic community.”—Erika Balsom, Reader in Film Studies at King’s College, London

With texts by Conall Cash, Jake Wilson, Miranda Stanyon, Jack Keenan, Philippa Hawker, Scott Robinson, Michelle Huang, Corey P. Cribb

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1969 printing of the 1966 publication of Godard's Alphaville photo-illustrated screenplay, by the great Lorrimer of London. Translated by Peter Whitehead and with an introduction by Richard Roud. Alphaville (subtitled Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution, "A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution"), Godard's highly innovative 1965 dystopian science fiction / noir genre film was a highly innovative and ground-breaking classic of the French New Wave, starring Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina and Akim Tamiroff. There are no special props or futuristic sets: instead, the film was shot in real locations in Paris, the night-time streets of the capital becoming the streets of Alphaville. Expatriate American actor Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, a trenchcoat-wearing secret agent. Constantine had already played this or similar roles in dozens of previous films; the character was originally created by British crime novelist Peter Cheyney. However, in Alphaville, director Jean-Luc Godard moves Caution away from his usual twentieth-century setting and places him in a futuristic sci-fi dystopia, the technocratic dictatorship of Alphaville. Released in France on May 5, 1965, the film won the Golden Bear award of the 15th Berlin International Film Festival the same year and has remained one of the most influential films in modern cinema.

Good copy with general light wear/age, some stainging to inner boards.

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First and only edition of the Japanese Jean-Luc Godard "MADE IN U.S.A." film book. This photo souvenir book is printed on thick board pages and made up of full-colour stills from Godard's 1966 classic "MADE IN U.S.A.", starring Anna Karina, Jean-Pierre Léaud, László Szabó, Yves Afonso, and Marianne Faithfull. Includes text/dialogue fragments throughout in French; profiles on the actors, Godard, cinematographer Raoul Coutard, producer Georges de Beauregard; lyrics to Marianne Faithfull's featured "As Tears Go By"; comic strip; and other texts in Japanese and French.

A very special collectable Godard book.

"With its giddily complex noir plot and color-drenched widescreen images, Made in U.S.A was a final burst of exuberance from Jean-Luc Godard’s early sixties barrage of delirious movie-movies. Yet this chaotic crime thriller and acidly funny critique of consumerism—starring Anna Karina as the most brightly dressed private investigator in film history, searching for a former lover who might have been assassinated—also points toward the more political cinema that would come to define Godard. Featuring characters with names such as Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, David Goodis, and Doris Mizoguchi, and appearances by a slapstick Jean-Pierre Léaud and a sweetly singing Marianne Faithfull, this piece of pop art is like a Looney Tunes rendition of The Big Sleep gone New Wave."

Very Good copy with some faint foxing/dustiness to pages.

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