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:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
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.
1994 / 2000, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 13.9 x 20.9 cm
Published by
Avalon Travel Publishing / Chicago
$38.00 - In stock -
"An astonishment"—Dennis Cooper
"A daring, controversial, necessary book."—Lynne Tillman
This extravagantly imagined tale chronicles the rehabilitation of a teacher who has had a love affair with a twelve-year-old boy. While the man's crime was to mistake molestation for love, his cure will partake of the same confusion: to help and rehabilitate him, the police and the doctors subject the teacher to increasingly bizarre forms of therapy. Called "an astonishment" by Dennis Cooper, The Sex Offender weds compelling mystery with comedy, satire, and politics.
"Equal parts Kafka, Burgess, and Brazil, Matthew Stadler's novel is beautifully morbid. The eloquent, florid prose in which Mr. Uh Uh describes his passions gives him an overwrought nobility.... Stadler's narrative weaves in and out of humor, grandiosity, fantasy, and sentiment with rare grace and cleverness."—The Village Voice
Matthew Stadler (born 1959) is an American author who has written six novels and received several awards. Stadler has compiled four anthologies about literature, city life and public life. His essays, which have been published in magazines and museum catalogs, focus on architecture, urban planning and sprawl. He was the literary editor of Nest magazine and books editor for The Stranger, a fledgling weekly newspaper in Seattle in the early-mid 1990s, bringing accomplished poets and prose writers such as Eileen Myles, Charles D'Ambrosio, Lisa Robertson, Kevin Killian, Bruce Benderson, and Stacey Levine to write for the paper. He co-founded Publication Studio, an independent publisher that prints by demand and binds books by hand in a Portland, Oregon storefront, "creating original work with artists and writers we admire, books that both respond to the conversation of the moment and can endure. We attend to the social life of the book, cultivating a public that cares and is engaged." The publisher has created a global network of studios — among the writers and artists published by Publication Studio are Dodie Bellamy, Dan Graham, Robert Walser, Nate Lippens, Lawrence Rinder, Walter Benjamin, Ari Marcopoulos, Lisa Robertson, Arthur Jafa, Alex Da Corte, Lisa Radon, Kevin Killian, Sylvia Wynter, W. E. B. Du Bois, Elizabeth Jaeger, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Jill Magid, Alex Mackin Dolan, Obe Alkema, Pedro Reyes, Travis Jeppesen, and so many more.
2015, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 22.8 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Wave / Washington
$42.00 - Out of stock
Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners gathers work by one of the most significant poets of the Black Mountain and Beat generation. Includes poems that have previously never been published, the full text of the 1958 edition of his influential The Hotel Wentley Poems, plus poems from rare sources, facsimiles, notes, and collages by Wieners. An invaluable collection for new and old fans.
"There is no doubt in my mind or in anyone's mind who knows these poems well that they are major American poetry and will be in anthologies for one hundred years, I mean that good."—Allen Ginsberg
"A graceful rigor seems to be Wieners' natural mode; we feel the force of deliberation in his most free forms—he is never casual. The grace is miraculous, for he aims at intensities, by orders that shape and then restrict feeling to the ardent."—Robert Duncan
"What moves us is not the darkness of the world in which the poems were written by the pity and terror and joy that is beauty in the poems themselves. . . . In Wieners the glamor is in the word-music itself."—Denise Levertov
"In his hands, poems are at once “wound,” “tomb,” and “bomb”—sites of injury, elegy, and threat."—Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
"His poetry was unburdened and unbuoyed, free, breathless, reckless, and jarringly, frankly queer — wicking graceful elegance from grim exile."—Michael Andor Brodeur, Boston Globe
John Wieners (1934–2002) was a founding member of the "New American" poetry that flourished in America after the Second World War. Upon graduating from Boston College in 1954, Wieners enrolled in the final class of Black Mountain College. Following Black Mountain's closure in 1956, he founded the small magazine Measure (1957–1962) and embarked on a peripatetic life, participating in poetry communities in Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Buffalo throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, before settling at 44 Joy Street in Boston in 1972. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, three one-act plays, and numerous broadsides, pamphlets, uncollected poems, and journals. Robert Creeley described Wieners as "the greatest poet of emotion" of their time.
2010, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 13.3 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Wave / Washington
$38.00 - In stock -
Winner of the 2009 Gil Ott Book Award, this expanded edition of The Book of Frank features additional "Frank" poems and an essay by Eileen Myles.
Praised by poet Anne Waldman as a "voyeuresque surreal portrait," The Book of Frank is also, in the words of poet-critic Alan Gilbert, a "candid portrayal of human cruelty and its resultant fantasies of escape."
CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021). The Book of Frank is now available in nine different languages. Other titles include While Standing in Line for Death, ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tic for the Future Wilderness, and A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics. They received a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Magazine Book Award. With Robert Dewhurst and Joshua Beckman, they co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners. In 2022 Augusto Cascales made a film of their play The Obituary Show. They recently had their first solo exhibition at Fluent Gallery in Santander, Spain, titled 13 Moons: Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. They teach at Columbia University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam.
2012, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 20.4 x 26.7 cm
Published by
Wave / Washington
$38.00 - Out of stock
"He's a poet for our time like Ginsberg was for his." - Eileen Myles
"Conrad's work shows us that the body itself is the first source of alienation and estrangement from the self, and is thus the true subject of poetry. Only by engaging this body ... can we achieve transport." - Bookforum
What is the best Love you've ever had in this world? Be quiet while thinking about that Love. If someone comes along and starts talking, quietly shoo them away, you're busy, you're a poet with a penny in your mouth...Now get your pen and paper and write about POVERTY, write line after line about starvation and deprivation from the voice of one who has been Loved in this world.
CAConrad's (Soma)tic exercises desire to literally crack open existence as we know it. A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon is an essential how-to book for anyone interested in breaking through their perceived limitations to become a more politically and physically engaged writer. Incorporating unorthodox steps in the writing process, these twenty-seven exercises and their corresponding poems confirm Conrad's unwavering belief in poetry as a necessary practice for being.
CAConrad, a 2011 PEW Fellow in the Arts, is the author of five books of poetry, including The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010/Chax Press, 2009). He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
As New copy with small tear to bottom back cover and last page, bumped corner otherwise perfect. Discounted accordingly.
2022, English
Softcover, 136 pages, 16.5 x 22.8 cm
Published by
Wave / Washington
$38.00 - In stock -
Former United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in the New York Times, “CAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious.” The poems in AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration reach out from a (Soma)tic poetry ritual where CA flooded their body with the field recordings of recently extinct animals. Foundational here are the memories of loved ones who died of AIDS, the daily struggle of existing through the Corona Virus pandemic, and the effort to arrive at a new way of falling in love with the world as it is, not as it was.
"CAConrad always argues (from the inside of their poems) for a poetry of radical inclusivity while keeping a very queer shoulder to the wheel. Their kind of queerness strikes me as nonpolarizing, not intentionally but because of the fullness of their exposition, a kind of gigantism that seems to me to be most deeply informed by love, and a tenderness for the ravages and tumult of existence." —Eileen Myles
"At a time when I don't always know how to make sense of what's going on, CAConrad serves as a cleareyed seer."—Jillian Steinhauer, New York Times
2014, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 19.1 x 25.2 cm
Published by
Wave / Washington
$42.00 - Out of stock
This series of 23 new (Soma)tic poetry rituals and resulting poems by CAConrad create what we can refer to as an “extreme present” set to reveal the creative viability of everything around us. Poetry rituals such as riding escalators and showing photographs of himself to strangers asking, “Excuse me, have you seen this person?” In another he pollinates flowers for security cameras, exclaiming, “I’M A POLLINATOR, I’M A POLLINATOR!” One was written with a ghost, another by stargazing to build his own constellations. (Soma)tic rituals are a practice of unorthodox steps aimed at breaking us out of the quotidian and into a more political and physical spiritual consciousness of The New Wilderness.
2017, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 24.8 x 25.4 cm
Published by
Wave / Washington
$42.00 - Out of stock
Winner of the 30th Annual Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry
"From these rituals come notes; from those notes come poems; and from those poems comes not just a view into his process, but an entrance into another present." Boston Globe
After his boyfriend Earth's murder, CAConrad was looking for a (Soma)tic poetry ritual to overcome his depression. This new book of eighteen rituals and their resulting poems contains that success, along with other political actions and exercises that testify to poetry's ability to reconnect us and help put an end to our alienation from the planet.
unfastened
in the backseat a
portion of the music is
mucus flying into stillness
at what point do we submit
to the authority of flowers
at what point after it enters
the mouth is it no longer in the
mouth but the throat the colon
making sumptuous death of the world
this is what crossing the line gains
no need to pretend we
are the people we
want to be in
the next life
bone under
tongue drives
taste of snow to metal
CAConrad is the author of ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, and The Book of Frank, as well as several other books of poetry and essays. Most recently, he has co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners. A 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, he also conducts workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics.
2016, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
Part springtime journal ("why are there thorns?"), Works and Days meditates on the first wasps and chipmunks of the season, times' passage, grackle hearts, and dandelions, while also collecting dozens of poems considering the Catholic Church, Sir Thomas Browne, "Go Away" welcome mats, books, floods ("never of dollar money"), the invention of words, local politics, friendships, property development, dogs, and Hesiod. Every page delights. As the poet herself notes: "My name is Bernadette Mayer, sometimes / I am at the head of my class."
1999, English
Softcover, 380 pages, 15.3 x 23.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Bloomsbury Academic / London
$45.00 - In stock -
Born in 1899, Alfred Hitchcock directed 57 films in a fifty year career that spanned the history of the moving image, from the silent era to stereo sound, black-and white to Technicolor, widescreen to television, and from Europe to Hollywood. His oeuvre has so comprehensively engaged the attentions of scholars of all critical persuasions that the study of his films is synonymous with the study of the art of cinema itself.
Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays displays the range and breadth of Hitchcock scholarship and assesses the significance of his singular body of work. The book engages with Hitchcock's characteristic formal and aesthetic preoccupations, his relationship with modernism and politics and his engagement with romance and sexuality.
This volume of essays draws on the best of current Hitchcock criticism and opens up new directions for Hitchcock scholarship.
Fine—As New copy. First edition.
1995, English / Italian
Softcover, 16 pages, 25 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Studio Castoli / Milan
$65.00 - In stock -
Very scarce catalogue from Milan published on the occasion of a two-person exhibition of works by Italian artists Lucio Fontana and Pino Pascali, held at Studio Castoli in 1995. Introductory text by Italian art critic Angela Vettese, with colour and b/w reproductions of works by each artist.
Very Good copy.
1969, Italian
Softcover, 84 pages, 24 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
De Luca Editori D'arte / Rome
$300.00 - Out of stock
Extremely rare catalogue of Pino Pascali to accompany the first retrospective exhibition of his work, organized by Palma Bucarelli, 7 months after the tragic death of the artist on 11 September 1968. Presented at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Roma, Valle Giulia 31 maggio - 27 giugno 1969, this accompanying catalogue is illustrated with 60 monochrome pages of Pascali's work and portraits of the artist himself, biography and full exhibition history, accompanied by text by curator and museum director Palma Bucarelli. A stunning and historical publication.
Pino Pascali (b. Bari, 1935—1968), in the late 1950s, whilst working as a set designer, graphic designer, scriptwriter, and creative writer for television advertising, met fellow Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis. In 1965, Pascali first exhibited his “fake sculptures,” a series of shaped-canvases that first appear to be solid sculptures but are actually paintings presenting abstract forms that suggest animals, plants and landscapes. During his brief activity as a sculptor at the height of Pop Art, Pascali, considered a key artist of the Arte Povera movement, produced no more than 149 works, many of which are true icons of twentieth-century Italian art. The day of his untimely death at the age of 32, following a tragic motorcycle accident on 11 September 1968, coincided with the moment of his greatest public recognition (his presentation at the Venice Biennale and the posthumous awarding of the Sculpture Grand Prix). His short, enigmatic career has served as an important, almost mythological, contribution to post-war European art.
Palma Bucarelli (1910—1998) was an Italian art historian, curator and administrator, mostly known for her tenure as director of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (GNAM) in Rome from 1942—1975.
Very Good copy with some light handling wear/ageing.
1969, French
Softcover, 96 pages, 20.5 cm x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Musée des Arts Decoratifs / Paris
$150.00 - Out of stock
Beautiful, scarce catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition "Ceroli Kounellis Marotta Pascali : 4 Artistes Italiens Plus Que Nature" at Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, in 1969.
"Four of the most representative artists of the last season of Italian art, four artists in full activity except, unfortunately, Pino Pascali, who died last year. Despite the brevity of his career, Pascali has given an international contribution to the artistic research of today. It is arbitrary to look for traits and points in common among these artists, even if they are more or less the same trend, so I preferred to draw separate portraits ... " (M. Calvesi, 1969)
Each artist has a profusely illustrated section dedicated to their work, each divided by printed wax title pages, introduced (in French) by Maurizio Calvesi, and closed with an exhibition history and list of works. Blakc and white photography throughout by Gianni Berengo Gardin, Ugo Mulas, Adele Macchi, Claudio Abate, Andrea Taverna, and silkscreened covers.
Included in ARTE POVERA 1966-1980. LIBRI E DOCUMENTI / BOOKS AND DOCUMENTS, the critical catalogue raisonné of artist's books from the Arte Povera movement 1966-1980, compiled by Giorgio Maffei.
2019, English
Hardcover, 516 pages, 21 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Fondazione Prada / Venice
$240.00 - Out of stock
The ultimate (now out-of-print) Jannis Kounellis book. Published by Fondazione Prada to accompany the exhibition 'Jannis Kounellis', curated by Germano Celant, the major retrospective in Venice dedicated to the artist. Developed in collaboration with Archivio Kounellis, the exhibit brings together more than 60 works from 1959 to 2015, from both Italian and international museums, as well as from important private collections both in Italy and abroad. This comprehensive hardcover catalogue explores the artistic and exhibition history of Jannis Kounellis (Piraeus 1936 - Rome 2017), a Greek Italian artist and key figure associated with Arte Povera, a movement theorized by curator Germano Celant as a major shift from work on flat surfaces to installations. In 1967, Kounellis installed "live birds in cages along with rose-shaped, cloth cut-outs pinned to canvas" alongside his painting. Through this shift in his work, "Kounellis was more interested in anarchical freedom from linguistic norms and conventional materials. The space of the gallery and the exhibition site in general were transformed into a stage where real life and fiction could join in a suspension of disbelief." Viewers became part of the scene of these living natural sources of energy within the gallery space. He continued his involvement with live animals later in 1969, when he exhibited twelve living horses, as if they were cars, in the Galleria l'Attico's new location in an old garage in Via Beccaria. Kounellis introduced recurring materials such as propane torches, smoke, coal, meat, ground coffee, lead, and found wooden objects into his installations, which looked beyond the gallery environment to historical (mostly industrial) sites. Lavishly illustrated throughout with full bleed large installation photographs, individual works, performances, details, an illustrated bibliographic history, introductory essay by Germano Celant, foreword by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli, and more, this volume forms a valuable, intimate resource on Kounellis.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 688 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by
Grove Press / New York
$65.00 - Out of stock
An utterly unique collection composed by the award-winning poet and writer, a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks to up-and-coming writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word "pathetic"
"Literature is pathetic." So claims Eileen Myles in their bold and bracing introduction to Pathetic Literature, an exuberant collection of pieces ranging from poetry to theater to prose to something in between, all of which explore those so-called "pathetic" or sensitive feelings around which lives are built and revolutions are incited.
Myles first reclaimed the word for a seminar they taught at the University of California San Diego, rescuing it from the derision into which it had slipped and restoring its original meaning of inspiring emotion or feeling, from the Ancient Greek rhetorical method pathos. Their reinvention of "pathetic" formed the bedrock for this anthology, which includes a breathtaking 106 contributors, encompassing titans of global literature like Robert Walser, Jorge Luis Borges, Rumi, and Gwendolyn Brooks, queer icons and revolutionaries like Dodie Bellamy, Samuel R. Delany, and Bob Flanagan, as well as the invigorating newness and excitement of writers on the rise, including Nicole Wallace, Precious Okoyomon, and Will Farris. Creative nonfiction by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jack Halberstam, and Porochista Khakpour rubs shoulders with poetry by Natalie Diaz, Victoria Chang, Lucille Clifton, and Ariana Reines, all joined by prose from Chester Himes, Djuna Barnes, Chris Kraus, and Qiu Miaojin, among so many others. The result is a matchless anthology that is as much an ongoing dialogue as an essential compendium of queer, revolutionary, joyful, and always moving literature.
From confrontations with suffering, embarrassment, and disquiet, to the comforts and consolations of finding one's familiar double in a poem, Pathetic Literature is a swarming taxonomy of ways to think differently and live pathetically on a polarized and fearful planet.
Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, Gwendolyn Brooks, The Friend, Kevin Killian, Ama Birch, Andrea Dworkin, Ariana Reines, Bob Flanagan, Baha' Ebdeir, Bob Kaufman, Brandon Shimoda, Bruce Benderson, CAConrad, Camille Roy, Can Xue, Carmen Boullosa, Chantal Akerman, Charles Bernstein, Chester Himes, Chris Kraus, Bas Jan Ader, Dana Ward, Dara Barrois/Dixon, Dennis Cooper, Dodie Bellamy, Djuna Barnes, essa may ranapiri, Etel Adnan, Fanny Howe, Fred Moten, Gail Scott, Franz Kafka, Georg Büchner, J. R. Ackerley, Jack Halberstam, James Schuyler, Frank B. Wilderson III, James Welch, Jerome Sala, Joe Proulx, Joan Larkin, Joe Westmoreland, Jocelyn Saidenberg, The Cyborg Jillian Weise, John Wieners, Jorge Luis Borges, Judy Grahn, Justin Torres, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Andrea Abi-Karam, Kathy Acker, Layli Long Soldier, Keith Waldrop, Kim Hyesoon, Kristín Ómarsdóttir, Laura Henriksen, Laurence Sterne, Lawrence Braithwaite, Laurie Weeks, Lucille Clifton, Lynne Tillman, Maan Abu Taleb, Maggie Nelson, Marcella Durand, Matthew Stadler, Michael McClure, Michelle Tea, Mira Gonzalez, Morgan Võ, Moyra Davey, Natalie Diaz, Nate Lippens, Akilah Oliver, Porochista Khakpour, Nicole Wallace, Qiu Miaojin, Rae Armantrout, Rebecca Brown, Renee Gladman, Feliu-Pettet, Robert Walser, Robert Glück, Sallie Fullerton, Rumi, Saidiya Hartman, Samuel Beckett, Samuel R. Delany, Sei Shōnagon, Sergio, Simone Weil, Simone White, Precious Okoyomon, Sophie Robinson, Sparrow, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Susie Timmons, Tim Johnson and Mark So, Valerie Solanas, Steve Carey, Violette Leduc, Tom Cole, Victoria Chang, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Victor Hugo, Will Farris...
2015, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
University Press of Mississippi / Jackson
$52.00 - Out of stock
Over nearly sixty years, Agnès Varda (b. 1928) has given interviews that are revealing not only of her work, but of her remarkably ambiguous status. She has been called the “Mother of the New Wave” but suffered for many years for never having been completely accepted by the cinematic establishment in France. Varda's first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), displayed many of the characteristics of the two later films that launched the New Wave, Truffaut's 400 Blows and Godard's Breathless. In a low-budget film, using (as yet) unknown actors and working entirely outside the prevailing studio system, Varda completely abandoned the “tradition of quality” that Truffaut was at that very time condemning in the pages of Cahiers du cinema. Her work, however, was not “discovered” until after Truffaut and Godard had broken onto the scene in 1959. Varda's next film, Cleo from 5 to 7, attracted considerably more attention and was selected as France's official entry for the Festival in Cannes. Ultimately, however, this film and her work for the next fifty years continued to be overshadowed by her more famous male friends, many of whom she mentored and advised.
Her films have finally earned recognition as deeply probing and fundamental to the growing awareness in France of women's issues and the role of women in the cinema. “I'm not philosophical,” she says, “not metaphysical. Feelings are the ground on which people can be led to think about things. I try to show everything that happens in such a way and ask questions so as to leave the viewers free to make their own judgments.” The panoply of interviews here emphasizes her core belief that “we never stop learning” and reveal the wealth of ways to answer her questions.
2019, English
Softcover, 243 pages, 15 x 22.5 cm
Published by
A Nos Amours / London
$52.00 - In stock -
Between 2013 and 2015, A Nos Amours presented in London a complete retrospective of the films of the celebrated film-maker Chantal Akerman, the only complete retrospective given to date. Rights and screening copies turn out to be widely scattered and incredibly difficult to access. The research needed to present this retrospective is offered in this book so that others may more easily follow suit.
Also included are the texts, journalism and blogging that was offered to the audience as a means to engage with film-works that are at once radical, wildly varied in style and content, and surprisingly often, on account of their rarity, little known. The book aims to be accurate and a reliable source of detailed information about the films. The book is intended to serve as an Akerman companion and a key reference work.
Many texts are included to provide invaluable insights, from the likes of Raymond Bellour, Richard Brody, Ivone Margulies, Marion Schmid and Ginette Vincendeau.
Laura Mulvey (whose phrase 'the male gaze' has revolutionised film theory) has written the foreword, surveying Akerman's achievement, making use of this book as an aide-mémoire for what stands as one of the astonishing bodies of work in all cinema:
"As a collage of writing of many different kinds, the Handbook crucially bears witness to the effect that Akerman has had on the film community, from her earliest movies until her last... The high quality of the texts included in the book are all a reminder of the way that her 'cinematic' qualities have advanced our understanding of film."
A Nos Amours was founded in London by Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts, to present screenings, events and art shows.
2005, English
Hardcover, 240 pages, 21.6 x 25.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Drawing Center / New York
Yale University Press / New Haven
$520.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this quickly out-of-print and highly sought after hardcover volume published by Yale in 2005 to accompany the major travelling exhibition, 3 x an Abstraction, presenting the extraordinary work of three important women artists whose innovative ideas and approaches to drawing had a significant impact on the history of modern abstraction. Hilma af Klint (Sweden, 1862-1944), Emma Kunz (Switzerland, 1892-1963) and Agnes Martin (Canada, b. 1912; U.S. citizenship 1950) approached geometric abstraction not as formalism, but as a means of structuring philosophical, scientific, and spiritual ideas. Using line, geometry and the grid, each of these artists created diagrammatic drawings of their exploration of complex belief systems and restorative practices. Noteworthy among the 150 illustrations in the volume are a large number of works by Hilma af Klint, reproduced here for the first time in a major publication; Emma Kunz's drawings, exhibited in the United States for the first time in 2005; and approximately 20 early works by Agnes Martin. The book also includes writings by each of the artists, an introduction by Catherine de Zegher, seven essays by distinguished contributors, and brief statements from five contemporary artists.
Exhibition schedule: The Drawing Center, New York City, 25 March to 21 May 2005; Santa Monica Museum of Art, 10 June to 13 August 2005; Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, Odense, Denmark, 14 October 2005 to 1 January 2006; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 24 January to 26 March 2006.
Catherine de Zegher is director of The Drawing Center. Hendel Teicher is an independent scholar and curator who publishes frequently on modern and contemporary art. Contributors include: Bracha Ettinger, Briony Fer, Elizabeth Finch, Adam Fuss, Rosalind Krauss, Birgit Pelzer, Griselda Pollock, Kathryn Tuma, Susan Klein, Richard Tuttle, Cecilia Vicuña, and Terry Winters.
Very Good copy with only light edge wear, light buckling from storage. A very important book that helped introduce the work of Emma Kunz and Hilma af Klint to English audiences.
2016, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket + CD), 232 pages, 22.9 x 29.2 cm
Published by
Silver Gate Inc. / Taxas
$115.00 - Out of stock
Years in the making, this definitive monograph presents nearly six decades of work by the pioneering San Francisco-based ceramic sculptor Ron Nagle (born 1939). The plates section features 51 sculptures made since 1958, all reproduced in full colour. Critical essays by Joel Selvin and David Pagel and a foreword by Dave Hickey offer diverse perspectives on Nagle's accomplishments as both an artist and a musician. An illustrated chronology provides an overview of his life and work, including his apprenticeship with ceramicist Peter Voulkos, his seminal role in San Francisco's psychedelic music scene, his sound design for the film The Exorcist, and his obsessive devotion to intimately scaled sculpture. Nagle's irrepressible personality comes through in the book's innovative design, which includes a jacket that unfolds into a poster of the artist dressed as his film hero Charlie Chan. Also included is a CD of 21 songs spanning Nagle's musical career, from the 1960s to the 2000s. An essential, comprehensive and intimate book on one of America's great contemporary sculptors.
2000, English
Softcover (staple-bound) + related invitation, 16 pages, 20 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Heide Museum of Modern Art / Victoria
$30.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Constructions in colour : the work of Yvonne Audette 1950s—1960s at Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2000, curated by Kelly Gellatly, with assistance from Ted Gott and Murray White. Published in an edition of 700 copies. Out-of-print. Heavily illustrated throughout with Audette's paintings in colour, accompanied by texts by Kelly Gellatly and Bruce James, plus biography, portraits, and list of works.
Bonus copy of invitation to coinciding solo retrospective exhibition at Lyttleton Gallery, North Melbourne, "Paintings 1950s—1990s, folded and inserted into catalogue.
Born in Sydney in 1930, Yvonne Audette is one of Australia’s most accomplished and dynamic abstract expressionist artists. She studied art under Henry Gibbons, Geoffrey Miller and John Passmore, Audette also modelled for Australian photographer’s Max Dupain and David Moore. At the age of 22 Audette travelled to America and was heavily influenced by it’s new abstract expressionism where she regularly mixed with Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson, and William de Kooning. In 1955 she travelled to Europe, establishing a studio in Florence and later, Milan, where she lived and worked, presenting numerous successful exhibitions, before returning to Australia in 1966 and has continued to work and exhibit, based in Melbourne.
VG copy.
2018, English
Softcover, 364 pages, 14 x 20 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$62.00 - In stock -
Isabelle Graw’s brilliant analysis of the exceptional position of painting in our increasingly digital economy combines a deep respect for the objects of study and those who make them with an impressive range of critical and theoretical insights. Along the way, The Love of Painting never loses sight of the medium’s dialectical relationship to the art world, the art market, and society at large. This is a lively, provocative, and persuasively argued book.
—Alexander Alberro, author of Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth-Century Latin American Art
It’s about time for a book declaring “the love of painting” to appear, afer the aridity of postmodernism’s announcement of painting’s demise. Isabelle Graw’s argument in favor of this love turns on what she terms “vitalistic fantasies”: the perception of artworks as “quasi subjects” saturated with the life of their creator. This notion of the work of art as a quasi subject relates directly to the philosopher Stanley Cavell’s consideration that “the possibility of fraudulence, and the experience of fraudulence, is endemic in the experience of contemporary art.” To understand this we must ask: Why do we relate to works of art in the same way we relate to people? The Love of Painting works on this question—and does so with success.
—Rosalind E. Krauss, author and University Professor at the Department of Art History, Columbia University
Painting seems to have lost its dominant position in the field of the arts. However, looking more closely at exhibited photographs, assemblages, installations, or performances, it is evident how the rhetorics of painting still remain omnipresent. Following the tradition of classical theories of painting based on exchanges with artists, Isabelle Graw’s The Love of Painting considers the art form not as something fixed, but as a visual and discursive material formation with the potential to fascinate owing to its ability to produce the fantasy of liveliness. Thus, painting is not restricted to the limits of its own frame, but possesses a specific potential that is located in its material and physical signs. Its value is grounded in its capacity to both reveal and mystify its conditions of production. Alongside in-depth analyses of the work of artists like Édouard Manet, Jutta Koether, Martin Kippenberger, Jana Euler, and Marcel Broodthaers, the book includes conversations with artists in which Graw’s insights are further discussed and put to the test.
Design by Surface
2006, French
Softcover (+ audio cd), 232 pages, 17 x 24 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Fondation Dubuffet / Paris
$100.00 - In stock -
First edition, out-of-print catalogue, the first book (+ CD) published by Cahiers de la Fondation Dubuffet to accompany a major exhibition tracing the "musical experiences" of Jean Dubuffet, curated by Sophie Duplaix for the Dubuffet Foundation, Paris.
Protean artist, Jean Dubuffet has always been interested in the world of music. His preoccupations with music echo the development of his discourse on the subversion of culture, sweeping away cultural acquisitions in favour of ever freer improvisation. It was with his interest in jazz in the 1940s that parallels between music and painting began to emerge, but it was not until the early 1960s that these theoretical parallels took shape in "musical experiences" which consisted of recording sessions taking advantage of the flexible handling of magnetic tape. Dubuffet links these experiments to the research he conducts on the pictorial plane. However, it was more than ten years later that he truly achieved, with Coucou Bazar, a vast "animated tableau" and the culmination of the "L'Hourloupe" cycle, the osmosis of which he had gradually established the principles.
The main body of the book, "An Anthology in Three Times" (175 pages) — three profusely illustrated chapters — is a selection of texts, letters, documents, presented by Sophie Duplaix — curator of the exhibition presented at the same time — allowing understand the context and the challenges of the musical creations of Jean Dubuffet.
An accompanying audio compact disc is offered with the book with 7 unpublished recordings by Jean Dubuffet, a selection commented on by the German musicologist, Andreas Wagner, in the chapter "A selection of unpublished works".
The work is completed by a comprehensive directory of the original tapes kept at the Dubuffet Foundation, a discography, a selective bibliography and a short biography of the artist.
"The musical experiences which occupied me for several months in 1961, then later again in 1974, aim at a total oblivion of all cultural musical conditioning. They aim at erasing all that has received until now the name of music and to start anew. The principles which form the basis of all traditional music are revoked, and therefore first of all the sounds of the scale, then rhythm and time. any clearly discernible melodic song.[.] A music therefore where speech is withdrawn from the singer expressing his affective or passionate moods, and restored to the cosmic rumors delivering their wild noise."—Jean Dubuffet.
Texts in French.
As New copy complete with audio CD.
2022, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 12.9 x 19.8 cm
Published by
And Other Stories / High Wycombe
$30.00 - Out of stock
First published in 1972, Ann Quin's fourth and final novel was a radical break from the introspective style she had developed in Three and Passages: a declaration of independence from all expectations.
Brashly experimental, ribald, and hilarious, Tripticks maps new territories for the novel - aspiring to a form of pop art via the drawings of the artist Carol Annand and anticipating the genre-busting work of Kathy Acker through collage and gory satire.
Splattering its pages with the story of a man being chased across a nightmarish America by his 'first X-wife' and her 'schoolboy gigolo', Tripticks was ground zero for the collision of punk energy with high style.
2021, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 19.8 x 13 cm
Published by
And Other Stories / High Wycombe
$28.00 - Out of stock
Introduction by Claire-Louise Bennett
A book of voices, landscapes and seasons, Ann Quin's newly republished novel mirrors the multiplicity of meanings of the very word 'passage'--of music, of time, and of life itself. A woman, accompanied by her lover, searches for her lost brother, who may have been a revolutionary, and who may have been tortured, imprisoned or killed. Roving through a Mediterranean landscape, they live out their entangled existences, reluctant to give up, afraid of the outcome.
Reflecting the schizophrenia of its characters, the novel splits into alternating passages, switching between the sister and her lover's perspective. The lover's passages are also fractured, taking the form of a diary with notes alongside the entries. An intricate system of repetition and relation builds across the passages. 'All seasons passed through before the pattern formed, collected in parts.'
Erotic and tense, in Quin's compelling third novel the author allowed her writing freer rein than before, and created a work ahead of its time: her most poetic, evocative and mysterious novel yet.
2019, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 91.8 x 13 cm
Published by
And Other Stories / High Wycombe
$28.00 - Out of stock
'A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father . . .'
So begins Ann Quin's madcap frolic with sinister undertones, her 1964 debut 'so staggeringly superior to most you'll never forget it' (The Guardian). Alistair Berg hears where his father, who has been absent from his life since his infancy, is living. Without revealing his identity, Berg takes a room next to the one where his father and father's mistress are lodging and he starts to plot his father's elimination. Seduction and violence follow, though not quite as Berg intends, with Quin lending the proceedings a delightful absurdist humour.
Anarchic, heady, dark, Berg is Quin's masterpiece, a classic of post-war avant-garde British writing, and now finally back in print after much demand.
Ann Quin (1936–1973) was a British writer noted for her experimental style. Born in Brighton, Sussex, in a family on the fringes of the working-class and lower-middle class, her father, former opera singer Nicholas Montague Quin, left the family, and she was raised by her mother Ann (née Reid) alone. Quin is associated with a loosely constituted circle of 'experimental' authors in Sixties Britain, headed by B. S. Johnson and including Stefan Themerson, Rayner Heppenstall, Alan Burns and Eva Figes, influenced by Samuel Beckett and recent French fiction (Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet). The author of Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972), she killed herself in 1973 at the age of 37.