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.
2022, English
Softcover, 108 pages, 14 x 19.1 cm
Published by
The Song Cave / New York
$42.00 - Out of stock
With mounting intensity extended across three sections of poems, Ben Estes' achingly personal second collection unfolds to reveal an uncertain past, present, and future that is by turns mysterious and beautiful. ABC MOONLIGHT contains poems that are filled with reflective awareness and subconsciously constructed dreams; a sweeping landscape of queer Midwestern loss and desire; and pairs of folded poems that question love, hope, and vulnerability in these harrowing times. Rather than prescribing answers, Estes offers the reader intimacy and open-handed, big-hearted consolation--Now to let something go / of myself, / without any need / to replace it
Ben Estes' new poems, here gathered together into numbered, cadenced and syncopated movements, trace themselves onto the reader's consciousness like a sort of extended, scorched earth sigh: Humans will / lose their purpose, ' it says. Phew.' Flood and fire focused, like the times they are written inside of, the poems' language drives straight towards, and eventually lands in, the telegraphic delivery of dreams, where loss and love are confused and finally remembered to be the same thing. The unexpectedness of fantasy mixed with the inevitability of memory is narrated by Estes from both before and after.—Matt Connors
Valéry says that the future is the most perceptible fraction of the present moment, but ABC MOONLIGHT gets us, as Devo says, jerkin' back'n' forth between what a mind once made up and the life to come. The writing here is a generous fusion of poetry and dreaming, one in which the poet-dreamer is ever cognizant of the collective as he plumbs his mind to find love and death in the American navel. If this book were a band, it would be called Ben Estes and Latent Destiny, and they'd play at your place every night.—Graham Foust
This poetry is snaily, somehow: both within and looking upon. It suggests we have to hide, but also plod on. And that is just how things feel, so often now. Ben Estes's new poems give me the feeling of life, aliveness, what it's like. There's apocalypse in ABC Moonlight but also tender, gorgeous wondering about human futures, wonder in both the forward-looking action sense (I wonder what will happen) and wonder in whatever is left of the Romantic address--awe and amazement. The line is magic again. The moon is babble.—Hannah Brooks Motl
2021, English
Softcover, 140 pages, 14 x 19.3 cm
Published by
The Song Cave / New York
$42.00 - In stock -
Unlike anything we've ever seen or published, Listen My Friend, This Is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night is a book of wonder in which poet Cody-Rose Clevidence layers the language of information with the language of the heart, constantly locating the connections between attention and perception. On each page local and global concerns combine in an effort to reveal what it’s like to live right now, during a pandemic in a broken world. With its uncategorizable form, somewhere between an essay and a prose poem, Clevidence mixes anthropology, poetry, autobiography, history, psychology, and philosophy, with subject matter ranging from agriculture, gender, justice, queerness, loneliness, pollution, space, guns, moths, family, grief, longing—it’s hard to name a subject relevant to our time that isn’t in this book. Clevidence’s deft movement between facts and feelings is immediate from the first page, with an inquisitive and searching voice stretched over one long, never-breaking block of prose, a catalogue that becomes revelatory by the end, allowing readers to imagine new ways of processing their own world. — The Song Cave
Cody-Rose Clevidence is the author of BEAST FEAST (2014) and Flung/Throne (2018), both from Ahsahta Press, and Aux Arc / Trypt Ich (forthcoming from Nightboat) as well as several handsome chapbooks (flowers and cream, NION, garden door press, Auric). They live in the Arkansas Ozarks with their medium sized but lion-hearted dog, Birdie.
2018, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 12.7 x 19.5 cm
Published by
Fitzcarraldo Editions / London
$36.00 - Out of stock
Translated for the first time into English, cult German author Rainald Goetz's debut novel Insane draws upon his clinical psychiatric experience to paint a portrait of the asylum as a total institution. We follow a young psychiatrist, Dr Raspe, who enters the profession dreaming of revolutionising its methods. Confronted by day-to-day practices and the reality of life in the psychiatric hospital, Raspe begins to fray at the edges. The very concept of madness is called into question in a brutal portrayal of patients and psychiatrists and the various treatments administered, from psychotherapy to electroshock therapy. What is madness? And who is truly mad? Diving headlong into a terrifying and oppressive world, Insane is a veritable journey into the madhouse by one of Germany's most prominent and contentious authors.
Translated by Adrian Nathan West.
Rainald Goetz, born in 1954 in Munich, studied History and Medicine in Munich and obtained a doctoral degree in both subjects. He briefly worked as a doctor, but quit this profession for the sake of literature in his early thirties. His first novel, Insane, was published in 1983. In 1998, Goetz wrote the internet diary ‘Rubbish for Everyone’, probably the first literary blog in Germany, with entries on the world of media and consumerism. It was published in book form in 1999 and together with Rave, Jeff Koons, Celebration and Deconspiration belongs to This Morning, his great history of the present. Goetz has been awarded numerous prizes, most notably the Georg Büchner Prize in 2015. He lives in Berlin.
2020, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 12.5 x 19.7 cm
Published by
Fitzcarraldo Editions / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
'Meet girls. Take drugs. Listen to music.' In Rave, cult German novelist Rainald Goetz takes a headlong dive into nineties techno culture. From the cathartic release on the dance floor to the intense conversations in corners of nightclubs and the after-parties in the light of dawn, this exhilarating, fragmentary novel captures the feeling of debauchery from within. Dazzling and intimate, Rave is an unapologetic embrace of nightlife from an author unafraid to lose himself in the subject of his work.
Translated by Adrian Nathan West
Rainald Goetz, born in 1954 in Munich, studied History and Medicine in Munich and obtained a doctoral degree in both subjects. He briefly worked as a doctor, but quit this profession for the sake of literature in his early thirties. His first novel, Insane, was published in 1983. In 1998, Goetz wrote the internet diary ‘Rubbish for Everyone’, probably the first literary blog in Germany, with entries on the world of media and consumerism. It was published in book form in 1999 and together with Rave, Jeff Koons, Celebration and Deconspiration belongs to This Morning, his great history of the present. Goetz has been awarded numerous prizes, most notably the Georg Büchner Prize in 2015. He lives in Berlin.
2018, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 12.7 x 19.5 cm
Published by
Fitzcarraldo Editions / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
In a world that demands faith in progress and growth, Limbo is a companion for the stuck, the isolated, delayed, stranded and those in the dark. Fusing memoir with a meditation on creative block and a cultural history of limbo, Dan Fox considers the role that fallow periods and states of inbetween play in art and life. Limbo is an essay about getting by when you can’t get along, employing a cast of artists, ghosts and sailors – including the author’s older brother who, in 1985, left England for good to sail the world – to reflect on the creative, emotional and political consequences of being stuck, and its opposites. From the Headington Shark to radical behavioural experiments, from life aboard a container ship to Sun Ra’s cosmology, Limbo argues that there can be no growth without stagnancy, no movement without inactivity, and no progress without refusal.
Dan Fox is a writer, musician, and co-editor of frieze magazine, Europe’s foremost magazine of art and culture. He is based in New York.
2015, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 12.7 x 19.7 cm
Published by
Fitzcarraldo Editions / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
Suicide is everywhere. It haunts history and current events. It haunts our own networks of friends and family. The spectre of suicide looms large, but the topic is taboo because any meaningful discussion must at the very least consider that the answer to the question - 'is life worth living?' - might not be an emphatic yes; it might even be a stern no. Through a sweeping historical overview of suicide, a moving literary survey of famous suicide notes, and a psychological analysis of himself, Simon Critchley offers us an insight into what it means to possess the all too human gift and curse of being of being able to choose life or death.
'An elegant, erudite, and provocative book that asks us to reflect on suicide without moral judgment and panicked response. For Critchley, many reasons have been given for suicide, but what remains less remarked is how suicide distinguishes human creatures who grapple with melancholy in the face of losses that are too huge or enigmatic to fathom. Though there may be many reasons given within philosophy or popular culture, there are also some simple, insistent truths that do forestall such an action. In his view, "suicide saddens the past and abolishes the future," establishing a problematic framework for grasping the whole of a life. This text gestures toward what makes us forgetful about suicide: wondrous and recurring moments when we find ourselves "enduring in the here and now."' - Judith Butler
Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. His previous books include On Humour, The Book of Dead Philosophers, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, Impossible Objects, The Mattering of Matter (with Tom McCarthy), The Faith of the Faithless, Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine (with Jamieson Webster), Bowie, and Memory Theatre (published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2014). He is series moderator of 'The Stone', a philosophy column in the New York Times, to which he is a frequent contributor.
2018, English
Softcover, 400 pages, 12.5 x 19.7 cm
Published by
Fitzcarraldo Editions / London
$36.00 - In stock -
An essay with the reach and momentum of a novel, Kate Briggs's This Little Art is a genre-bending song for the practice of literary translation, offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking on reading, writing and living with the works of others. Taking her own experience of translating Roland Barthes's lecture notes as a starting point, the author threads various stories together to give us this portrait of translation as a compelling, complex and intensely relational activity. She recounts the story of Helen Lowe-Porter's translations of Thomas Mann, and their posthumous vilification. She writes about the loving relationship between Andre Gide and his translator Dorothy Bussy. She recalls how Robinson Crusoe laboriously made a table, for him for the first time, on an undeserted island. With This Little Art, a beautifully layered account of a subjective translating experience, Kate Briggs emerges as a truly remarkable writer: distinctive, wise, frank, funny and utterly original.
2018, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 12.7 x 19.6 cm
Published by
Fitzcarraldo Editions / London
$36.00 - Out of stock
This Young Monster is a hallucinatory celebration of artists who raise hell, transform their bodies, anger their elders and show their audience dark, disturbing things. What does it mean to be a freak? Why might we be wise to think of the present as a time of monstrosity? And how does the concept of the monster irradiate our thinking about queerness, disability, children and adolescents? From Twin Peaks to Leigh Bowery, Harmony Korine to Alice in Wonderland, This Young Monster gets high on a whole range of riotous art as its voice and form shape-shift, all in the name of dealing with the strange wonders of what Nabokov once called ‘monsterhood’. Ready or not, here they come...
‘My friend Bruce Hainley had told me about a new book coming out called “This Young Monster,” by Charlie Fox, but I had forgotten all about it until the publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions in London sent me this beautifully designed French-flap-style paperback original. Good God, where did this wise-beyond-his-years 25-year-old critic’s voice come from? His breath of proudly putrefied air is really something to behold. Finally, a new Parker Tyler is on the scene. Yep. Mr. Fox is the real thing.’
— John Waters, New York Times
‘This Young Monster is a hybrid animal in its own right, suturing biographical essays with stranger things: a “dumb fan letter” to the Beast, a meandering confession from Alice, bombed out after her many years in Wonderland. ...There’s not enough of this sort of playfulness and frank enthusiasm in art criticism.’
— Olivia Laing, New Statesman
‘Surreal and provocative, This Young Monster is both a poignant portrayal of life on the margins, and a joyful salute to a group of people who embraced their misfit status to lead beautifully unconventional lives.’
— Lucy Watson, Financial Times
‘A Rimbaud-like moonbeam in written form.’
— Bruce Hainley, author of Under the Sign of [sic]
‘Charlie Fox writes about scary and fabulous monsters, but he really writes about culture, which is the monster’s best and only escape. He is a dazzling writer, unbelievably erudite, and this book is a pleasure to read. Fox’s essays spin out across galaxies of knowledge. Domesticating the difficult, he invites us as his readers to become monsters as well.’
— Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick
‘A performance as original and audacious as any of the characters within – it crackles off the page, roaring and clawing its way into the world, powered by a brilliant vagabond electricity.’
— Chloe Aridjis, author of Book of Clouds
‘Charlie Fox is a ferociously gifted critic, whose prose, like a punk Walter Pater’s, attains pure flame. Fox’s sentences, never “matchy-matchy”, clash with orthodoxy; I love how extravagantly he leaps between different cultural climes, and how intemperately – and with what impressive erudition! – he pledges allegiance to perversity. Take This Young Monster with you to a desert island; his bons mots will supply you with all the protein you need.’
— Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Humiliation
‘Charlie Fox has a cardsharp’s diamond-eye for cataloguing the shapeshifting face of the sublime. His essays slither through skins over the warm flesh where so many mythic worlds and realities connect, from that of Twin Peaks to Diane Arbus, Fassbinder to Columbine, which somehow in their amassment ventriloquise a tender, enchanted endnotes for our black present. Put on this mask and breathe.’
— Blake Butler, author of 300,000,000
‘Central to the book is the corporeal home in which we find ourselves, the alien feelings that occur in an obstinate body and the forms of expression born of this contradiction. Fox writes as a surrealist conversationalist. At times the reader is invited to perform a role, somewhere between ventriloquist and historian, talking yourself into a beast.’
— Tank Magazine
‘[This Young Monster] is a paean to the queer transformative power of art.’
— Mònica Tomàs White, Totally Dublin
Charlie Fox is a writer who lives in London. He was born in 1991. His work has appeared in many publications including frieze, Cabinet, Sight & Sound, ArtReview, The Wire and The White Review.
2019, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 12.5 x 19.7 cm
Published by
Fitzcarraldo Editions / London
$36.00 - In stock -
Foreword by Frances Wilson
Boldly combining the highly personal with the brilliantly scholarly, In the Dark Room explores the question of how memory works emotionally and culturally. It is narrated through the prism of the author's experience of losing both his parents, his mother when he was sixteen, his father when he was on the cusp of adulthood and of trying, after a breakdown some years later, to piece things together. Drawing on the lessons of centuries of literature, philosophy and visual art, Dillon interprets the relics of his parents and of his childhood in a singularly original and arresting piece of writing reissued for the first time since its original publication in 2005, and including a new foreword from prize-winning biographer Frances Wilson.
‘It is the deeply emotive nature of his “journey into memory” that presents Dillon with such a formidable task. Yet he not only succeeds in translating his personal experience into a book of immense, disturbingly lucid insight, but in doing so has written a meditation on the nature of memory that, in many places, could compare to the most open-hearted writings of Roland Barthes. It is an amazing achievement in terms of prose style alone.’ — Michael Bracewell, Daily Telegraph
2022, English
Softcover, 480 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$44.00 - In stock -
Poetical biographies of six radical thinkers from Cagliostro to Restif de la Bretonne, by the leading figure of French Romanticism.
Translated, with an introduction, by Peter Valente
First published in French in 1852, on the heels of the previous year’s appearance of Journey to the Orient, The Illuminated was the first of a string of Gérard de Nerval’s major works in his final years that would culminate in his posthumous fantastical autobiography Aurélia in 1855. The “male” counterpart to his 1854 Les Filles de feu (Daughters of fire), The Illuminated collects six portraits of men whom Nerval mysteriously dubbed “precursors of socialism”—visionaries who together formed an alternative history of France and a backdrop to a mystical form of madness that Nerval ultimately claimed for himself.
Nerval here presents the reader with Raoul Spifame, a mad lawyer who imagined himself to be Henry II; the abbé de Bucquoy, a man who opposed the monarchy and whose amazing escapes suggested the possession of magical powers; Restif de la Bretonne, the eighteenth-century theosophist, sensualist, and pantheist who defined God in human terms rather than spiritual; the Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, the famous magus and alchemist; Jacques Cazotte, author of The Devil in Love who created a synthesis between hermetic ideas and Catholic thought; and Quintus Aucler, a lawyer who sought to revive paganism in the unstable world of French society in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of 1789.
An overlooked work by Nerval, The Illuminated combines the picturesque with pathos: a peculiar gallery of portraits that blur the boundaries between mysticism and mystification, and offers an outline for a communitarian rendition of the imagination.
Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855) was a writer, poet, and translator who wedded French and German Romanticism and transformed his research into mystic thought and his bouts of mental illness into such visionary works as the posthumously published Aurélia, or Dream and Life. After his suicide, his work would grow in stature and go on to influence everyone from Marcel Proust, André Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Michel Leiris.
2022, English
Softcover, 60 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$25.00 - In stock -
Originally published in 1930 in an edition of one hundred copies, Gertrude Stein's Dix Portraits pairs her singular literary style with original lithographs by Pablo Picasso and other artists in Stein's circle to create an exceptional artist book exploring written and visual portraiture.
Written between 1913 and 1929, revolutionary years in art history, Dix Portraits conveys the deep human engagement between an artist and her subject. The artist book unites Stein's ten portraits in prose with sketches by five artists: Pablo Picasso, Christian Berard, Eugene Berman, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Kristians Tonny. Utilizing the interplay between word and image, Stein's writing and the artists' images provide nuance and depth, balancing humor and sincerity.
With a new introduction by the writer Lynne Tillman, Dix Portraits is an unforgettable artistic collaboration. The subjects represented include Guillaume Apollinaire, Christian Berman, Eugene Berman, Bernard Fay, Georges Hugnet, Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie, Pavel Tchelitchew, Virgil Thomson, and Kristians Tonny. Originally printed in an edition of one hundred copies with the lithography, and now widely accessible for the first time, Dix Portraits captures Stein's legacy as a champion of artists and a pioneer of creativity.
About the Authors
The American writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was a major figure in the avant-garde visual arts and literary spheres in the period between World Wars I and II. Stein moved to Paris in 1903 where she met Alice B. Toklas, who would remain her companion for 40 years. Their home in Paris functioned as a salon for many now-celebrated writers and artists, who became close acquaintances. Stein is recognized for coining the term the "Lost Generation" to describe American authors living abroad, including Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. She and her brother Leo were among the first collectors, patrons, and supporters of many modern and cubist artists, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse. Her own work shares the goals of that of her contemporaries-for example, similar to cubist works, her writing shows a proclivity for simplification, repetition, and fragmentation. Revered and feared for both her literary and artistic expertise, Stein has, in no small part, shaped how we understand and appreciate modernism today. Stein's best-known books include The Making of Americans (1925), How to Write(1931), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), as well as her poetry collection Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems [1929-1933] (1956).
Lynne Tillman writes novels, including, most recently, Men and Apparitions (2018); short stories, including the collection The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories (2016); and essays and art and cultural criticism, including contributions to the catalogues Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (2018) and Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work (2017) and publications such as Aperture magazine. Her book-length autobiographical essay, Mothercare , is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in 2022. Tillman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation grant for arts writing. Tillman is a professor and writer in residence in the English department of The University at Albany. She lives in New York with the bass player David Hofstra.
2018, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 10.8 x 17.8 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$25.00 - In stock -
Published on the fiftieth anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s death, Duchamp’s Last Day offers a radical reading of the artist’s final hours.
Just moments after Duchamp died, his closest friend Man Ray took a photograph of him. His face is wan; his eyes are closed; he appears calm. Taking this image as a point of departure, Donald Shambroom begins to examine the surrounding context—the dinner with Man Ray and another friend, Robert Lebel, the night Duchamp died, the conversations about his own death at that dinner and elsewhere, and the larger question of whether this radical artist’s death can be read as an extension of his work.
Shambroom’s in-depth research into this final night, and his analysis of the photograph, feeds into larger questions about the very nature of artworks and authorship which Duchamp raised in his lifetime. In the case of this mysterious and once long-lost photograph, who is the author? Man Ray or Duchamp? Is it an artwork or merely a record? Has the artist himself turned into one of his own readymades?
A fascinating essay that is both intimate and steeped in art history, Duchamp’s Last Day is filled with intricate details from decades of research into this peculiar encounter between art, life, and death. Shambroom’s book is a wonderful study of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.
2020, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 10.8 x 17.8 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$25.00 - In stock -
In his 1989 book on Balthus - the storied and controversial artist who worked in Paris throughout the twentieth century - Guy Davenport gives one of the most nuanced, literary, and compelling readings of the work of this master. Reading it today highlights the change in perspectives on sexuality and nudity in art in the past thirty years.
Written over several years in his notebooks, Davenport's distinct reflections on Balthus's paintings try to explain why his work is so radical, and why it has so often come under scrutiny for its depiction of girls and women. Davenport throws the lens back on the viewer and asks: is it us or Balthus who reads sexuality into these paintings? For Davenport, the answer is clear: Balthus may indeed show us periods in adolescent development that are uncomfortable to view, but the eroticization exists primarily on the part of the viewer.
Arguing that Balthus's figures are erotic only if we make them so, and that their innocence is more present than anything pornographic in them, Davenport posits that the paintings hold up a mirror to our own perversities and force us, difficultly, to confront them. He writes, "The nearer an artist works to the erotic politics of his own culture, the more he gets its concerned attention. Gauguin's naked Polynesian girls, brown and remote, escape the scandal of Balthus's, although a Martian observer would not see the distinction." Davenport's critique helps us understand Balthus in our times-something we need more than ever as we crucially confront sexual politics in visual art.
2021, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
Virgina Woolf’s collection of writings on visual arts offer a whole new perspective on the revolutionary author.
Introduction by Claudia Tobin
Despite wide interest in Woolf’s writings, her circle, and her relationship with the visual arts, there is no accessible edition or selection of essays dedicated to her writings on art. This newest edition in David Zwirner Books’s ekphrasis series collects such essays including “Walter Sickert: A Conversation” (1934), “Pictures” (1925), and “Pictures and Portraits” (1920).
These formally inventive texts examine the connection between the literary writer and the visual artist and are innovative in their treatment of ideas about color and modern art as experienced in picture galleries. In these essays, Woolf looks at the complex and interdependent relationship between the artist and society. She also provides sharp and astute commentary on specific works of art and the relationship between art and writing.
An introduction by Claudia Tobin situates the essays within their cultural contexts.
2019, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
In The Critic as Artist, arguably the most complete exploration of his aesthetic thinking, and certainly the most entertaining, Oscar Wilde harnesses his famous wit to demolish the supposed boundary between art and criticism.
Introduction by Michael Bracewell.
Subtitled Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything, the essay takes the form of a leisurely dialogue between two characters: Ernest, who insists upon Wilde’s own belief in art’s freedom from societal mandates and values, and a quizzical Gilbert. With his playwright’s ear for dialogue, Wilde champions idleness and contemplation as prerequisites to artistic cultivation. Beyond the well-known dictum of art for art’s sake, Wilde’s originality lays argument for the equality of criticism and art. For him, criticism is not subject to the work of art, but can in fact precede it: the artist cannot create without engaging his or her critical faculties first. And, as Wilde writes, “To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own.”
The field of art and criticism should be open to the free play of the mind, but Wilde plays seriously, even prophetically. Writing in 1891, he foresaw that criticism would have an increasingly important role as the need to make sense of what we see increases with the complexities of modern life. It is only the fine perception and explication of beauty, Wilde suggests, that will allow us to create meaning, joy, empathy, and peace out of the chaos of facts and reality.
About the Author
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish poet and playwright who became one of London’s most popular writers in the early 1890s. Graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, and later Magdalen College, Oxford, Wilde embarked on a hugely successful lecture tour of America in 1882. Two early melodramatic tragedies, Vera; or, The Nihilists (1880) and The Duchess of Padua (1883), were written during these years, paving the way for later stage classics such as A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
Wilde also continued to write prose and criticism for popular daily newspapers such as The Pall Mall Gazette, as well as The Woman’s World, a Victorian women’s magazine that he edited between 1887 and 1889. Though often controversial, his flair for journalism and nose for scandal ensured these writings were widely read. His bold essays on aesthetic philosophy, published together in the collection Intentions (1891), were known for their wit and play with motif. Together with his plays and poems, these writings on art remain important and influential meditations of the nature of art criticism itself.
2021, English
Softcover, 88 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
Master sculptor Auguste Rodin’s illuminating writings on cathedrals in France are especially relevant and significant following the recent fire at Notre Dame.
In this volume, the writer and Rodin scholar Rachel Corbett selects excerpts from the famous sculptor’s book Cathedrals of France, first published in 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I. Cathedrals were central to the way Rodin thought about his art: he saw them as visual metaphors for the human figure, among the finest examples of craftsmanship known to modern man, and as a model for how to live and work-slowly, brick by brick.
Here, Corbett takes the fire at Notre Dame and the concerns over its restoration as an entry point in an exploration of Rodin’s cathedrals. Rodin adamantly opposed restoration, as he felt it often did more damage than the original injury. (Many of the cathedrals that Rodin looks at in his texts were, in fact, bombed during the war.) But while he rails against various restoration efforts as evidence that “we are letting our cathedrals die,” the book, with its tenderly rendered sketches and written portraits, is itself an attempt to preserve these cathedrals. The selection of texts in this volume is a reminder-as is the tragedy of Notre Dame-of why we ought to appreciate these feats of architecture, whether or not they are still standing today.
About the Authors
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) is known for an innovative sculptural style in which the traces of his working process are conserved in the works' final form. His career began in Brussels and later shifted to Paris, where he undertook public commissions that dovetailed with academic trends affirming clarity in sculptural language. These afforded him the support to pursue bolder aesthetic experimentation in private. Rodin's attention to partial figures and fragmentation and his privileging of emotive pathos over allegory are hallmarks of his groundbreaking and influential style.
Rachel Corbett is the author of You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin, which won the 2016 Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing. Her essays and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, New York magazine, and other publications. She wrote the introduction to Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Painter (2017), published by David Zwirner Books.
2000, German
Softcover, 55 pages, 24 × 28 cm
Published by
Galerie Ascan Crone / Hamburg
$65.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful early artist's book by German artist Kai Althoff, published in 2000 on the occasion of his solo exhibition at Galerie Ascan Crone, Hamburg, and long out-of-print. Illustrated throughout in colour and black and white with Althoff's paintings, drawings, installations and assorted imagery, alongside a text by German painter Michaela Eichwald.
As New.
Kai Althoff (born 1966 in Cologne) is a German visual artist and musician. Borrowing from moments of history, religious iconography, and counter-cultural movements, Althoff creates imaginary environments in which paintings, sculpture, drawing, video, and found objects commingle. Tapping a multitude of sources, from Germanic folk traditions to recent popular culture, from medieval and gothic religious imagery to early modern expressionism, Althoff’s characters inhabit imaginary worlds that serve as allegories for human experience and emotion. His image bank and painterly style also draw on the past, especially early-20th-century German Expressionism, reconfigured by introducing collaged technique.
1973, English
Softcover, 266 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
"A prodigious novel ... Stapledon's literary imagination was boundless"—Jorge Luis Borges
Star Maker is a science fiction novel by British writer and philosopher Olaf Stapledon, published in 1937. A lasting influence on successive generations of science fiction writers and on the physicist Freeman Dyson, this poetic, philosophical tale of one man's unexpected voyage through the universe is imbued with a sense of mystery and vast cosmic loneliness.
"The most wonderful novel I have ever read ... Star Maker remains light years ahead"—Brian Aldiss
"Probably the most powerful work of imagination ever written"—Arthur C. Clarke
"A unique genius"—Doris Lessing
William Olaf Stapledon (1886—1950) – known as Olaf Stapledon – was a British philosopher and author of science fiction. In 2014, he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Very Good copy of the 1977 Penguin edition.
2013, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 14.5 x 21.8 cm
Published by
Zero Books / UK
$29.00 - Out of stock
After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it will also show that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program capitalism in fact is anything but realistic.
2022, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 14.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
Reader is the first anthology to gather Constance DeJong’s diverse body of writing. Spanning from the 1980s to the present, the publication features eighteen works by DeJong, including out-of-print and previously unpublished fiction, as well as texts emanating from her new media sculptures, sound works, video works, and public art commissions.
An influential figure of the 1970s and ’80s downtown New York writing and performance scene, Constance DeJong has channeled time and language as mediums in her work for the last four decades, expanding the possibilities of narrative form and literary genre. From the earliest work collected here—a manuscript of DeJong’s 1982 prose text I.T.I.L.O.E.—to the digital project Nightwriters (2017-18), Reader assembles a range of experimental texts by the artist. The volume includes such works as the 2013 publication and performance, SpeakChamber and the script for Relatives (1988), a duet between a television and a performer made in collaboration with artist Tony Oursler. Never-before-published works including texts created for re-engineered vintage radios, aphorisms commissioned for a Times Square digital billboard, and transcripts for sound works originally installed along the Thames and Hudson rivers are also featured in the book.
Taken together, these works showcase how DeJong has helped define and push the boundaries of language in the visual and performing arts. The artist’s sustained exploration of language blurs the lines between many fields, and DeJong’s work has also had a long life in the literary world. In the late 1970s, she self-published the critically acclaimed novel Modern Love on her short-lived Standard Editions imprint. On the 40th anniversary of the novel’s original publication, the book was published in facsimile form by Primary Information and Ugly Duckling Presse, and has gone on to sell over 10,000 copies since its release in 2017.
Constance DeJong is a New York-based artist who has exhibited and performed internationally. Her work has been presented at the Renaissance Society, Chicago; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in New York at the Dia Art Foundation; The Kitchen, Thread Waxing Space, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1983 she composed the libretto for Satyagraha, the Philip Glass opera, which has been staged at opera houses worldwide, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York; the Netherlands National Opera, Rotterdam; and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York. She has permanent audio-text installations in Beacon, New York; London; and Seattle. DeJong has published several books of fiction, including her celebrated Modern Love (Standard Editions, 1977; Primary Information/Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), I.T.I.L.O.E. (Top Stories, 1983), and SpeakChamber (Bureau, 2013), and her work is included in the anthologies Up is Up, But So is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Science, 1974-1991 (NYU Press, 2006); Blasted Allegories (New Museum/MIT, 1987), and Wild History (Tanam Press, 1985).
2011, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 320 pages, 21.9 x 28.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$90.00 - In stock -
Adolf Menzel was one of the most important German artists of the 19th century, yet he is scarcely known outside his native land. In this study a leading art historian argues that Menzel deserves to be recognized not only as one of the greatest painters and draftsmen of his century but also as a master realist whose work engages profoundly with an extraordinary range of issues - artistic, scientific, philosophical and socio-political.
Michael Fried explores Menzel's large and fascinating oeuvre, and in so doing seeks to make the artist's achievement accessible to a wide audience. Fried compares Menzel's art with that of the 19th-century's two other great realist painters, Courbet and Eakins. Analyzing paintings, drawings and prints from all stages of Menzel's long career, he asserts that the distinctive quality of Menzel's realism is found in his concern with evoking the multi-sensory, fully-embodied relationships of persons with the universe of physical objects, tools and situations.
Fried establishes connections between Menzel's work and a broad array of extra-artistic contexts, among them the writings of the empathy theorists, Kierkegaard on reflection and the everyday, Helmholtz on vision, Fontane's "Effi Briest", Duranty's art criticism, Simmel on modern urban life, E.T.A. Hoffmann's "art of seeing", and Benjamin on traces. He also explores the complex relationship between Menzel's version of "extreme" realism and the exactly contemporary technology of photography. The resulting work establishes Menzel as a key artist of modernity.
Out-of-print, Fine—As New copy.
1982 / 2018, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 25 x 20 cm
Published by
RE/SEARCH / San Francisco
$45.00 - Out of stock
First published in 1982 and long out-of-print, in this iconic issue of the mighty RE/Search magazine, #4/5, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Throbbing Gristle talk about advanced ideas involving the social control process, creativity and the future. Interviews, scarce fiction, essays: this is a manual of prophetic ideas and insights. Strikingly designed and heavily illustrated with rare photos, bibliographies, discographies, chronologies and illustrations. A classic! Back in a limited edition print-run.
2022, English
Softcover, 260 pages, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
Published by
11:11 Press / US
$44.00 - In stock -
LIKE A RECOVERED PYRAMID TEXT IN WHICH ALL THE ANCIENT MYTHS WE THOUGHT WE UNDERSTOOD HAVE BEEN RECAST, EVAN ISOLINE’S DƐVDMVTH IS A DISORIENTING PHANTASMAGORIA OF GENRE-SHATTERING FORMS AND STYLES, TEARING LIKE BLITZKRIEG THROUGH ITS UNHINGED IMAGINATION OF THE UNCONSCIOUS SPACE BEHIND ALL TIME. SPASTIC, BATTY, UNRELENTING, ABSURD, PROVOCATIVE, INCANTATORY, AND PROFANE ON EVERY PAGE, CONSIDER MAKING THIS THE LAST GIFT YOU EVER GIVE THE PEOPLE YOU CALL YOUR PARENTS.
—BLAKE BUTLER, AUTHOR OF ALICE KNOTT
DƐVDMVTH is a mythographical-rhetorical work, a book of flowers, of arcadian theophanies & semiopathic assaults. In sur-rendering its totems & mementoes of Western arcana to the agency of their own dissolution, DƐVDMVTH brings the dead into rebellion, constructs a monument to an uninterpretable key in a ruin of obsolete modes.
2021, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 23 x 17 cm
Published by
11:11 Press / US
$52.00 - In stock -
PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY is not a work of philosophy in an academic or traditional sense. It is, however, highly philosophical, totemic, and personal. In the book, Evan uses the sky as an abstract philosophical concept, like a cinematic backdrop, to explore conceptual associations between selfhood, objecthood, the body, apocalypticism, masculinity, masturbation, and self-destruction.
The text, symbol, and glyph are partially augmented by chance cut-up processes such as language translators, Markov chain generators, and AI natural language generators for the purpose of eliminating narrative preconception, discovering subconscious visual realms, and spotlighting a point of tension between natural and artificial aesthetic forms. The formatting of text becomes an important cinematographic framing tool.
LIKE AN ARTAUDIAN SET OF MAPS SKETCHED OUT FROM THE TOPOGRAPHIC EXPLORATION OF A SELF WHICH LOST ITSELF IN DATA AND CONSTELLATIONS, PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY BECOMES A MIRROR IMAGE OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL ABYSS. ISOLINE’S SKY REFLECTS THE BLACKHOLESNESS OF WRITING AS IT UNVEILS ITSELF AS THE ATTRACTOR OF CONJUGATION, MUTATION AND REMIX —A CATACLYSMIC BLANK SPACE INSINUATING THE SILHOUETTES OF MONSTERS AND THE DISORIENTING TURBULENCE THAT ANTICIPATES THE ABERRANT DIRECTION OF THEIR WHIMS. THROUGH ABSTRACT IMAGES EXTIRPATED FROM CHAOS AND THEN FLOWCHARTED, AND GRAMMATICALIZED DESPAIR SAMPLED OUT IN GRAPHICAL TEST TUBES, PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY IS BOTH A CAREFUL ESSAY ON THE GEOMETRY OF WRITING AND A VISIONARY COLLECTION OF ATTEMPTS TO CRYSTALLIZE A LOVABLE SELF FROM THE RUINS OF A COLLAPSING UNIVERSE.
— GERMÁN SIERRA
THERE ARE A FEW BOOKS I’VE READ THAT FELT LIKE THEY WERE DIRECTLY ANSWERING THE CALL MADE BY ROBBE-GRILLET IN TOWARDS A NEW NOVEL. SLOW SLIDINGS BY M KITCHELL IS ONE, APPARITIONS OF THE LIVING BY JOHN TREFRY ANOTHER. I FELT EXCITED WHILE READING EVAN ISOLINE’S PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY BECAUSE IT WAS CLEAR I’D FOUND ONE MORE. THE LANGUAGE IS SPARE YET RELENTLESS, THE FORM EXACTLY AS EXPERIMENTAL AS IT NEEDS TO BE TO PULL THE RUG OUT FROM YOU AGAIN AND AGAIN. A COMPLETELY UNIQUE AND REWARDING EXPERIENCE.
— GRANT MAIERHOFER
WHEREAS DANIEL SCHREBER GAVE US TESTIMONY FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SUN, AND NERVAL TOOK CONTROL OF THE MOON, EVAN ISOLINE’S DEBUT WANTS TO GRASP THE ENTIRE SKY, TO FOLD ITS HIDDEN ASPECT INTO A SECRET WEAPON AND BLOW OUR BRAINS OUT ACROSS THE HEAVENS. WITH A NERVE-LOGIC MADE HIS OWN, ISOLINE’S DEMENTED EMPIRICISM HALLUCINATES A SPRAWLING, ONANISTIC ONTOLOGY: WE DISCOVER HOW THE SKY IS ALSO THE SEA (THE SKY THAT FELL TO EARTH), THE BEACH A DESERT, AND HOW IT WAS ONCE SWALLOWED BY A SHARK (WHOSE ATTACKS NOW CONSUMMATE THE ULTIMATE SEXUAL UNION). A LOVE LETTER TO IMAGINATIVE EXCESS AND THE FAILURES OF REALITY, THIS TOO REAL SIMULATION WILL DRY HUMP YOUR LEG LIKE IT WAS THE LAST GLORY HOLE OF GOD, AND YOU’LL BE GLAD OF THE ATTENTION.
— GARY J SHIPLEY
SEBALD'S "I" IS INEXTRICABLY HIM, YET IS SO UNSPECIFIC AND ETHEREAL AS TO BECOME ALL OF US. ISOLINE'S "I" IS NOT HIM, NOT EVEN A HUMAN--"I AM THE NEW WORD OUTSIDE ITSELF"--NOT EVEN A WORD. WRITERS USE THE "I" FOR MANY REASONS... URGENCY, VULNERABILITY, AUTHENTICITY. ISOLINE USES IT TO MAKE US AWARE THAT WE DON'T EXIST.
— JOHN TREFRY