World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2024, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 19.8 x 12.9
Published by
Verso / London
$39.00 - Out of stock
Translated by Helen O'Horan
The first novel from Izumi Suzuki to be published in English: a candid, intimate exploration of passion, music and transgression.
Hope I’m in for a good time, I thought. Even if it’s just for tonight.
Set in the underground bar and club scene of 1970s Tokyo, Set My Heart On Fire tells the story of Izumi in her turbulent twenties. Through a series of disarmingly frank vignettes, author Izumi Suzuki presents an unforgettable portrait of a young woman encountering missteps and miscommunication, good music and unreliable men, powerful drugs and disorientating meds. Izumi usually keeps her relationships short but complicated, until she meets Jun.
Set My Heart on Fire is a visceral novel about mistaken relationships and the convolutions of desire, about regret and acceptance. Pulsing through the narration is the protagonist’s love of music, a vital soundtrack spanning the Zombies, T. Rex and the Rolling Stones as well as underground Japanese psychedelic-rock bands such as the Tigers and the Tempters.
"The work and messages of Ursula K. Le Guin, the author’s longer-lived contemporary, come to mind. Both Suzuki and Le Guin knew that gender roles are a matter of costume or control, affect or affliction. The terms we use to define humanity are often inhuman"—Catherine Lacey, New York Times
"Suzuki's unique sensibility, which combined a punk aesthetic with a taste for the absurd. Her work-populated by misfits, loners, and femmes fatales alongside extraterrestrial boyfriends, intergalactic animal traffickers, and murderous teen-agers with E.S.P.-wryly blurs the boundary between earthly delinquency and otherworldly phenomena."—New Yorker
"Wild and restless ... I can't think of anyone I'd rather read than this countercultural icon of the Japanese literary underground."—Frieze
2023, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 20.83 x 13.72 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
First collection on filmmaker and poet Pasolini's passion for painting.
Preface by T. J. Clark
Edited by Alessandro Giammei and Ara H Merjian
One of Europe's most mythologized Marxist intellectuals of the 20th century, Pier Paolo Pasolini was not only a poet, filmmaker, novelist, and political martyr. He was also a keen critic of painting. An intermittently practicing artist in his own right, Pasolini studied under the distinguished art historian Roberto Longhi, whose lessons marked a life-long affinity for figurative painting and its centrality to a particular cinematic sensibility.
Pasolini set out wilfully to "contaminate" art criticism with semiotics, dialectology, and film theory, penning catalogue essays and exhibition reviews alongside poems, autobiographical meditations, and public lectures on painting. His fiercely idiosyncratic blend of Communism and classicism, localism and civic universalism, iconophilia and aesthetic "heresy," animated and antagonized Cold War culture like few European contemporaries. This book offers numerous texts previously available only in Italian, each accompanied by an editorial note elucidating its place in the tumultuous context of post-war Italian culture.
Prefaced by the renowned art historian T.J. Clark, a historical essay on Pasolini's radical aesthetics anchors the anthology. One hundred years after his birth, Heretical Aesthetics sheds light on one of the most consequential aspects of Pasolini's intellectual life, further illuminating a vast cinematic and poetic corpus along the way.
"Vision in Pasolini is at once tactile, earthy, erotic, divine and communist. His way of seeing communes with the world rather than holding it at a distance. By bringing together his writings on art, Heretical Aesthetics gives the Anglophone reader the key to his at once singular and generous cinema and poetry. His is a perspective from elsewhere in history, one which holds our own times sternly to account. This is such a good book for understanding one of the very best of 'bad' Marxists."—T.J. Clark
"Magisterially translated and edited, this indispensable anthology is finally available to an English-speaking audience. It provides detailed and precise insight into Pasolini's convulsive and idiosyncratic relationship with the visual arts and the artists who inspired his aesthetic sense. This exhilarating trove sheds light on the contaminated and visionary visual landscape produced by one of the most important filmmakers in the history of cinema: a total artist who found expressive depth in the heretical forms of his vision."—Pierpaolo Antonello
"Pasolini's intimate relation to painting and the history of art demonstrated in these essays is a revelation, especially for understanding his films. The texts are classic Pasolini - unfailingly brilliant and erudite, but also at once revolutionary and reactionary, observant of his times and blind to some of the most innovative developments. A fascinating collection."—Michael Hardt, author of The Subversive Seventies
2024, English
Softcover, 416 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$48.00 - Out of stock
The highly-acclaimed history of the ground-breaking Situationist movement, in one volume for the first time.
The Situationist International, who came to the fore during the Paris tumults of 1968, were revolutionary thinkers who continue to influence movements and philosophy into the twenty-first century. Mostly know for Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle as well as other key texts, the group was in fact hugely diverse and radical. In Leaving The 20th Century McKenzie Wark explores the full range of the movement.
At once an extraordinary counter history of radical praxis and a call to arms in the age of financial crisis and the resurgence of the streets Wark traces the group's development from the bohemian Paris of the '50s to the explosive days of May '68, Wark's take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement—including Constant, Asger Jorn, Mich le Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong—Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions.
She also follows the narrative beyond 1968 to show what happened after the movement disintegration exploring the lives and ideas of T.J. Clark, the Fourierist utopia of Raoul Vaneigem, Ren Vienet's earthy situationist cinema, Gianfranco Sangunetti's pranking of the Italian ruling class, Alice-Becker Ho's account of the anonymous language of the Romany, Guy Debord's late films and his surprising work as a game designer.
2023, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 20.9 x 13 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$32.00 - In stock -
A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom.
Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy.
A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki’s stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.
Wryly anarchic and deeply imaginative, Suzuki was a writer like no other. These eleven stories offer readers the opportunity to delve deeper in this singular writer's work.
Translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph and Helen O'Horan
"Extraordinary. To use one of her own coolly illuminating formulations, Suzuki is steward of a new anxiety"—China Miéville
"Brilliant and often bleak … all shot through with a camp ethos, dark humour and kitchen-sink realism … in their brio and jagged urgency, these stories have, if anything, only gained in their alarming immediacy."— Times Literary Supplement
2021, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 20.9 x 13 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$32.00 - Out of stock
The first English-language publication of the work of Izumi Suzuki, a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural icon.
In a future where men are contained in ghettoised isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia—until a boy escapes and a young woman’s perception of the world is violently interrupted. The last family in a desolate city struggles to approximate twentieth- century life on Earth, lifting what notions they can from 1960s popular culture. But beneath these badly learned behaviours lies an atavistic appetite for destruction. Two new friends enjoy drinks on a holiday resort planet where all is not as it seems, and the air itself seems to carry a treacherously potent nostalgia. Back on Earth, Emma’s not certain if her emotionally abusive, green-haired boyfriend is in fact an intergalactic alien spy, or if she’s been hitting the bottles and baggies too hard. And in the title story, the tyranny of enforced screen-time and the mechanisation of labour foster a cold-hearted and ultimately tragic disaffection among the youth of Tokyo.
Nonchalantly hip and full of deranged prescience, Suzuki’s singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Neuromancer to The Handmaid’s Tale. In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always grounded in the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on.
Izumi Suzuki was born in 1949. After dropping out of high school she worked in a factory before finding success and infamy as a model and actress. She was a member of Shuji Terayama's independent underground theater troupe Tenjo Saijiki, and acted in both "pink" films and classics of 1970s Japanese cinema. Izumi was the subject of many of Nobuyoshi Araki's most famous photographs and this photobook is one of his most sought after.. When the father of her children, the jazz musician Kaoru Abe, died of an overdose, Suzuki’s creative output went into hyperdrive and she began producing the irreverent and punky short fiction, novels and essays that ensured her reputation would outstrip and outlast that of the men she had been associated with in her early career. She took her own life in 1986, leaving behind a decade’s worth of groundbreaking and influential writing.
2024, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 176 pages, 21.59 x 14.61 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$39.00 - Out of stock
A breathtaking memoir of transition, history, art, and memory.
After a successful career, a twenty-year marriage, and two kids, McKenzie Wark has an acute midlife crisis: coming out as a trans woman. Changing both social role and bodily form recasts her relation to the world. Transition changes what, and how, she remembers. She makes fresh sense of her past and of history by writing to key figures in her life about the big themes that haunt us all--love and money, sex and death.
In letters to her childhood self, her mother, sister, and past lovers, she writes a backstory that enables her to live in the present. The letters expand to address trans sisters lost and found, as well as Cybele, ancient goddess of trans women. She engages with the political, the aesthetic, and the numinous dimensions of trans life and how they refract her sense of who she is, who she has been, who she can still become. She confronts difficult memories that connect her mother's early death to her compulsion to write, her communist convictions, her coming to New York, the bittersweet reality of her late transition, and the joy to be found in Brooklyn's trans and raver communities.
2009, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket),
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$35.00 - In stock -
First 2009 hardcover edition. Now out-of-print.
The foremost philosopher of art argues for a new politics of looking
The theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern audience as aesthetically and politically passive. In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a communal performance.
In this follow-up to the acclaimed The Future of the Image, Rancière takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. First asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goes on to look at what the tradition of critical art, and the desire to insert art into life, has achieved. Has the militant critique of the consumption of images and commodities become, ironically, a sad affirmation of its omnipotence?
VG/VG
1985, English
Softcover, 252 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$45.00 - In stock -
A classic of twentieth-century thought, Minima Moralia is Adorno's literary and philosophical masterpiece of aphorisms and short prose meditations. 1985 Edition, 1994 printing.
Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-century America and finds a life deformed by capitalism. This is Adorno's theoretical and literary masterpiece and a classic of twentieth-century thought.
A volume of Adorno is equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature.—Susan Sontag
The best thoughts of a noble and invigorating mind.
Very Good copy with some wear to cover edges.
1998 / 2009, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 19.5 x 12.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$18.00 - In stock -
Introduction by George Steiner
Translated by John Osborne
Benjamin’s most sustained and original work, and one of the main sources of literary modernism.
The Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer and the theatre of Calderon and Shakespeare. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history. Georg Lukacs, an opponent of Benjamin's aesthetics, singled out The Origin of German Tragic Drama as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.
"He drew, from the obscure disdained German baroque, elements of the modern sensibility: the taste for allegory, surrealist shock effects, discontinuous utterance, a sense of historical catastrophe."—Susan Sontag
"If the killing of Lorca was Fascism’s first great crime against literature, Benjamin’s death was undoubtedly the second."—The Listener
Walter Benjamin is the most important German aesthetician and literary critic of this century.
Very Good copy. 2009 reprint of the 1998 edition.
2000, English
Softcover, 330 pages, 19 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality:
Contemporary Dialogues on the Left
by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek
First --- edition of Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek — The Hegelian legacy, Left strategy, and post-structuralism versus Lacanian psychoanalysis.
What is the contemporary legacy of Gramsci’s notion of Hegemony? How can universality be reformulated now that its spurious versions have been so thoroughly criticized? In this ground-breaking project, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek engage in a dialogue on central questions of contemporary philosophy and politics. Their essays, organized as separate contributions that respond to one another, range over the Hegelian legacy in contemporary critical theory, the theoretical dilemmas of multiculturalism, the universalism-versus-particularism debate, the strategies of the Left in a globalized economy, and the relative merits of post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis for a critical social theory. While the rigor and intelligence with which these writers approach their work is formidable, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality benefits additionally from their clear sense of energy and enjoyment in a revealing and often unpredictable exchange.
Very Good copy.
2001, English
Softcover, 296 pages, 21.54 x 13.72 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$60.00 - In stock -
Since the 1948 war which drove them from their heartland, the Palestinian people have consistently been denied the most basic democratic rights. Blaming the Victims shows how the historical fate of the Palestinians has been justified by spurious academic attempts to dismiss their claim to a home within the boundaries of historical Palestine and even to deny their very existence. Beginning with a thorough exposé of the fraudulent assertions of Joan Peters concerning the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine prior to 1948, the book then turns to similar instances in Middle East research where the truth about the Palestinians has been systematically suppressed: from the bogus.though still widely believed.explanations of why so many Palestinians fled their homes in 1948, to today.s distorted propaganda about PLO terrorism. The volume also includes sharp critiques of the wide consensus in the USA which supports Israel and its territorial ambitions while maintaining total silence about the competing reality of the Palestinians.
"the wide-ranging scope and demythologising structure of Blaming The Victims makes it especially relevant at the present time when the actions of the state of Israel seem to contradict received opinion as to its nature. The book provides a great quantity of information, analyses it convincingly and, through an impressive body of notes on primary and secondary literature, points the reader in the direction of further information."—Middle East International
"These forcefully argued treatises will be as enlightening as they are disturbing for anyone with an interest in Middle East Politics."—ALA Booklist
2013, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 336 pages, 20.8 x 13.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Verso / London
$60.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of Fredric Jameson's The Antinomies of Realism, a history of the nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it impossible to recreate. The works of Zola, Tolstoy, Perez Galdos, and George Eliot are in the most profound sense inimitable, yet continue to dominate the novel form to this day. Novels to emerge since struggle to reconcile the social conditions of their own creation with the history of this mode of writing: the so-called modernist novel is one attempted solution to this conflict, as is the ever-more impoverished variety of commercial narratives - what today's book reviewers dub "serious novels," which are an attempt at the impossible endeavor to roll back the past.
Fredric Jameson examines the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism, approaching the subject himself in terms of the social and historical preconditions for realism's emergence. The realist novel combined an attention to the body and its states of feeling with a focus on the quest for individual realization within the confines of history.
In contemporary writing, other forms of representation - for which the term "postmodern" is too glib - have become visible: for example, in the historical fiction of Hilary Mantel or the stylistic plurality of David Mitchell's novels. Contemporary fiction is shown to be conducting startling experiments in the representation of new realities of a global social totality, modern technological warfare, and historical developments that, although they saturate every corner of our lives, only become apparent on rare occasions and by way of the strangest formal and artistic devices.
In a coda, Jameson explains how "realistic" narratives survived the end of classical realism. In effect, he provides an argument for the serious study of popular fiction and mass culture that transcends lazy journalism and the easy platitudes of recent cultural studies.
"Fredric Jameson is America's leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction."—Terry Eagleton
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 192 pages, 21.6 x 16.9 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
Sex and art, we're told, are sacred, two spheres that ought to be kept separate from the ravages of the marketplace. Yet both prop up two incredibly lucrative industries, built on the commodification of creativity and desire, authenticity and intimacy. Our reaction to this should not be moral or political outrage, nor legal regulation or denial, but rather—as Sophia Giovannitti argues here—acceptance, through which we can find a more autonomous way to live.
In this searching and provocative work, drawing on cultural and political theory, the contemporary art world, and the author's own experience as a sex worker and artist trying to make a living, Giovannitti argues that if we delve into our anxieties around art and sex, we can instead find new ways to live and spaces, however small, of freedom. When there is nothing left to protect, she argues, everything is possible.
1995, English
Softcover, 158 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
First 1995 edition.
Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative as Guy Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle". From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism and everyday life in the late 20th century. Now available in English translation, Debord's text remains as crucial for understanding the contemporary effects of power, which are increasingly inseparable from the new virtual worlds of our rapidly changing image/information culture.
Very Good copy.
1998, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
First English 1998 edition of Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, published by Verso.
First published in 1967, Guy Debord's stinging revolutionary critique of contemporary society, The Society of the Spectacle, has since acquired a cult status. Credited by many as being the inspiration for the ideas generated by the events of May 1968 in France, Debord's pitiless attack on commodity fetishism and its incrustation in the practices of everyday life continues to burn brightly in today's age of satellite television and the soundbite
In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle published twenty years later, Debord returned to the themes of his previous analysis and demonstrated how they were all the more relevant in a period when the 'integrated spectacle' was dominant. Resolutely refusing to be reconciled to the system, Debord trenchantly slices through the doxa and mystification offered tip by journalists and pundits to show how aspects of reality as diverse as terrorism and the environment, the Mafia and the media, were caught in the logic of the spectacular society. Pointing the finger clearly at those who benefit from the logic of domination, Debord's Comments convey the revolutionary impulse at the heart of situationism.
Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931 and committed suicide in 1994. A Marxist theorist, French writer, poet, filmmaker, hypergraphist and founding member of the groups Letterist International and Situationist International, Debord is best known as the leading theoretician of the situationist movement. His works translated into English include The Society of the Spectacle, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, and Panegyric.
Very Good copy.
1985, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 13.97 x 21.59 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$30.00 - In stock -
Written in exile from Germany, this potent study of Europe’s most controversial composer explodes the frontiers of musical and cultural analysis.
Richard Wagner's works are among the most controversial in the history of European music — aesthetically, for their ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk, which inspired such productions as the Ring cycle; and in wider terms, because of their ultimate assimilation into the official culture of the Third Reich. The aesthetic and the ideological and political are subtly interwoven throughout In Search of Wagner.
Adorno, who studied under Alban Berg in Vienna and went on to become the most brilliant exponent of the Frankfurt School of German Marxism, was in many ways the cultural antitype of his subject. In his concise synoptic account, he provides deft musicological analyses of Wagner's scores, of his compositional techniques, orchestration and staging methods, quoting copiously from the music dramas themselves. At the same time, he sets down incisive reflections on Wagner's social character, and on the ideological impulses of his artistic activity.
"Adorno's In Search of Wagner is an astonishing book, comparable only... to the later Wagner tracts by Nietzsche... It is essential reading for anyone seriously involved with the composer, and now we can read it thanks to a superior translation by Rodney Livingstone"—New York Review of Books
"Every chapter of this excellent little book has some penetrating insight"—Classical Music Weekly
VG copy.
2022, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 12.9 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$32.00 - In stock -
An absurdist novel about fame, culture and connections, bodies and breakdowns from the author of The Superrationals.
Margot’s on her way to Montana, with blood on her face and a jeweled cigarette case full of pills. She’s fresh from a bad break-up and fleeing the cold comforts of her famous family – legendary punk parents and an overbearing show business scion of a grandmother.
But while the eyes of the world are elsewhere for the first time in Margot's life, a graveyard encounter with a disgraced doctor and the discovery of a dozen old film reels leads to a troubling new subjecthood, as her congenital inability to feel pain puts her center stage for one man’s desire and ambition.
A jarringly sensual book about the peculiarities of our bodies and the impossibilities of our families, and a young woman trying to find a way forward with both.
“I Fear My Pain Interests You is meticulously constructed, with each part supporting and supported by the others. Controlled self-awareness like this in novels makes me pay close attention, enriching my experience.”—Tao Lin, The New York Times
“The cool girl book of the year”—Jordan Richman, 032c
2022, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 12.9 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$32.00 - In stock -
What if we could do better than the family?
We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family.
Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. It could be otherwise: in this urgent, incisive polemic, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case for family abolition.
Abolish the Family traces the history of family abolitionist demands, beginning with nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and early-twentieth century Russian family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai. Turning her attention to the 1960s, Lewis reminds us of the anti-family politics of radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and the gay liberationists, a tradition she traces to the queer marxists bringing family abolition to the twenty-first century. This exhilarating essay looks at historic rightwing panic about Black families and the violent imposition of the family on indigenous communities, and insists: only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine what might come after.
1995, English
Softcover, 414 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
Appearing for the first time in an English translation, Introduction to Modernity is one of Henri Lefebvre's greatest works. Published in 1962, when Lefebvre was beginning his career as a lecturer in sociology at the University of Strasbourg, it established his position in the vanguard of a movement which was to culminate in the events of May 1968. It is a book which supersedes the conventional divisions between academic disciplines. With dazzling skill, Lefebvre moves from philosophy to sociology, from literature to history, to present a profound analysis of the social, political and cultural forces at work in France and the world in the aftermath of Stalin's death-an analysis in which the contours of our own "postmodernity" appear with startling clarity.
Lefebvre's lectures have become legendary, and something of his charismatic presence and delivery is captured in this book, which he intended "to be understood in the mind's ear ... and not simply to be read." With its mercurial shifts of tone, now intensely poetic, now conversational, it not only explores modernity, it exemplifies it. Equally experimental in conception is the book's remarkable structure, twelve "preludes" through which a range of recurrent themes are interwoven in free-form counterpoint: irony as a critical tool, utopianism, nature and culture, the Stalinization of Marxism, the alienation of everyday life, the cybernetic society ... What gradually emerges is not only a series of original concepts about humanity and culture, but an extraordinary invocation of the complexity of social contradictions.
Yet the fragmented structure of the book is not left to float free. Its shifting and eclectic melodies and leitmotifs have a solid ground basis: the wish to rehabilitate the Marxist dialectic as a method for understanding and transforming the modern world. This program is at the heart of the book, and gives it its underlying coherence, making Introduction to Modernity not only essential reading for all students of European cultural history, but also a key text for Marxism in the post-communist world of the late twentieth century.
Very Good copy, general light wear.
1988, English
Softcover, 335 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
In the most comprehensive study of Jacques Lacan yet to be published in English, David Macey challenges many of the assumptions that have come to surround Lacan's work. He shows that key elements of Lacanian thought relate not to structuralism, as is often claimed, but to surrealism, Bataille and the early French phenomenologists. The famous "return to Freud" is shown to mask Lacan's adherence to a psychiatric tradition and to trends within French psychoanalysis which were opposed by Freud himself.
A detailed and challenging reading of work by Lacan and his associates on femininity reveals its reliance upon a virulently sexist discourse and upon an iconography derived from surrealism. The view that Lacanian psychoanalysis has a positive contribution to make to feminism and to theories of gender and sexual difference is contested. As well as providing a new and provocative reading of Lacan's work, Lacan in Contexts is an important contribution to psychoanalytic history and to the history of French intellectual life.
Very Good copy of the first 1988 edition.
1996, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 13.7 x 21.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$35.00 - In stock -
This is the work in which Louis Althusser formulated some of his most influential ideas. For Marx, first published in France in 1968, has come to be regarded as the founding text of the school of "structuralist Marxism" which was presided over by the fascinating and enigmatic figure of Louis Althusser. Structuralism constituted an intellectual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s and radically transformed the way philosophy, political and social theory, history, science, and aesthetics were discussed and thought about. For Marx was a key contribution to that process and it fundamentally recast the way in which many people understood Marx and Marxism.
This book contains the classic statements of Althusser's analysis of the young Marx and the importance of Feuerbach during this formative period, of his thesis of the "epistomological break" between the early and the late Marx, and of his conception of dialectics, contradiction and "overdetermination." Also included is a study of the materialist theater of Bertolazzi and Brecht and the critique of humanist readings of Marxism. Since his death in 1990, Althusser's legacy has come under renewed examination and it is increasingly recognized that the influence of his ideas has been wider and deeper than previously thought: reading For Marx, in its audacity, originality and rigor, will explain why this impact was so significant.
First English Verso 1996 edition, now out-of-print. Very Good copy.
1997, English
Softcover, 392 pages, 13.5 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$48.00 - Out of stock
Introduction by Susan Sontag
Walter Benjamin is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic intellectual figures of this century. Notwithstanding the enormous impact made by his critical and philosophical writings, he was a thinker who shattered so many disciplinary and stylistic conventions that it is almost impossible to place him neatly in any particular category of writing or any specific and exclusive theoretical tradition. This collection, introduced by by Susan Sontag, contains the most representative and illuminating selection of his work over a twenty-year period, and thus does full justice to the richness and the multi-dimensional nature of his thought. Included in these pages are aphorisms and townscapes, esoteric meditation and reminiscences of childhood, and reflections on language, psychology, aesthetics and politics.
1997, English
Softcover, 254 pages, 13 x 19.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$55.00 - Out of stock
First 1997 edition.
Slavoj Zizek is, without doubt, one of the most stimulating and vibrant thinkers of our time, and his idiosyncratic blend of Lacan and Hegel is always sparkling with insight and studded with amusing stories, anecdotes and jokes. In The Plague of Fantasies Zizek approaches another enormous subject with characteristic brio and provocativeness. The current epoch is plagued by fantasms: there is an ever intensifying antagonism between the process of ever greater abstraction of our lives-whether in the form of digitalization or market relations-and the deluge of pseudo-concrete images which surround us. Traditional critical thought would have sought to trace the roots of abstract notions in concrete social reality; but today, the correct procedure is the inverse-from pseudo-concrete imagery to the abstract process which structures our lives.
Ranging in his examples from national differences in toilet design to cybersex, and from intellectuals' responses to the Bosnian war to Robert Schumann's music, Zizek explores the relations between fantasy and ideology, the way in which fantasy animates enjoy-ment while protecting against its excesses, the associations of the notion of fetishism with fantasized seduction, and the ways in which digitalization and cyberspace affect the status of subjectivity. To the already initiated, The Plague of Fantasies will be a welcome reminder of why they enjoy Zizek's writing so much. For new readers, it will be the beginning of a long and meaningful relationship.
Very Good copy.
2015, English
Softcover, 1056 pages, 15.2 x 23.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$70.00 - In stock -
For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, an influence each new thinker struggles to escape. As a consequence, Hegel's absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the defining philosopher of the historical transition to modernity, a period with which our own times share startling similarities.
Today, as global capitalism comes apart at the seams, we are entering a new period of transition. In Less Than Nothing, the product of a career-long focus on the part of its author, Slavoj Zizek argues it is imperative we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Zizek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with the key strands of contemporary thought-Heidegger, Badiou, speculative realism, quantum physics, and cognitive sciences. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.
Very Good copy. First edition.