Brickbat Books: March 2013

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Featured: Three Science Fiction Books

Philip Jose Farmer (writing as the Kurt Vonnegut character, Kilgore Trout)

Venus On A Half-Shell

Paperback (out of print)

Final Stage, The Ultimate Science Fiction Collection

Paperback (out of print)

Mick Farren, The Feelies

Paperback (out of print)

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Monday, March 18, 2013

Event: Ora Cogan & Laura Baird

Tues, March 26th at 8pm at

Brickbat:

Ora Cogan

Laura Baird

"Ora Cogan’s haunting voice and post-americana guitar playing are like none other. Her music is expansive, beautiful and ethereal. It makes you feel as though you are laying down in a rowboat and drifting across a calm lake in the pitch black night with a storm approaching. She has collaborated with a variety of artists including Tara Jane O’Neil, Anni Rossi, Alela Diane, and The Be Good Tanyas, and has shared the stage with the likes of Hope Sandoval, Vashti Bunyan, Scout Niblett, Au, and Tanya Tagaq."

Laura Baird has been writing songs and making home recordings since the late 1980's. She is also an enthusiastic collector and performer of traditional Appalachian music. She sings and plays many instruments, including clawhammer banjo, guitar, piano and harpsichord and has recorded with Espers (flute) and Death Vessel (banjo and backing vocals.) She records and performs as The Baird Sisters, with her sister Meg.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Featured: The Doll

Hans Bellmer & Paul Eluard, The Doll

Paperback in printed slipcase

HANS BELLMER (1902-1975) is one of the most illustrious names in the field of erotic art and Surrealism. The Doll comprises a series of photographs that have acquired iconic status and which exemplify the Surrealists’ conception of “convulsive beauty”. They are accompanied by a body of theoretical, poetic and speculative texts written between the 1930s and early 1960s which reveal Bellmer as one whose ideas are a “scandal for reason” (Joë Bousquet).

The insight Bellmer’s writing provides into his work is crucial. He weaves together a remarkably disparate set of concepts - covering such diverse fields as the body, psychology, anagrams, chance, the laws of optics and mathematics, the fourth dimension, hermaphroditism, the marvellous, intuition - into a theory of eroticism which forms the underlying rationale of his fearsome art.

This English edition is based exactly upon Bellmer’s original, the texts having been translated for the first time from the final German version.

A legendary work on eroticism, surrealism, and photography. Includes a suite of poems by Paul Eluard, 15 colour photographs, 10 in black and white, plus numerous line drawings. Limited to 1000 slipcased copies.

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Featured: New Issue of Arthur!

Arthur #34

Twenty-four 15" x 22.75" pages (16 color, 8 b/w)

Now with 50% more pages, Arthur continues its comeback in the bold new broadsheet newspaper format that's turning heads and drawing critical acclaim.

In this issue...
After 20-plus years navigating strange, inspiring trips across myriad underground psychedelic terrains with a host of fellow free folk, righteous musician/head MATT VALENTINE (MV & EE, Tower Recordings, etc) finally spills all possible beans in an unprecedented, career-summarizing, ridiculously footnoted epic interview by BYRON COLEY. Plus: Deep archival photo finds from the MV vaults, a sidebar wander through some important MV listening experiences with your guide Dan Ireton, and a gorgeous cover painting by ARIK ROPER of MV & EE at peace in the cosmic wild. Delicious!

Also in this issue:
Orange County, California psych rockers FEEDING PEOPLE left the church, entered the void, lost band members and returned to our reality to sing their tale in glorious reverb. Chris Ziegler investigates, with photography by Ward Robinson...
Everyone needs someone to love, and AROMATIC APHRODISIACS are here to help that lovin’ along (sans wack pharma side effects). From truffles to borrachero, authors CHRISTIAN RATSCH and CLAUDIA MULLER-EBELING get in on the action. Illustrations by Kira Mardikes...
Gabe Soria chats with author AUSTIN GROSSMAN (Soon I Will Be Invincible) about the basic weirdness of playing (and making) VIDEO GAMES, with art by Ron Rege, Jr....

All-new full-color comics by Lale Westvind, Will Sweeney, Vanessa Davis and Jonny Negron...

Is there a way to examine the nature of existence at its very foundation? Esoteric mapmaker DAVID CHAIM SMITH say yes—but there’s a price. Interview by Jay Babcock...

Stewart Voegtlin on what (or: who) made MELVINS’ 1992 beercrusher "Lysol" the most unlikely religious record ever built, with art by Stewart's Chips N Beer mag compatriot Beaver...

"Weedeater" columnist Nance Klehm on BETTER HOME BREWING...

The Center for Tactical Magic on ANARCHO-OCCULTISM...

Byron Coley and Thurston Moore's essential underground review column, Bull Tongue, now expanded to two giant pages. Covered in this issue: New York Art Quartet, Don Cauble, Douglas Blazek, Rick Myers, Desmadrados, Century Plants, Richard Aldrich, Robbie Basho, Steffen Basho-Junghans, Bed Wettin' Bad Boys, Michael Zacchilli, Pat Murano, Tom Carter, Les Conversions, Hobo Sunn, Decimus, Saifyya, Jeff Keen, Inspector 22, Yves/Son/Ace, Pink Priest, Smegma, Nouvelle Impressions D'Afrique, K. Johnson Blair, Major Stars, Endless Boogie, David Novick, Joe Carducci, Scam, Erick Lyle, Phantom Horse, Failing Lights, Tomuntonttu, The Lost Domain, George Laughead jr., Xochi, Sublime Frequencies, Barbara Rubin, Red Rippers, Linda King, Cuntz, My Cat Is An Alien, Bird Build Nests Underground, Pestrepeller, Painting Petals on Planet Ghost, Peter Stampfel, Joshua Burkett, Michael Chapman, L'Oie de Cravan Press, Genvieve Desrosiers, The Residents, Dawn McCarthy, Bonnie Prince Billy, Ensemble Pearl, Azita, Woo, Galactic Zoo Dossier, Mad Music Inc., White Limo, Excusamwa, Little Black Egg, Dump, Jarrett Kobek, Felix Kubin, The Army, Bruce Russell, and Gate...

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Event: General Idea Presents Poetry!

St Patrick's Day

Sunday, March 17th at 4pm
at Brickbat:

Marion Bell

Brandon Holmquest

Carlos Soto-Roman

Carlos Soto-Román was born in Valparaíso, Chile. He is the author of Philadelphia's Notebooks (Otoliths, 2011). He curates the cooperative anthology of contemporary u.s. poetry Elective Affinities. He lives in Philadelphia, PA.

Brandon Holmquest will just show up unannounced in your town like it's no big deal and leave just as nonchalantly. When not living out his childhood dream of being a suspicious drifter, he writes and translates poems, rolls cigarettes and wonders what his problem is, exactly

Marion Bell is a poet who lives in Philadelphia. She has a chapbook called The Abjector from con/crescent press. Recent interests include Marxist and trans feminisms, prison abolition movements, and the uses of anger. She also likes folk songs, cats and coffee. She’s working on a manuscript tentatively titled Hey High Lonesome or Queer Theory for Losers or You People. She was selected for a 2012 grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation.

Friday, March 8, 2013

New Arrivals: Little Big Books!

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Featured: New Children's Books

Ramona Badescu & Benjamin Chaud, Pomelo Begins To Grow

Hardcover

Arthur Bradford & Lisa Hanawalt, Bennie's Brigade

Hardcover

Mack Barnett & Adam Rex, Chloe And The Lion

Hardcover

Germano Zullo & Albertine, Sky High

Hardcover

Arthur Geisert, Ice

Hardcover

Jon Chad, Leo Geo And His Miraculous Journey

Hardcover

Coralie Saudo & Kris Di Giacomo, My Dad Is Big And Strong But...

Hardcover

Matt Furie, Night Riders

Hardcover

Arthur Geisert, The Giant Seed

Hardcover

Sara Fanelli, The Onion's Great Escape

Hardcover

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Featured: Two from Siglio

Joe Brainard, The Nancy Book

Hardcover

From 1963 to 1978 Joe Brainard created more than one hundred works of art that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent her into an astonishing variety of spaces, all electrified and complicated by the incongruity of her presence.

The Nancy Book is the first collection of Brainard's Nancy texts, drawings, collages and paintings, with full page reproductions of over fifty works, several of which have never been exhibited or published before.

In The Nancy Book, Joe Brainard's Nancy traverses high art and low, the poetic and pornographic, the surreal and the absurd. Whether inserted into hypothetical situations, dispatched on erotic adventures, or seemingly rendered by the hands of artists as varied as Leonardo da Vinci, R. Crumb, Larry Rivers, and Willem de Kooning, Brainard's Nancy revels in as well as transcends her two-dimensionality.

These works exude a beguiling balance of mischief and innocence, irreverence and wonder, spontaneity and calculation. Together they accumulate into a sophisticated and complex work of great wit and joy, rich with metaphor, and equal parts surprise and subtlety.

The Nancy Book also includes original essays by Ann Lauterbach and Ron Padgett as well as collaborations with luminary poets Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Frank Lima, Frank O'Hara, Ron Padgett and James Schuyler.

It Is Almost That

Hardcover

It Is Almost That collects twenty-six visionary image+text works by women artists and writers. Supremely imaginative in their use of word and image, these hybrid works are steeped in narrative play and subversion, inviting readers to engage in multiple modes of reading. The first in a series that embodies Siglio’s unique editorial mission, It Is Almost That features substantial excerpts or the works in their entirety—many previously unpublished, difficult to find, or long out-of-print—by renown, little known, forgotten, and emerging artists.

The works include a painted autobiographical novel by a young artist who died in the Holocaust (Charlotte Salomon); the transformation of the front pages of newspapers into alchemical drawings (Suzanne Treister); a computer-generated chance operation that “imagines” houses and their inhabitants (Alison Knowles); the pseudo-scientific examination of mother-daughter conversations (Eleanor Antin); and drawings called “body maps,” inscribed with stories of HIV-positive South African women (Bambanani Women’s Group), among almost two dozen others.

Edited by Lisa Pearson, this collection is not organized like a traditional anthology; rather, it creates a constellation of works that exceed categorical boundaries. While many works may be recognized by their various connections (such as to Fluxus, Conceptual, Feminist, and Outsider art as well as to experimental literature, etc.), the collection aims to engage both literary and art audiences, reorienting the reader so that these works may be seen and read anew.