STRANGE ATTRACTOR PRESS
Welcome to a bumper December Strange Attractor Press mailout. It's been an exciting year for us, and we've got a huge amount of news to share with you including details of many new titles, an exhibition, podcasts and updates on forthcoming releases. Be sure to scroll all the way down to the bitter end!
FLOWER OF PERVERSION
The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco, Volume Two
Stephen Thrower
Almost a decade in the making, Stephen Thrower's monumental two-volume critical appraisal of Jess Franco's filmography is now drawing to an end with the publication of Flowers of Perversion: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco, Volume Two. This covers the second half of his career, including such grubby jewels as Shining Sex, Barbed Wire Dolls, Ilsa The Wicked Warden and Bloody Moon. Covered within its 520 full colour pages are films that have never before received critical appraisal, as well as exclusive interviews with Franco collaborators including Antonio Mayans, Juan Soler, Katja Bienert and Monica Swinn.
As well as the sumptuous standard edition, we have also printed 500 copies of an exclusive special edition to match the first volume of this ambitious work, Murderous Passions. The Flowers of Perversion special edition will ship with an all-new 100-page book, The Sinister Case of Dr Franco, revealing in exquisite colour facsimile the curious contents of a suitcase full of intended projects, scripts and sketches abandoned by Franco in a French hotel in 1975. Books will start shipping in the week of 17 December.
Order Flowers of Perversion here
BOMB CULTURE: 50th Anniversary Edition
Jeff Nuttall
Bomb Culture is an abscess that lances itself. An extreme book, unreasonable but not irrational. Abrasive, contemptuous, attitudinizing, ignorant and yet brilliant. – Dennis Potter
Out of print for fifty years, Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture has achieved legendary status as a powerful, informative, and spirited exploration of 1960s alternative society and counterculture. Nuttall’s confessional account of the period investigates the sources of its radical art, music,and protest movements as well as the beliefs, anxieties, and conceits of its key agitators, including his own.
Nuttall argued that a tangible psychic dread of nuclear holocaust pervaded both high and low cultures, determining their attitude and content, much as the horrors of World War I had nourished the tactics and aesthetics of Dadaism.
Accompanying the original text is a new foreword by author Iain Sinclair, who was closely acquainted with Jeff Nuttall and participated in the turbulent underground culture described in Bomb Culture. This anniversary edition is rounded out with an afterword by writer Maria Fusco and a contextual introduction by the book’s editors which includes photographs and images of Nuttall’s distinctive artwork as well as further archival materials.
Running until 15 December at Flat Time House in Peckham, London, is The Psychopathic Now!, a coincident exhibition curated by Jamie Sutcliffe, Jay Jeff Jones and Douglas Field that gathers together many small press publications, fragments of charged ephemera, historical documents and correspondence in an attempt to illustrate something of the complex milieu out of which Bomb Culture erupted.
Order Bomb Culture here
THE SURRENDER OF SILENCE
The Memoir of Ironfoot Jack, King of the Bohemians
“The Surrender of Silence will be the greatest book ever written on Bohemians in Europe—not fiction but reality; the life I chose to live.” - Ironfoot Jack
“I became acquainted with gipsies, with show people, with buskers, with people who entertained the public by performing in the city, on fair grounds and market places and with a variety of ‘fiddles’—that is, some dubious methods of obtaining the means of life. I became a member of this fraternity.”
Escape artist, fortune-teller, author, cunning man and raconteur “Ironfoot Jack,” aka Jack Rudolph Neave (1881–1959), the self-styled “King of the Bohemians,” was a well-known Soho character in pre- and postwar London. This, his rich and enthralling story of a lifestyle now gone forever, was dictated as his portrait was being painted in 1956. It vividly describes his life on the streets and his many exploits, including establishing The Caravan Club in 1934, considered the first gay-friendly nightclub in London.
Neave’s unpublished manuscript was discovered amongst cult author Colin Wilson’s papers by his bibliographer Colin Stanley, who assembled and annotated the text, which is presented here for the first time, accompanied by a contextual introduction by cultural historian Phil Baker.
“The Surrender of Silence is the outcome of years of struggle to survive; of solving the problem of existence by various and curious methods… Most of the people I am talking about led a precarious life and obtained their livelihood from day to day…. They worked to live; they did not live to work.”
Order The Surrender of Silence here
INCURABLE - THE HAUNTED WRITINGS OF LIONEL JOHNSON
Edited by Nina Antonia
OF KINGS & THINGS - STRANGE TALES AND DECADENT POEMS BY COUNT STENBOCK
Edited by David Tibet
Two of our recent titles celebrating lesser-known icons of 19th century decadence - Lionel Johnson and Count Eric Stanislaus Stenbock - are now available to order in both standard and special editions.
A lost poet of the decadent era, Lionel Johnson contributed to the leading decadent publications of the day, including The Chameleon, The Yellow Book, and The Savoy.
Stenbock was a homosexual convert to Roman Catholicism and owner of a serpent, a toad, and a dachshund called Trixie. It was said that toward the end of his life he was accompanied everywhere by a life-size wooden doll that he believed to be his son.
We were very pleased to see both books mentioned in a round-up of recent publications on the period over at the Washington Post.
You can read the article here
Order Incurable here
Order Of Kings & Things here
HIGH STATIC, DEAD LINES
Sonic Spectres and the Object Hereafter
Media historian, curator and artist Kristen Gallerneaux weaves a literary mix tape that explores the entwined boundaries between sound, material culture, landscape, and esoteric belief. Essays and fictocritical interludes are arranged to evoke a network of ley lines for the “sonic spectre” to travel through—a hypothetical presence that manifests itself as an invisible layer of noise alongside the conventional histories of technological artifacts.
High Static, Dead Lines is one of the most imaginative books to contend with sound in recent memory. Its labyrinthine explorations creatively mirror the strange and often baffling phenomena they describe - Geeta Dayal
Hear Kristen discuss the book on the Occulture podcast and a mix of some of her favourite recordings on the Graham Dunning's Fractal Meat show on NTS.
Order High Static, Dead Lines here
A HIDDEN LANDSCAPE ONCE A WEEK
The Unruly Curiosity of The UK Music Press in the 1960s-80s, in the Words of Those Who Were There
Edited by Mark Sinker, this anthology of conversations and essays, memories and commentary from the heyday of British pop music writing explores how this uncharted space first came about, who put it together, what it achieved, and where it went. Along the way, it unearths the many surprising worlds explored by this network of young anarchists, dreamers, and agitators who dared to take pop culture seriously, and considers what remains of their critical legacy.
Contributors include Valerie Wilmer, Charles Shaar Murray, Richard Williams, Penny Reel, Jonh Ingham, Jon Savage, Cynthia Rose, Paul Morley, David Toop, Bob Stanley, Barney Hoskyns, Jonathon Green, Simon Frith, Paul Gilroy, and many others
Order A Hidden Landscape Once a Week here
THE SPACE ORACLE
A Guide To Your Stars
Ken Hollings' radical retelling of our relationship with the cosmos, reinventing the history of astronomy as a new form of astrological calendar.
Astronomy is another form of cinema. Time is fragmented and extended. Matter becomes light in motion. The camera remains fixed, looking outwards into the darkness, while the earth moves beneath our feet.
A carefully constructed text in sixty numbered sections, The Space Oracle reinvents the history of astronomy as a new form of astrological calendar. This radical retelling of our relationship with the cosmos reaches back to places and times when astronomers were treated as artists or priests, to when popes took part in astral rites and the common people feared eclipses and comets as portents of disaster.
Panoramic and encyclopedic in its scope, The Space Oracle brings astronauts and spies, engineers and soldiers, goddesses and satellites into alignment with speculative insights and everyday observations. The universe, Hollings argues, is a work in progress—enjoy it.
Order The Space Oracle here
For more information on all titles, events and forthcoming releases, please visit us at strangeattractor.co.uk