We're very happy to announce that the third volume of Ken Hollings'
celebrated archaeology of trash culture and aesthetics, Paradise:
The Psychoanalysis of Trash, is available to order now,
shipping immediately.
Customers who buy the book directly from us will also receive a
complimentary copy of The Trash Concordance: A Guide to The Divine
Comedy, The Trash Project, Dante and Me.
If you're new to the project, we're also happy to be able to offer,
for a limited time only, the complete set of works at a discounted price of
£45.00.
The sequel to Inferno and Purgatory is the third volume in
Ken Hollings’ three-part series of personal reflections on Trash and Trash
Aesthetics.
All copies of Paradise bought from our web site will come with a
free copy of The Trash Concordance, a 136pp book highlighting some of
the structural and thematic correspondences between The Divine Comedy
and The Trash Project.
"What first attracted me to the prospect of creating one work in the
shadow of another was Dante’s inflexible commitment to proportion,
symmetry and uniformity in the depiction of his spiritual journey through the
afterlife."
Energetic and enthusiastic, Hollings’ conception of trash is poetic,
exaggerated and true to the conceptual and ultimately confrontational nature of
the underground.
Laura Jacobs, Art Monthly
In the third and final volume of his personal reflections on Trash
Aesthetics, Ken Hollings tells the story of three kings who squandered
everything they had in a grandiose spectacle of waste. King Ludwig II of
Bavaria, ‘King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ Elvis Presley and
Michael Jackson, the ‘King of Pop,’ all shared the same doomed
innocence. Their lives and early deaths were connected through individual
displays of unfettered extravagance that brought them to the very edge of ruin.
Each of them lived out their personal ideals of beauty and pleasure – even
after the money was gone. In his reworking of Dante Alighieri’s
Paradiso, Hollings presents Heaven as a place of rebellious but tragic
self-indulgence.
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Ken Hollings is a writer and broadcaster based in London. As well as the
first two volumes of his Trash Trilogy, he is the author of The Bright
Labyrinth, Welcome to Mars, The Space Oracle and
Destroy All Monsters. His work has appeared in numerous journals and
anthologies as well as in features and series for BBC Radio 3, Radio 4 and
Resonance 104.4 FM. He teaches at the Royal College of Art and Central St
Martins College of Art and Design.
REVIEWS
- Ken Hollings is a master of connecting the dots between avant-garde art
history, outré culture and weird science.
David Pescowitz Boing Boing
Ken Hollings has been described as both a genius and an alien. He is the
kind of writer who looks up at a million points of light in the sky and starts
to connect the dots.