May 9th Newsletter

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Torn Light Records
1855 N Milwaukee
Chicago, IL 60647
312.955.0614
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  • Davis Grubb – The Night of the Hunter
    Davis Grubb – The Night of the Hunter
    $16.00 | ,

    Two young children hold the key to a secret stash of money – and a relentless psychopath is on their trail… Harry ‘Preacher’ Powell, his fingers tattooed with LOVE and [...]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Russell Hoban – Turtle Diary
    Russell Hoban – Turtle Diary
    $14.00 | ,

    Born to swim thousands of miles in the ocean, the giant sea turtles are now trapped in a tank of golden-green water at London Zoo. But not for much longer. […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Russell Hoban – Riddley Walker
    Russell Hoban – Riddley Walker
    $16.00 | ,

    Wandering a desolate post-apocalyptic landscape, speaking a broken-down English lost after the end of civilization, Riddley Walker sets out to find out what brought humanity here. This is his [...]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Russell Hoban – Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer
    Russell Hoban – Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer
    $14.00 | ,

    You want to buy my death for a million pounds!’ Piccadilly Circus tube station is an unlikely location for a pact with the Devil, but this is where Jonathan Fitch […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Russell Hoban – The Medusa Frequency
    Russell Hoban – The Medusa Frequency
    $14.00 | ,

    It all begins the night a leaflet comes through the door of unsuccessful novelist Herman Orff, promising a magical cure for writer’s block. The strange treatment plunges him into a […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Russell Hoban – Kleinzeit
    Russell Hoban – Kleinzeit
    $16.00 | ,

    On an ordinary day in a strangely unfamiliar London, Kleinzeit is fired from his advertising job and told he must go to hospital with a skewed hypotenuse. There on Ward […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Russell Hoban – Fremder
    Russell Hoban – Fremder
    $14.00 | ,

    On 4 November 2052, Fremder Gorn is discovered drifting in deep space. He has no spacesuit, no helmet, no oxygen, but he is still alive: the sole survivor from the […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Kobo Abe – The Ruined Map
    Kobo Abe – The Ruined Map
    $14.00 | ,

    A private detective is hired to find a missing person, but nothing is normal about this case. Why has the beautiful, alcoholic wife of the vanished salesman waited over half […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Georges Bataille – Literature and Evil
    Georges Bataille – Literature and Evil
    $16.00 | ,

    ‘Literature is not innocent,’ stated Georges Bataille in this extraordinary 1957 collection of essays, arguing that only by acknowledging its complicity with the knowledge of evil can [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Georges Bataille – Blue of Noon
    Georges Bataille – Blue of Noon
    $16.00 | ,

    Set against the backdrop of Europe’s slide into Fascism, Blue of Noon is a blackly compelling account of depravity and violence. As its narrator lurches despairingly from city to city […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • The Psychedelic Experience : A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead
    The Psychedelic Experience : A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the…
    $14.00 | ,

    The Psychedelic Experience, created by the prophetic shaman-professors Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzer and Richard Alpert, is a foundational text that serves as a model and a guide for all subsequent [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Jorge Luis Borges – The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory
    Jorge Luis Borges – The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Mem…
    $16.00 | ,

    THE BOOK OF SAND was the last of Borges’ major collections to be published. The stories are, in his words, ‘variations on favourite themes… combining a plain and at times […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth
    Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth
    $16.00 | ,

    Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule and first published in 1961, Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth has provided inspiration for [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Stanislaw Lem – The Cyberiad : Fables for the Cybernetic Age
    Stanislaw Lem – The Cyberiad : Fables for the Cybernetic Age
    $16.00 | ,

    A charming, mind-bending and anarchic book of imagined civilizations’Most cosmic civilizations long for things, in the depths of their souls, they would never openly admit [...]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Liam Gillick – Five or Six
    Liam Gillick – Five or Six
    $9.00 | ,

    five or six contains texts selected from more than 100 reviews, articles, and catalogue essays published by Liam Gillick since 1989. The book includes some of the formal, social, and […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Thomas Moynihan – X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction
    Thomas Moynihan – X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinc…
    $10.00 | ,

    How humanity came to contemplate its possible extinction. From forecasts of disastrous climate change to prophecies of evil AI superintelligences and the impending perils of genome editing, our [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents
    Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents
    $18.00 | ,

    An exploration of the unsettling collisions of art and culture in Georges Bataille’s revolutionary journal and a new consideration of twentieth-century masterpieces by Picasso, Miró, Dalí, [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography
  • Wayne Koestenbaum – The Cheerful Scapegoat: Fables
    Wayne Koestenbaum – The Cheerful Scapegoat: Fables
    $7.00 | ,

    In his first book of short fiction–a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables–Wayne Koestenbaum takes the gloom and melancholy of our own terrifying [...]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film
    Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film
    $12.00 | ,

    Translating the experience of film: filmmakers, writers, and artists explore the elements of film that make us feel “outside and inside at the same time.” “Every film is a [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • J.G Ballard – Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007
    J.G Ballard – Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007
    $13.00 | ,

    J. G. Ballard’s collected nonfiction from 1962 to 2007, mapping the cultural obsessions, experiences, and insights of one of the most original minds of his generation. J. G. Ballard was [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Revisions: Essays by Apollo Musagète, Yvonne Rainer, and Others
    Revisions: Essays by Apollo Musagète, Yvonne Rainer, and Others
    $12.00 | ,

    The final iteration of Rainer’s dance rant A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies, accompanied by texts offering a real-time account of Rainer’s creative process. [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Presence: A Conversation at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich
    Presence: A Conversation at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich
    $10.00 | ,

    Recently, the idea of “presence” has returned to the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In February 2013, in Zurich’s historical Cabaret Voltaire, which was central to the [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Ben Ware – On Extinction: Beginning Again At The End
    Ben Ware – On Extinction: Beginning Again At The End
    $10.00 | ,

    On Extinction takes us on a breathtaking philosophical journey through desperate territory. As we face ‘the end of all things’, Ben Ware argues we must face our apocalyptic future without […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Moscow Symposium: Conceptualism Revisited
    Moscow Symposium: Conceptualism Revisited
    $10.00 | ,

    Beyond the view that multiple, globally dispersed conceptual art practices provide a heterogeneity of cultural references, Andrei Monastyrski and Collective Actions propose much more: other [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • The Medium of Contingency (Urbanomic / Redactions)
    The Medium of Contingency (Urbanomic / Redactions)
    $8.00 | ,

    An unprecedented meeting of philosophical thought, financial markets, and the art world. Why has the concept of contingency taken on a marked importance both in contemporary philosophy and in [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Elliott Sharp – IrRational Music
    Elliott Sharp – IrRational Music
    $10.00 | ,

    A memoir and manifesto by a pivotal figure at the junction of rock, the avant-garde, and an ever-widening spiral of art, theater, film, and dance. For over five decades, Elliott […]

    GENRE: Memoir
  • Karl Ove Knausgaard – In The Land Of The Cyclops
    Karl Ove Knausgaard – In The Land Of The Cyclops
    $11.00 | ,

    In his first essay collection to be published in English, the New York Times bestselling author of the My Struggle series Karl Ove Knausgaard explores art, philosophy, and literature with […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Hydroplutonic Kernow (Urbanomic / Redactions)
    Hydroplutonic Kernow (Urbanomic / Redactions)
    $9.00 | ,

    A geophilosophical odyssey through the remains of Cornwall’s industrial past offers a historical portrait of geotrauma in action. This unique document provides a pioneering case study in [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • French Theory and American Art
    French Theory and American Art
    $10.00 | ,

    Many postwar American artists were influenced by French philosophy, literary studies, and social sciences. Accordingly, a number of French authors gathered under the label “French [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Charles Harrison – Essays on Art and Language
    Charles Harrison – Essays on Art and Language
    $10.00 | ,

    These essays by art historian and critic Charles Harrison are based on the premise that making art and talking about art are related enterprises. They are written from the point […]

    GENRE: Art/Photography
  • Jacques Rancière – The Emancipated Spectator
    Jacques Rancière – The Emancipated Spectator
    $8.00 | ,

    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, […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Robert Gluck – Communal Nude
    Robert Gluck – Communal Nude
    $9.00 | ,

    Since cofounding San Francisco’s influential New Narrative circle in 1979, Robert Glück has been one of America’s finest prose stylists of innovative fiction, bending narrative into the service [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Ewa Lajer-Burcharth – Chardin Material
    Ewa Lajer-Burcharth – Chardin Material
    $9.00 | ,

    Adapted from the lecture she delivered at the Institut für Kunstkritik, Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth’s essay explores the dimension of self-reflexivity in the work of [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Joanna Walsh – Break Up
    Joanna Walsh – Break Up
    $7.00 | ,

    In this “novel in essays,” Joanna Walsh simultaneously flees and pursues an ambiguous partner in an affair conducted mostly online. Traversing Europe, she awaits emails and texts and PMs, awash [...]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers
    Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black…
    $8.00 | ,

    The life of an unexpected revolutionary with the Black Panthers in Algiers Mokhtefi (née Klein), a Jewish American from Long Island, has had an exhilarating life. In the 1960s, she […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times
    The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philos…
    $11.00 | ,

    “A soaring intellectual narrative starring the radical, brilliant, and provocative philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Ayn Rand by the critically acclaimed [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen: An Authorized Biography
    Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen: An Authorized Biog…
    $10.00 | ,

    “People tell me it’s country music,” Terry Allen has joked, “and I ask, ‘Which country?’” For nearly sixty years, Allen’s inimitable art has explored the borderlands of memory, crossing [...]

    GENRE: Folk / Country, Non-Fiction
  • To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse
    To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Conver…
    $10.00 | ,

    This is the mesmerizing story of an enigmatic life. When musician and New Yorker contributor Howard Fishman first heard Connie Converse’s voice on a recording, he was convinced she could […]

    GENRE: Folk / Country, Non-Fiction
  • Thurston Moore – Sonic Life: A Memoir
    Thurston Moore – Sonic Life: A Memoir
    $10.00 | ,

    “Thurston Moore moved to Manhattan’s East Village in 1978 with a yearning for music. He wanted to be immersed in downtown New York’s sights and sounds—the feral energy of its […]

    GENRE: Indie / Alternative, Memoir
  • The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality
    The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature…
    $10.00 | , ,

    Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth—that love is [...]

  • Alex Ross – The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
    Alex Ross – The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Centur…
    $10.00 | , ,

    In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First […]

    GENRE: Modern Composition / Musique Concrete / Electronic, Non-Fiction
  • Cormac McCarthy – The Passenger Box Set (The Passenger/Stella Maris)
    Cormac McCarthy – The Passenger Box Set (The Passenger/Stella Ma…
    $20.00 | , ,

    An artfully designed box set of Pulitzer Prize–winning author Cormac McCarthy’s final masterpiece, told in two volumes, each a New York Times bestseller. The Passenger is a fast-paced and [...]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius
    Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s …
    $10.00 | , ,

    Miss May Does Not Exist, by Carrie Courogen is the riveting biography of comedian, director, actor and writer Elaine May, one of America’s greatest comic geniuses. May began her career […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Michael Mann: A Contemporary Retrospective
    Michael Mann: A Contemporary Retrospective
    $16.00 | , ,

    During his career, Michael Mann has drawn a singular and innovative line within the Hollywood industry. The Last of the Mohicans, Heat, Revelations, Ali, Collateral, Miami Vice, and even Public [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band
    MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band
    $9.00 | , ,

    A riveting oral biography of the proto-punk Detroit rockers MC5, based on original interviews with the band and key members of their inner circle. Few bands have dared to ignite […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Lucy R. Lippard on Pop Art
    Lucy R. Lippard on Pop Art
    $7.00 | , ,

    Explore the dynamic world of 1960s pop art through Lucy Lippard’s insightful analysis of this groundbreaking international art movement. Pop Art epitomized the free spirit of the 1960s, [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • Loaded: The Life (and Afterlife) of the Velvet Underground
    Loaded: The Life (and Afterlife) of the Velvet Underground
    $9.00 | , ,

    Rebellion always starts somewhere, and in the music world of the transgressive teen—whether it be the 1960s or the 2020s—the Velvet Underground represents ground zero. Crystallizing the idea of [...]

    GENRE: Art Rock / Krautrock / Prog / Psych, Non-Fiction
  • Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller
    Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller
    $10.00 | , ,

    During his lifetime, Buckminster Fuller was hailed as one of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century. As the architectural designer and futurist best known for the geodesic dome, he […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Francis Bacon: Unsichtbare Räume/Invisible Rooms
    Francis Bacon: Unsichtbare Räume/Invisible Rooms
    $16.00 | , ,

    This fascinating and beautifully illustrated book on the work of Francis Bacon, one of the 20th century’s greatest painters, takes an in-depth look at his trademark motif of figures imprisoned [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography
  • Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker
    Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker
    $8.00 | , ,

    Kathy Acker (1947–1997) was a rare and almost inconceivable thing: a celebrity experimental writer. Twenty-five years after her death, she remains one of the most original, shocking, and [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction