Jan 31st Newsletter

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Torn Light Records
1855 N Milwaukee
Chicago, IL 60647
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  • Amit Chaudhuri – Finding the Raga
    Amit Chaudhuri – Finding the Raga
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    By turns essay, memoir and cultural study, Alaap is Amit Chaudhuri’s singular account of his discovery of, and enduring passion for, North Indian music: an ancient, evolving tradition whose [...]

    GENRE: Hindustani, Non-Fiction
  • John Rechy – About My Life and the Kept Woman: A Memoir
    John Rechy – About My Life and the Kept Woman: A Memoir
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    The untold personal life story of the novelist whom Gore Vidal has hailed as “one of the few original American writers of the last century.” John Rechy’s first novel, City […]

    GENRE: Memoir
  • Julie Hecht – Was This Man a Genius?: Talks with Andy Kaufman
    Julie Hecht – Was This Man a Genius?: Talks with Andy Kaufman
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    Just as Andy Kaufman subverted traditional forms of comedy, Julie Hecht, with her deadpan wit and highly original style, subverts the traditional form of the profile with her acclaimed nonfiction [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Annette Michelson – On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film
    Annette Michelson – On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings …
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    The celebrated critic and film scholar Annette Michelson saw the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s as radically redefining and extending the Modernist tradition of painting and [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980
    Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980
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    Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980 is a groundbreaking anthology that features papers from a conference and series of film screenings on postwar avant-garde [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Lyn Hejinian – Oxota: A Short Russian Novel
    Lyn Hejinian – Oxota: A Short Russian Novel
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    Over the course of nearly a decade (1983–1991), author Lyn Hejinian visited the USSR seven times, staying frequently with her friends the poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and his wife Zina in […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci
    Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci
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    Pioneering conceptual artist Vito Acconci began his career as a poet. In the 1960s, before beginning his work in performance and video art, Acconci studied at the Iowa Writers Workshop […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive, Non-Fiction
  • Chester Himes – If He Hollers Let Him Go
    Chester Himes – If He Hollers Let Him Go
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    This story of a man living every day in fear of his life for simply being black is as powerful today as it was when it was first published in […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Ken Russell – Beethoven Confidential & Brahms Gets Laid
    Ken Russell – Beethoven Confidential & Brahms Gets Laid
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    Beethoven Confidential started life as a play that was developed into a screenplay for a film starring Jodie Foster and Glenda Jackson, with Anthony Hopkins as the deaf musical genius […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Stan Brakhage: The Realm Buster
    Stan Brakhage: The Realm Buster
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    Stan Brakhage’s body of work counts as one of the most important within post-war avant-garde cinema, and yet it has rarely been given the attention it deserves. Over the years, […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • NSK from Kapital to Capital: Neue Slowenische Kunst-an Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia
    NSK from Kapital to Capital: Neue Slowenische Kunst-an Event of the Fi…
    $20.00 | , , Add to cart

    The generously illustrated, lavishly documented story of NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst), the eastern European art collective present at the last revolution of the twentieth century. This book is [...]

    GENRE: Industrial / Power Electronics, Non-Fiction
  • Marco Breuer: Early Recordings
    Marco Breuer: Early Recordings
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    “Early Recordings” presents the first comprehensive look at the work of the respected, conceptually driven artist, Marco Breuer. Boldly experimental, Breuer uses an extensive and [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography
  • James Lee Byars : The Rest is Silence
    James Lee Byars : The Rest is Silence
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    Published on the occasion of the exhibition James Lee Byars: The Rest Is Silence, 27 April – 24 June 2006 at Michael Werner Gallery, New York (in collaboration with Mary […]

    GENRE: Art/Photography
  • Peter McGough – I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going: The Art Scene and Downtown New York in the 1980s
    Peter McGough – I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Goi…
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    Brilliantly funny, frank, and shattering, this is the bittersweet memoir by Peter McGough of his life with artist David McDermott. Set in New York’s Lower East Side of the 1980s […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Constructing an Avant-Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949-1979
    Constructing an Avant-Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949-1979
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    Brazilian avant-garde artists of the postwar era worked from a fundamental but productive out-of-jointness. They were modernist but distant from modernism. Europeans and North Americans may feel [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • Between Form and Content: Perspectives on Jacob Lawrence + Black Mountain College
    Between Form and Content: Perspectives on Jacob Lawrence + Black Mount…
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    This catalog accompanies Between Form and Content: Perspectives on Jacob Lawrence + Black Mountain College, the first exhibition to focus on a watershed moment in the seminal career of Jacob […]

    GENRE: Art/Photography
  • David Carrier – Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained
    David Carrier – Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesth…
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    “Wild Art” refers to work that exists outside the established, rarified world of art galleries and cultural channels. It encompasses uncatalogued, uncommodified art not often recognized as such, [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • Fredric Jameson – The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971-1986
    Fredric Jameson – The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971-1986
    $8.00 | , , Add to cart

    A collection of Jameson’s essays related to literary theory. Book is in “Like New” condition. Some light superficial wear and/or remainder mark might be present.

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • William T. Vollmann – The Book of Dolores
    William T. Vollmann – The Book of Dolores
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    William T. Vollmann has travelled to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan with Islamic commandos, shivered out a solitary stretch at the North Magnetic Pole in winter, hopped freight trains, studied the [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • Kamala Tiyavanich – In the Cool Shade of Compassion: The Enchanted World of the Buddha in the Jungle
    Kamala Tiyavanich – In the Cool Shade of Compassion: The Enchant…
    $8.00 | , , Add to cart

    A fascinating collection of stories of the Thai forest monks that illuminates the Thai Forest tradition as a vibrant, compassionate, and highly appealing way of life. This work ingeniously [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test & The Power Of Seeing
    Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test & The Power Of Seeing
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    A popular misconception of the controversial Rorschach test, which requires subjects to interpret a series of ten inkblots, is that there are no wrong answers. For professional psychologists, [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Morrissey – Autobiography
    Morrissey – Autobiography
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    Autobiography covers Morrissey’s life from his birth until the present day. Book is in “Like New” condition. Some light superficial wear and/or remainder mark might be present.

    GENRE: Memoir
  • Jim Dine: This is How I Remember, Now: Portraits: Photographs by Jim Dine
    Jim Dine: This is How I Remember, Now: Portraits: Photographs by Jim D…
    $15.00 | , , Add to cart

    Jim Dine may be best known for his prints, paintings and sculptural works–and for being one of the founders of Pop art–but he has also been making photographs since 1996. […]

    GENRE: Art/Photography
  • Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe
    Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe
    $9.00 | , , Add to cart

    Multi-disciplinary in approach and cross-European in scope, this richly illustrated book features new links between the political and the monstrous in the early modern period. Emphasizing the [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Paul Davies – The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence
    Paul Davies – The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien I…
    $8.00 | , , Add to cart

    Fifty years ago, a young astronomer named Frank Drake first pointed a radio telescope at nearby stars in the hope of picking up a signal from an alien civilization. Thus […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Jonathan Strauss – Human Remains: Medicine, Death, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Paris
    Jonathan Strauss – Human Remains: Medicine, Death, and Desire in…
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    “The living and the dead cohabited Paris until the late eighteenth century, when, in the name of public health, measures were taken to drive the latter from the city. Cemeteries […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Verena A Conley – Helene Cixous
    Verena A Conley – Helene Cixous
    $8.00 | , , Add to cart

    “Reflecting the broad spectrum of modern European and American theory, this introductory series focuses on those cultural theorists who have had the most significant impact in the twentieth [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Hard to Be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats
    Hard to Be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats
    $8.00 | , , Add to cart

    “It’s been said that Jack Kerouac made it cool to be a thinking person seeking a spiritual experience. And there is no doubt that the writers he knew and inspired—iconic […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles
    An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    “Paul Bowles’s seductive, terrifying, exquisitely detached fictions have inspired writers and iconoclasts from the Beats to the present day. In this brilliant and definitive [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Diane Wakoski – The Emerald City of Las Vegas
    Diane Wakoski – The Emerald City of Las Vegas
    $8.00 | , , Add to cart

    “Dedicated to America’s mythic city, Diane Wakoski discusses risk, betrayal, and history in this third volume of her Archaeology of Movies and Books. Wakoski skillfully weaves together [...]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Klaus Mann – Alexander
    Klaus Mann – Alexander
    $8.00 | , , Add to cart

    “This historical fantasy, written by the son of the well-known German novelist Thomas Mann, takes Alexander the Great for its subject, charting his life and career, and examining his [...]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Carol Off – Bitter Chocolate: Anatomy of an Industry
    Carol Off – Bitter Chocolate: Anatomy of an Industry
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    “Bitter Chocolate is both an absorbing social history and a passionate investigation into an industry that has institutionalized abuse as it indulges our whims. Award-winning journalist [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It
    Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It
    $9.00 | , , Add to cart

    “Over the last decade, blockchains and crypto have opened up a new terrain for political action. It is not surprising, however, that the crypto space has also become overrun by […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema
    Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cine…
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    “In Picturing American Modernity, Kristen Whissel investigates the relationship between early American cinema and the experience of technological modernity. She demonstrates how between the [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Kembrew McLeod – Downtown Pop Underground
    Kembrew McLeod – Downtown Pop Underground
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    “The 1960s to early ’70s was a pivotal time for American culture, and New York City was ground zero for seismic shifts in music, theater, art, and filmmaking. The Downtown […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture
    Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    “In this lively narrative, award-winning author Michael Kammen presents a fascinating analysis of cutting-edge art and artists and their unique ability to both delight and provoke us. He [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry
    Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    “Letters profiles Canadian artist Michael Morris during the period between 1964 and 1971 with a particular focus on his relationship with concrete poetry, considered to be among the first [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Gerhard Richter: Images of an Era
    Gerhard Richter: Images of an Era
    $25.00 | , , Add to cart

    “Among German painter Gerhard Richter’s best-known works are his large-scale paintings based on—and sometimes applied directly to—photographs. A transplant to West Germany mere months [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • Blurring The Boundaries: Installation Art 1969-1996
    Blurring The Boundaries: Installation Art 1969-1996
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    “A classic documentation of site-specific and multi-media installation artwork, Blurring the Boundaries surveys twenty-five years of the genre’s finest accomplishments. Included are [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography
  • Abstracts of Karl Rahner’s Unserialized Essays
    Abstracts of Karl Rahner’s Unserialized Essays
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    “Excellent reference work to finding specific topics within the vast range of the writings of Karl Rahner. Using this book in tandem with the authors earlier Abstracts of Karl Rahners […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • 26 Songs in 30 Days: Woody Guthrie’s Columbia River Songs and the Planned Promised Land in the Pacific Northwest
    26 Songs in 30 Days: Woody Guthrie’s Columbia River Songs and th…
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    “In 1941, Woody Guthrie wrote 26 songs in 30 days–including classics like “Roll On Columbia” and “Pastures of Plenty”–when he was hired by the Bonneville [...]

    GENRE: Folk / Country
  • Music of Azerbaijan: From Mugham to Opera
    Music of Azerbaijan: From Mugham to Opera
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    “This book traces the development of Azerbaijani art music from its origins in the Eastern, modal, improvisational tradition known as mugham through its fusion with Western classical, jazz, [...]

    GENRE: International, Non-Fiction
  • The Henry Davis Gift: A Collection of Bookbindings
    The Henry Davis Gift: A Collection of Bookbindings
    $30.00 | , , Add to cart

    “This much anticipated third and final volume of The Henry Davis Gift focuses on South and East European fine bindings, with additional sections on Oriental and American bindings. It [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • Gao Minglu – Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art
    Gao Minglu – Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Ce…
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    “To the extent that Chinese contemporary art has become a global phenomenon, it is largely through the groundbreaking exhibitions curated by Gao Minglu: “China/Avant-Garde” [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • In the Atelier: Erik Desmazières Printmaker René Tazé Printer: An Artistic collaboration 1978-2018
    In the Atelier: Erik Desmazières Printmaker René Tazé Printer: An Arti…
    $15.00 | , , Add to cart

    “Erik Desmazières’s first love was drawing and he began engraving in the Ville de Paris studios from 1971. René Tazé joined the Leblanc studio, a famous and ancient Parisian intaglio [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • American Modernism at Mid-Century: The Work of Morris Davidson
    American Modernism at Mid-Century: The Work of Morris Davidson
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    “This volume presents the first scholarly consideration of Morris Davidson (1898–1979), an influential painter and educator whose work has been neglected in the art history of [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • The Big Idea: Criticality and Practice in Contemporary Architecture
    The Big Idea: Criticality and Practice in Contemporary Architecture
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    “Scott Johnson is the highly acclaimed designer of some of L.A.’s most recognized architecture. As partner in the award-winning Los Angeles architecture firm Johnson Fain he was the [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Scott Walker – Sundog
    Scott Walker – Sundog
    $9.00 | , , Add to cart

    “Scott Walker is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant, serious, and intelligent avant-garde artists today. As one of the greatest lyricists of the 20th century and front man of globally [...]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Franciska ‎– Tryghed
    Franciska ‎– Tryghed
    $16.00 | , , Add to cart

    Tryghed is the debut album from Franciska, the alias of the now Copenhagen-based artist Jonas Torstensson. As one of the key figures in the young, vivid scene around the Forlaget […]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise
  • Methuselah ‎– Matthew, Mark, Luke And John (Sealed)
    Methuselah ‎– Matthew, Mark, Luke And John (Sealed)
    $40.00 | , , Add to cart

    “There’s no true gospel to be gleaned from Methuselah, just lots of familiar Bible references and name-drops, but Les Nicol’s lead guitar cuts through any nonsense, ripping out [...]

    GENRE: Art Rock / Krautrock / Prog / Psych