Non-fiction

A biography of Allen Ginsberg that re-examines the life, poetry and politics of this crucial poet and activist, and discusses his position in American letters and culture. It moves from the influences of childhood to his meeting with Kerouac and Burroughs in the New York of the late 1940s and the birth of the Beat Generation. Ginsberg’s epic poem ‘Howl’, written in 1955, is one of the defining works of the Beat Generation despite having been labelled obscene when it was first published. A harsh denunciation of American capitalism and conformity, the poem drew scenes, characters and situations from Ginsberg’s life, a life re-examined here by his former editor and researcher.

Grave Desire is an analysis of the occasions of necrophilia throughout history, literature and the arts. It is an examination of the breaking of taboos and the metastasizing of fetishes in individuals and cultures using the works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek and others to explore the biographies of known necrophiles such as Carl von Cosel, Karen Greenlee and Ed Gein, and to analyze the cultures of Ancient Egypt, Greece, Troy, Victorian England and the first to eighth century CE civilization of the Moche people in northern Peru who used necrophilia as a means of religious time travel. Throughout the book, examples from the works of Herodotus, the Metaphysical poets, the Marquis de Sade, Cormac McCarthy, Poppie Z Brite, Jörg Buttgereit and more are used for illustration. 

Notes from the Sick Room takes place in an imaginary hospital that bends the rules of time and space. Within its wards and departments we meet artists, musicians and writers who have suffered from various physical illnesses – cancer, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and physical trauma. Their lives and works are discussed in an attempt to diagnose how their complaints influenced their work or how their creativity affected their symptoms. We meet Virginia Woolf, Kathy Acker, Frida Kahlo, Katherine Mansfield, Bob Dylan Bruce Chatwin and many others as they struggle to produce works of art, literature and music while in denial, acceptance or flight and through periods of serious illness and convalescence. As we move through the hospital, specialists keep us informed of the history of creativity and illness and the author divulges his own medical history.

Collaborationists Steve Finbow and Karolina Urbaniak's Death Mort Tod uses fiction, non-fiction, appropriation, cut-ups, and a series of over fifty unsettling illustrations to tour the dark sites of Europe with its millennia of genocides, mass murders, serial killings and suicides. A country-to-country death trip, a necro-travel guide, a Baedeker of bereavement, incorporating myth, folklore, maps, reportage, photographs, recordings, illustrations and poetry. Discover a continent’s thanatic history within a textual and visual reliquary – A European Book of the Dead. 

A week later, on June 26, 1977, 199 days after the Mineshaft opened its doors for the first time, across the bridges, through the tunnels, seventeen-year-old Judy Placido and twenty-year-old Salvatore Lupo have been dancing in the Elephas discotheque on 211th Street in Bayside, Queens, and are sitting in Lupo’s car. It is 3 a.m. and they are talking about the Son of Sam. Three gunshots from a .44-calibre Charter Arms Bulldog penetrate the vehicle. None of the strikes are fatal. << penis, expelled, bouncing up, shining, transparent film of jissom coating reddened flesh, violaceous on glans, marked with ringed imprints >> Exterior. It is necessary to invent with the body, with its elements, its surfaces, its volumes, its depths, a nondisciplinary eroticism: that of the body plunged into a volatile and diffused state through chance encounters and incalculable pleasures.

The biography of the painter, goldsmith, sculptor, anatomist and black magician Niccolò di Mescolano – born in Florence in 1465 – reads like a prototype of the lives of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Aleister Crowley and Robert Mapplethorpe. This newly discovered work by the little-known sixteenth-century Italian writer Stefano Pinnarco (author of Desiderio di grazia, Appunti dalla stanza del malato, Morte morte morte and Il pozzo della mente) charts the remarkable short life of this forgotten experimental early Renaissance artist. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of art, the Renaissance, and the dark side of human nature.

Necrophilia has shadowed humanity throughout its existence, from ancient Egypt, to the Moche culture of Peru, the exploits of the renowned Vampire of Montparnasse, the sexual murders of the Weimar Republic, through to serial killers such as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. This new edition of Grave Desire – with artworks by Karolina Urbaniak – delves unflinchingly into the myths, art and practices surrounding this taboo subject. Finding Juliet’s catatonic body and believing she had poisoned herself, it could have crossed Romeo’s mind to act out the unthinkable. Maybe Juliet, seeing Romeo’s corpse, considered a little sexual frottage before she stabbed herself with the phallic dagger. Repulsive yet real, disgusting and disturbing, this is an erotic book of the dead.