An insightful and timely account of the life of Edmund White, his generation's most respected gay writer, chronicles his arrival in New York in 1962 and captures the full flavor of the early days of gay liberation and activism. 10,000 first printing.

Edmund White: The Burning World

Biographies & Memoirs

Barber, Stephen

Arts & Literature

St.Martin's Press

Antonin Artaud is one of the great cultural legends of the 20th century. His Theatre of Cruelty altered the course of modern theatre and his experiments with the Surrealist movement have proved inspirational throughout Europe and America. But Artaud's life was one of terrible failure and confrontation, an exploration of the extremes of agony and joy. At the end of a long series of journeys - both physical and spiritual - aimed at creating a magical culture of the human body, he was arrested and interned for nine years in a succession of French lunatic asylums, where he suffered starvation and was subjected to 50 electroshock treatments. This book is a faithful portrait of his life and work.

Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs

Faber&Faber

Antonin Artaud

Humor & Entertainment

Faber and Faber

This book explores the visual transformation of the contemporary European city, focusing on the most emblematic and visibly wounded of all European cities – Berlin. Taking as its subject the "intricately assembled, relentlessly disassembling metropolitan screen", it charts the virulent implosions of culture, the distortions and violence that give city-living its fractured and hallucinatory quality. Provocatively written as a series of inter-locking poetic fragments, the text evokes the formation of metropolitan "identity" as it ricochets between the physical surface of the city and the vulnerable but manipulating consciousness of city dwellers. Barber has discovered a powerful new vocabulary – a vocabulary charged with the visual and sonic impact of the cinema. Like the city, the text pulsates, creatively chaotic, raw and exhilarating.

Fragments of the European City (Topographics)

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

Reaktion Books

The great riches of Western Europe and the United States have been accumulated over six decades. That the world economy is still only shakily recovering from the credit crunch serves only to underline our misplaced faith in a system ill-equipped to deal with our real needs in the twenty first century. Paradoxically, our riches are now the cause of our greatest problems. This book offers a devastating analysis of our political system, and argues that the captains of the baby boom generation milked its economic prosperity while failing to deliver a sustainable ideology. Accepted for so long, the post-war ‘mixed economic settlement’ of three contrasting forms of economic, welfare and social liberalism have reached the limits of what can now be achieved without fundamental political change. The comfortable bubble of Western economic prosperity has created a rich, complacent society that has, in pursuit of hedonistic and consumer-driven short term interests, lost sight of its original goals. If the real lessons have not been learned, there is a real danger, for reasons of political convenience and economic dogmatism, that the system that generated the crisis will not be reformed. This book makes a passionate case that instead of accepting a status quo of dysfunctional modern economics we must now create a new, political settlement prepared to tackle the great issues of our age before it is too late.REVIEWS "While the Western world has managed to build great economic prosperity, it has not created great happiness or wellbeing, reconciled political conflicts, nor defended policymaking against globalization, argues the author, who contends that the riches of the Western world are in fact the cause of most of the Western world's problems. Disavowing any anti-capitalist intent, he combines political theory, history, and economic analysis to discuss how baby-boom politicians came to power in Europe and the United States and cemented a policy mix forged in the coming together of economic, welfare, and social liberalism which failed to produce an adequate political strand of fairness and civic renewal to the project. Previously unavailable in the US"Protoview (previously known as Book News)

Tragedy of Riches: How our Politics has Failed Us and Why We Need a New Economic Destiny

Health, Fitness & Dieting

University of Buckingham Press

Caligula is the most notorious of the Roman Emperors, a vile degenerate who seduced his own sister, installed a horse in the Roman Senate, turned his palace into a brothel, married a prostitute, tortured and killed innocent citizens on whims, and committed countless other acts of madness, cruelty and deviancy. Award-winning writers Stephen Barber and Jeremy Reed document in full the atrocities of Caligula and also the other mad Emperors, including the deranged Commodus and Heliogabalus, the teenage ambisexual sun-god. Also included is a bloody history of Gladiators and that depraved circus, the Roman Arena. This is a shocking catalogue of ancient perversity and decadence. 
The greatest history of Caesaral carnage ever written. -- Bizarre Magazine

Caligula: Divine Carnage: Atrocities of the Roman Emperors (Solar Blood History)

Arts & Photography

Solar Books

The work of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) remains a constant source of seminal inspiration, astonishment and provocation across contemporary visual art, film, performance, choreography, digital media, and critical theory, throughout the world. In ARTAUD: TERMINAL CURSES, Stephen Barber explores the newly-revealed set of 406 notebooks which Artaud used in the final years of his life in Paris, after his release from a decade of asylum-incarceration, to carry through his projects for corporeal transformation and social refusal. Artaud's notebooks are designed as an autonomous work in their own right, through which he distils his pre-eminent preoccupations: the envisioning of a new, organ-less human anatomy (crucial for Deleuze and Guattari's theoretical work), his conception of the time and space of gesture, his raw fury against society and all of its manifestations, his visualization of a ruined and supplanted natural and urban world, his intensive confrontation between text and image, and his reflections on the fluctuating parameters of life and death. Those preoccupations retrospectively illuminate Artaud's earlier Surrealist work and theories of film and performance. This eye-opening and original university-level text will be of major significance for all readers interested in the extreme zones of art, literature and media, as well providing critical new revelations for those engaged with Artaud's work. Stephen Barber is a leading authority on Artaud's work, and author of "Artaud: The Screaming Body" and "Artaud: Blows and Bombs".

Antonin Artaud: Terminal Curses: The Notebooks 1945-1948

Hijikita: Revolt of the Body examines the life and work of Tatsumi Hijikata (1928–86), who invented a revolutionary performance art and dance known as Ankoku Butoh, or “Dance of Darkness.” The Butoh style of performance and movement premiered in Japan in 1959 and developed in subsequent years in response to the student riots and the 1960s protest movement. Hijikata is the supreme figure in the last half-century of Japan’s experimental culture, and he remains a seminal and inspirational presence for Japanese artists, choreographers, film-makers, musicians, and writers. 
Based on extended interviews with Hijikata's family and all of his surviving collaborators, this is the only book to focus exclusively on Hijikata and his work, including his interest in European art and figures such as Genet, Artaud, Sade, and Lautréamont, as well as the Japanese Surrealist movement. It also provides a unique, in-depth analysis of Japanese avant-garde culture of the 1960s—including film, visual art, and literature—in direct relation to Hijikata’s performance pieces. 
Butoh and Hijikata’s performance art continue to grow in popularity and appreciation around the world, and this text is the definitive study of Hijikata and his radical art.
“A brilliant and illuminating study of Hijikata and the Japanese avant-garde”—Donald Richie

Hijikata: Revolt of the Body (Solar East)

Berlin’s unique history of conflict, violence, and transformation has created an arena of extraordinary urban surfaces, from which the present-day city and its layered, wounded past are projected simultaneously. In The Walls of Berlin, acclaimed cultural historian Stephen Barberexplores the intimate connections between those surfaces and the works of art and film that have both incised Berlin’s urban screens and been inspired by them.Drawing on a vast range of material—from the first films of Berlin in the 1890s to the city’s place in contemporary digital art—the book takes the form of a series of image-propelled journeys across the face of Berlin and through its urban histories, excavating the ricochets among the city, art, and film. In Barber’s hands, Berlin's walls become apertures that mediate the city’s preoccupations and manias, damage and scars, strata and outgrowths, sexual obsessions, and urban vanishings. The Walls of Berlin is a rich cultural history of the city’s memories—as well as its acts of forgetting—that illuminates overlooked spaces and the sensory presences that inhabit them.This is the first truly innovative look at Berlin since Siegfried Kracauer’s classic Streets of Berlin and Elsewhere, and it will be essential reading for anyone engaged with the transformations of contemporary cities as well as for readers and visitors enthralled by Berlin’s astonishing surfaces.

The Walls of Berlin: Urban Surfaces: Art: Film (Solar Seminal Cities)

History & Criticism

The Art of Destruction: The Vienna Action Group In Film, Performance & Revolt

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Books by Barber, Stephen