What do the doors of Advent calendars conceal? Chocolates, sometimes, or toys. Sometimes there are illustrations of chocolates and toys. And holly. And snow. Things that make Christmas Christmas. Derek McCormack's Christmas Days is an Advent calendar in words and images. The chapters are doors, each wittily illustrated by Seth, and each offering a behind-the-scenes look at the making of something quintessentially Christmassy. Wrapping paper, toy stockings, tree stands. When did they become part of Christmas? Where were they made? Who made them? A blend of history and reportage, Christmas Days includes a cast of incredible characters and a sampling of festive holiday treats from the past and present.

Christmas Days

History

McCormack, Derek

Americas

House of Anansi Press

Christmas Days leads us through the 24 days before Christmas, stopping to examine some of the most wonderfully wacky traditions along the way. In each of his 24 charming chapters, McCormack tucks an inventive story that is quintessentially Christmassy and wittily illustrated by acclaimed cartoonist Seth. From toy stockings to Santa Claus to holly and mistletoe, Christmas Days offers a delightful sampling of holiday treats past and present.

Christmas Days: From Fake Snow to Santalands, the Things That Make Christmas Christmas

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Wild Mouse

Chambers, Chris

Pedlar Press

Judy Blame's Obituary: Writings on Fashion and Death

Judy Blame's Obituary: Writings on Fashion and Death

Arts & Photography

Pilot Press

Key Concepts in Urban Geography (Key Concepts in Human Geography)

Key Concepts in Urban Geography is a new kind of textbook that forms part of an innovative set of companion texts for the human geography sub-disciplines. Organized around 20 short essays, Key Concepts in Urban Geography provides a cutting edge introduction to the central concepts that define contemporary research in urban geography.

McNamara, Kim

McNeill, Donald

Latham, Alan

Sage Publications Ltd.

A comic book in words, episodic and eerie, The Haunted Hillbilly is a carnivalesque thrill-ride that reads both like a vintage 1950s issue of Tales from the Crypt and a 21st century re-imagining of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. The Haunted Hillbilly is an historical first-person narrative, told by Nudie The Carnival Couturier” (the name’s a twist on Nudie, the Rodeo Tailor”, a real-life figure perhaps best known for dressing Elvis Presley), a gay couturier who, in Derek McCormack’s spellbinding world, also happens to be a vampire. As the story evolves, with its magical poetic cadence, Nudie makes, then breaks, the career of country-and-western legend Hank Williams.

The Haunted Hillbilly

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

ECW Press

The Show That Smells is the most SHOCKING story ever shown on the silver screen! It’s also the tale of Jimmie, a country music singer dying of tuberculosis, and Carrie, his wife, who tries to save him by selling her soul to a devil who designs haute couture clothing! Elsa is a powerful Parisian dress designer, and a vampire. She wants to make Carrie look beautiful, smell beautifuland then she wants to eat her! Will Carrie survive as her slave? Will Jimmie be cured? Starring a host of Hollywood’s brightest stars, including Coco Chanel, Lon Chaney and the Carter Family, The Show That Smells is a thrilling tale of hillbillies, high fashion, and horror!

The Show That Smells

Literary

A gleeful grotesquerie and savage satire, featuring Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln and the Devil, along with Civil War dead, deconstructed couture, and gay ghosts.
The Well-Dressed Wound is Derek McCormack's play script “séance”: a fashion show by the dead for the living. In the depths of the Civil War, in a theater in P. T. Barnum's American Museum on Broadway, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln participate in a staged spiritualistic rite. But the medium conducting them has invited along another being: the Devil, disguised as twentieth-century French fashionista Martin Margiela (aka “King Faggot”). What follows is the most fiendish runway show ever mounted, complete with war dead, deconstructed couture, and gay ghosts infected with all manner of infectious agents, including oozy AIDS.
While his previous fictions have explored the darker corners of country music, high fashion, and camp, The Well-Dressed Wound is McCormack's most radical work yet, occultishly evoking the evil-twin muses of transgressive literature, Kathy Acker and Pierre Guyotat. The creation thus conjured is a gleeful grotesquerie, a savage satire not so much of fashion as of death, a work that, as Bruce Hainley observes in Artforum, puts “the 'pus' back in opus.” Here death and life spin on a viral double helix of contamination and couture, blistering and bandages, history and hysteria, semen and seams. “Being dead is so very now,” Hainley opines. “This tiny tome (a time bomb, a tomb) is to die for and radically alive.”

The Well-Dressed Wound (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

Dramas & Plays

Semiotext[e]

A dark satire about an amusement park more deranged than anything Disney could imagine- a playland for gay men called Faggotland. A dark satire about an amusement park more deranged than anything Disney could imagine- a playland for gay men called Faggotland.Castle Faggot is Derek McCormack's darkest and most delicious book yet, a satire of sugary cereals and Saturday morning cartoons set in an amusement park more deranged than anything Disney dreamed up. At the heart of the park is Faggotland, a playland for gay men, and Castle Faggot, the darkest dark ride in the world. Home to a cartoon Dracula called Count Choc-o-log, the castle is decorated with the corpses of gays-some were killed, some killed themselves, all ended up as decor. The book includes a map of Faggotland, a photobook of the castle, the instructions for a castle-shaped dollhouse, and the novelization of a TV puppet show about Count Choc-o-log and his friends-reminiscent of the classic stop-motion special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but even gayer and more grotesque. As scatological as Sade but with a Hanna-Barbera vibe, Castle Faggot transmutes McCormack's love of the lurid and the childlike, of funhouses and sickhouses, into something furiously funny- as Edmund White says, "the mystery of objects, the lyricism of neglected lives, the menace and nostalgia of the past-these are all ingredients in this weird and beautiful parallel universe."

Castle Faggot (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McCormack, Derek. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by McCormack, Derek

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McCormack, Derek. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Christmas Days

Christmas Days: From Fake Snow to Santalands, the Things That Make Christmas Christmas

Wild Mouse

Judy Blame's Obituary: Writings on Fashion and Death

Key Concepts in Urban Geography (Key Concepts in Human Geography)

Key Concepts in Urban Geography (Key Concepts in Human Geography)

The Haunted Hillbilly

The Show That Smells

The Well-Dressed Wound (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

Castle Faggot (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)