In their collaborative poetry, Dustin Junkert and Shane Moritz drag the compositional practice of Exquisite Corpse kicking and screaming into the 21st century.\nThe two poets finish each other’s sentences with often preposterous élan. Their subjects are projectiles of varying gravity launched at a Ouija board planchette. The scenarios they unfold describe a universe of pop-culture misunderstandings.\nSomewhere at the intersection of David Berman, Anne Sexton, Robert Pinsky, and Stephen Malkmus lies the lyrebird glory of these poems, their impact amplified by David Nichols’s original drawings, whose air of tender perplexity provides a perfect emotional accompaniment.\n“In The Book of Treasures, curators Dustin Junkert and Shane Moritz expertly constitute a kickass hyper-contemporary below-the-bug-line Cabinet of Wonders.—Michael Martone\n“These paratactic poems deliver the shifting dimensions of life, but also the quick life of impulse They are acrobatically funny and urbane; they’re also slyly imbued with pathos. They revel, actively, in the music of the sentence, especially, and in the weird hum of the contemporary western world. —Laura Newbern

The Book of Treasures: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Junkert, Dustin

Moritz, Shane

Poetry

The Visible Spectrum

When does the shadow of a legend merely block out the sun? Everyone remembers The Rest of Quiglet, that heartwarming sitcom starring Grace Mannix. For four years it told the story of a typical teenage girl, her widowed father, and their robot maid (played by the exotic 'Biltong'). The legend was made complete by the chance casting of the show's composer, Sherman Schiegel, in an onscreen role as Quiglet's boyfriend. In perpetual syndication, the show still has many avid fans. Elyse Argawal, following its progress and absorbing its teachings, has made it the focus of her successful academic career, while teenage twins Tabby and Billy Tibbins have pursued their obsession with the show's machinations in their fanzine, Silent Zone. A crucial part of Quiglet mythology is its much discussed but long suppressed finale: the so-called 'murder episode.' But while doing research in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Elyse stumbles upon a copy of this jewel in the Quiglet crown. And when she and Billy fall in love, she faces the same dilemma the show's cast has long faced: what is their identity without the myth that brought them fame and fortune? Extending over four decades and told from a range of perspectives and paradigms, this debut graphic novel from renowned Australian cultural historian David Nichols is a pitch-perfect satire that explores ambition, desire, and the pursuit of perfection.

Persiflage: a Graphic Novel

Comics & Graphic Novels

Nichols, David

Graphic Novels

Life After Death is a deep dive into the subcultures of Los Angeles and London in the 1980s as glam turned to punk and goth. Susan Compo captures the lives of aspiring musicians, scenesters, and obsessive fans-lives in which reality is a constant threat to cherished illusions, and death, while never far away, is sometimes not the end of the story.

Life After Death and Other Stories

Compo, Susan

Literary

Paris Notebook / Pařížský deník: Poems (Bilingual Edition)

Riedlbauchová, Tereza

Robert Freeman Wexler's potent blend of urban realism and fantasy-"North American Surrealism" is the term Jeff VanderMeer has coined for Wexler's work-is on full display in his second novel, which makes its US debut some 12 years after its initial limited-edition publication in the UK. . At a mundane Manhattan party in the first summer of the twenty-first century, sculptor Jacob Lerner catches sight of an old painting and is transfixed. Who is the woman it portrays so intently? And what accounts for the malevolent gaze of the figure lurking behind her? Striving to produce art that meets his high standards, without surrender to the demands of the marketplace, Lerner is also driven to learn about the haunting portrait and its creator, Philip Schuyler. His discovery of Schuyler's journal reveals the sinister forces that coerced the artist as he fulfilled his commission in 1840s New York, and sharpens Lerner's own conflict with those forces that still control the modern city. Propelled in his quest by a glass marionette with unusual powers, Lerner finds himself slipping back and forth in time between the present-day city and Schuyler's Manhattan, before the island's pastures and streams were buried under concrete. His obsession comes to dominate his own art: he produces a pair of works, one that recovers the promise of the preindustrial island; the other a visualization of the modern metropolis, corrupted by greed and entrenched interests, and its possible destruction. With his vision of a city in ruins, open to regeneration through nature and art, Lerner arrives at a cataclysmic conclusion.

The Painting and the City

Wexler, Robert Freeman

The definitive book on Australian punk and post-punk music, long unavailable, now reissued in a much-expanded new edition with 175 photos. Stranded offers the inside story of the emergence of the Saints, the Birthday Party, the Laughing Clowns, the Go-Betweens, Nick Cave, the Triffids, the Moodists, the Scientists, and many more great Australian bands, told by a writer who witnessed it all first-hand and is acknowledged as the leading chronicler of the Australian music scene.

Stranded: Australian Independent Music, 1976–1992

Arts & Photography

Walker, Clinton

Music

Every era has had the Sherlock Holmes it wanted or needed-except the 1970s. In that wild decade, all bets were off . . The popular image of Sherlock Holmes in any given period derives as much from the actors who portrayed the detective as it does from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories and Sidney Paget's famous illustrations. In earlier and subsequent decades this image was defined by a single stage or screen actor (from William Gillette and Basil Rathbone to Jeremy Brett and Robert Downey Jr.), but the nine Sherlock Holmes films made in the '70s re-imagine the detective in starkly divergent ways, from the boldly inventive to the flat-out irreverent. Holmes is variously portrayed as gay (Robert Stephens), crazy (George C. Scott), pompous (Stewart Granger), petulant (Gene Wilder), vulnerable (Nicol Williamson), camp (Roger Moore) wrong-headed (John Cleese), silly (Peter Cook), and socially conscious (Christopher Plummer). Yet all these films contribute in their own way to casting new light on the legend. In Sherlock in the Seventies, Derham Groves offers an entertaining and absorbing account of these films, packed with shrewd analysis and insights, background details, numerous illustrations, and behind-the-scenes anecdotes.

Sherlock in the Seventies: A Wild Decade of Sherlock Holmes Films

Humor & Entertainment

Groves, Derham

Movies

The wild and ghostly adventures of William S. Burroughs and his old Beat comrades as they haunt the alleyways and tunnels of contemporary Tangier in search of a lost and virulent manuscript.\nWilliam S. Burroughs is dead and buried, but he can find no rest. His ghost is roaming the backstreets of Tangier in search of a missing manuscript. During his chaotic years there in the 1950s, Burroughs not only wrote Naked Lunch, he also spewed out a mass of much darker material he then lost—hundreds of pages in which he wrestled with his demons. He fears his longtime nemesis, the Ugly Spirit, has been lurking in those pages ever since—and is now emerging from its slumber. 
To help him find and destroy the infected manuscript before the Ugly Spirit can spread its evil in the world, Burroughs enlists fellow ghosts and old Tangier pros Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin, Joseph Dean and Brian Jones, as well as an inept witch, an elderly sorcerer, and a gang of macaque monkeys. Their many adventures—often comic, sometimes ghastly—involve vanishing corpses, a magic carpet, giant black centipedes—and a word virus about to go pandemic.\n“For someone like me, personally steeped in both the very particular ambience that is Tangier and the ever-looming shadows of its literary and bohemian transplants and inhabitants, this book is a goldmine. Terrill and Poole’s deft weaving of fact with fiction is like a conjuring trick—and it’s from here the ghosts emerge. Ultrazone is captivating on several levels at once, and it’s entertaining as hell.”—Jim Jarmusch\n“The ghosts who shadow the living through the alleys of Tangier are not only intimately alive, they are as vivid as Joyce’s ruminating Dubliners in a tale as rich as anything by Poe. What’s more, the novel’s mix of fact and fiction gives it the authority of a well--researched document nested within an exotic, fully imagined world.”—Jan Herman\n“Reading Ultrazone is like watching a trippy ghost movie full of your favorite beat icons. All inhabited Tangier during the hedonistic Interzone period, and here they haunt the mysterious underbelly of this magical and sinister city. Fun and riveting!”—Sara Driver

Ultrazone: A Tangier Ghost Story

Terrill, Mark

Poole, Francis

Malingering: Goth Stories

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