May 3rd Newsletter
1
Torn Light Records
1855 N Milwaukee
Chicago, IL 60647
312.955.0614
Open Everyday
10AM-7PM

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  • Raymond Queneau – The Blue Flowers
    Raymond Queneau – The Blue Flowers
    $7.00 | , , Add to cart

    “The Blue Flowers follows two unlikely characters: Cidrolin, who alternates between drinking and napping on a barge parked along the Seine in the 1960s, and the Duke d’Auge as he […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Raymond Queneau – The Bark Tree
    Raymond Queneau – The Bark Tree
    $7.00 | , , Add to cart

    “Seated in a Paris café, a man glimpses another man, a shadowy figure hurrying for the train: Who is he? he wonders, How does he live? And instantly the shadow […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Raymond Queneau – Pierrot Mon Ami
    Raymond Queneau – Pierrot Mon Ami
    $6.00 | , , Add to cart

    “Pierrot Mon Ami, considered by many to be one of Raymond Queneau’s finest achievements, is a quirky coming-of-age novel concerning a young man’s initiation into a world filled with deceit, [...]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Rainer Maria Rilke – Duino Elegies
    Rainer Maria Rilke – Duino Elegies
    $6.00 | , , Add to cart

    “We have a marvelous, almost legendary image of the circumstances in which the composition of this great poem began. Rainer Maria Rilke was staying at Duino Castle, on a rocky […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Arnost Lustig – Night and Hope
    Arnost Lustig – Night and Hope
    $6.00 | , , Add to cart

    “Stories about young people in the unique concentration-camp ghetto organized by the Nazis in the Czech city of Terezin are based on the author’s own childhood experiences and [...]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy* – Will Oldham On Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (2×10″ & book)
    Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy* – Will Oldham On Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (2×10″ & book)
    $150.00 | , , , , , Add to cart

    Limited edition of 300 copies encased in a chocolate and silver Solander box. Included is the signed and numbered hardback edition of the book ‘Will Oldham On Bonnie ‘Prince’ [...]

    GENRE: Folk / Country, Indie / Alternative
  • Art & Power: The Avant-garde & the Soviet State, 1917-1928
    Art & Power: The Avant-garde & the Soviet State, 1917-1928
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    In Art and Power, Andrei Sarabyanov and Natalia Strizhkova explore the historical period between 1917 to the early 1930s, when avant-garde artists and Bolshevik leaders worked hand in hand to [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-Garde Art and Language After Mallarmé
    Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-Garde Art and Language After Mallarmé
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    At the outset of the twentieth century, language became a visual medium and a philosophical problem for European avant-garde artists. In Total Expansion of the Letter, art historian Trevor Stark [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, & the Interpersonal World
    Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, & the Interpersonal World
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    In Real Hallucinations, Matthew Ratcliffe offers a philosophical examination of the structure of human experience, its vulnerability to disruption, and how it is shaped by relations with other [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War
    Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    The 1950s were a transformative, even revolutionary decade in the history of brain science. Using new techniques for probing brain activity and function, researchers in neurosurgery, psychiatry, [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Rolling Thunder Logbook: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright’s Account of Bob Dylan’s Legendary Tour
    Rolling Thunder Logbook: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright’s Account of Bob Dylan’s Legendary Tour
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    In the autumn of 1975, when “New England is festering with Bicentennial madness,” Bob Dylan and his Rolling Thunder Revue-a rag-tag variety show that Dylan envisioned as a traveling [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Neon Screams: How Drill, Trap, & Basement Made Music New Again
    Neon Screams: How Drill, Trap, & Basement Made Music New Again
    $8.00 | , , Add to cart

    Neon Screams is a manifesto, a rallying cry for the new musical futurism. Taking street music’s embrace of Auto-Tune in the late 2000s as his starting point, Kit Mackintosh launches […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Endless Endless: A Lo-Fi History of the Elephant 6 Mystery
    Endless Endless: A Lo-Fi History of the Elephant 6 Mystery
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    Years after its release, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea remains one of the most beloved and best-selling albums in all of indie music, hailed as a […]

    GENRE: Indie / Alternative, Non-Fiction
  • Soma: The Divine Hallucinogen
    Soma: The Divine Hallucinogen
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    Soma has been shrouded in mystery for centuries. It is simultaneously a sacred hallucinogenic plant used in secret rituals, a personified God, and an important cosmological principle. Summarizing [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • From the Bodies of the Gods: Psychoactive Plants & the Cults of the Dead as Revealed in Pagan, Hebrew, Minoan, & Christian Traditions
    From the Bodies of the Gods: Psychoactive Plants & the Cults of the Dead as Revealed in Pagan, Hebrew, Minoan, & Christian Traditions
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    Long before the beginnings of civilization, humans have been sacrificed and their flesh used to produce sacred foods and oils for use in religious rites. Originating with the sacred harvest […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Courtly Love: The Path of Sexual Initiation
    Courtly Love: The Path of Sexual Initiation
    $9.00 | , , Add to cart

    The widespread turmoil that shook Western Europe as it entered the new millennium with the year 1000 prompted a vast reevaluation of the chief tenets of society. Foremost among these […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Vladimir Nabokov – Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, & Letters to the Editor
    Vladimir Nabokov – Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, & Letters to the Editor
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child”: so Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote in the introduction to his volume of selected […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer
    Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    When Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring premiered in Paris in 1913, the crowd rioted in response to the harsh dissonance and jarring rhythms of its score. This was noise, not music. […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • John Waters – Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder
    John Waters – Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    No one knows more about everything―especially everything rude, clever, and offensively compelling―than John Waters. The man in the pencil-thin mustache, auteur of the transgressive movie classics [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Witold Gombrowicz – Kind of Testament
    Witold Gombrowicz – Kind of Testament
    $9.00 | , , Add to cart

    A Kind of Testament is part autobiography and part justification of the life’s work of one of Poland’s most important novelists and playwrights. Written in France in 1968, this personal […]

    GENRE: Memoir
  • Angela Carter – Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings
    Angela Carter – Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings
    $9.00 | , , Add to cart

    Angela Carter was one of the most important and influential writers of our time: a novelist of extraordinary power and a searching critic and essayist. This selection of her writing, […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Lydia Davis – Essays Two
    Lydia Davis – Essays Two
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    In Essays One, Lydia Davis, who has been called “a magician of self-consciousness” by Jonathan Franzen and “the best prose stylist in America” by Rick Moody, gathered a generous selection […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Marcus Rainsford – Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti
    Marcus Rainsford – Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    As the first complete narrative in English of the Haitian Revolution, Marcus Rainsford’s An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti was highly influential in establishing [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Ramayana: A Tale of Gods & Demons
    Ramayana: A Tale of Gods & Demons
    $14.00 | , , Add to cart

    From the kingdom of Ayodhya to the isle of Lanka, we are transported to a land that has inspired morality and spiritual tradition for thousands of years. Rama, the king […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Sex Scene: Media & the Sexual Revolution
    Sex Scene: Media & the Sexual Revolution
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    Sex Scene suggests that what we have come to understand as the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s was actually a media revolution. In lively essays, the […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Dream Factory on the Nile: Pierre Sioufi Collection of Egyptian Cinema Lobby Cards.
    Dream Factory on the Nile: Pierre Sioufi Collection of Egyptian Cinema Lobby Cards.
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    Egyptian lobby cards combined a film’s poster art, still photographs from the set, and a credit list that usually included the production company, cast and crew, director, screenwriter, and music [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography
  • Harry Matthews – Tlooth
    Harry Matthews – Tlooth
    $8.00 | , , Add to cart

    This novel begins in a Russian prison camp at a baseball game featuring the defective Baptists versus the Fideists. There is a plot (of sorts), one of revenge surrounding a […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Arno Schmidt – Nobodaddy’s Children (Collected Early Fiction 1949-1964, Volume 2)
    Arno Schmidt – Nobodaddy’s Children (Collected Early Fiction 1949-1964, Volume 2)
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    This trilogy of novels traces life in Germany from the Nazi era through the postwar years and into an apocalyptic future. Scenes from the Life of a Faun recounts the […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Gilbert Sorrentino – Mulligan Stew: A Novel.
    Gilbert Sorrentino – Mulligan Stew: A Novel.
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    Widely regarded as Sorrentino’s finest achievement, ?”Mulligan Stew”?takes as its subject the comic possibilities of the modern literary imagination. As avant-garde novelist [...]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Julia Kristeva – Enchanted Clock: A Novel
    Julia Kristeva – Enchanted Clock: A Novel
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    In the Palace of Versailles there is a fabulous golden clock, made for Louis XV by the king’s engineer, Claude-Siméon Passemant. The astronomical clock shows the phases of the moon […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • John Ashbery – Collected French Translations: Prose.
    John Ashbery – Collected French Translations: Prose.
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    Collected French Translations: Prose, the second volume in a landmark two-volume selection of John Ashbery’s translations, focuses on prose writing. Ashbery’s own prose writings and [...]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry & Plays of Jack Spicer.
    Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry & Plays of Jack Spicer.
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    Be Brave to Things shows legendary San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer at the top of his form, with his blistering intelligence, painful double-edged wit, and devastating will to truth [...]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Gesualdo Hex: Music, Myth, & Memory.
    Gesualdo Hex: Music, Myth, & Memory.
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    In this vivid tale of adultery and intrigue, witchcraft and murder, Glenn Watkins explores the fascinating life of the Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo―a life suffused with scandal and [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Trip: Andy Warhol’s Plastic Fantastic Cross-Country Adventure.
    Trip: Andy Warhol’s Plastic Fantastic Cross-Country Adventure.
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    From the author of Strapless and Guest of Honor, a book about a little-known road trip Andy Warhol took from New York to LA in 1963, and how that journey—and […]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • Donald Judd (October Files)
    Donald Judd (October Files)
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    Donald Judd (1928-1994) is one of the most influential American artists of the postwar era. Beginning in the 1960s, he developed new ideas about art–in both his works and [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • Absence of Clutter: Minimal Writing as Art & Literature.
    Absence of Clutter: Minimal Writing as Art & Literature.
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    In the 1960s and 70s, minimal and conceptual artists stripped language down to its most basic components: the word and the letter. Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Carl Andre, Lawrence Weiner, […]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • We Are The Mutants: The Battle For Hollywood From Rosemary’s Baby To Lethal Weapon
    We Are The Mutants: The Battle For Hollywood From Rosemary’s Baby To Lethal Weapon
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    We Are the Mutants is a critical reassessment of what is arguably the most discussed and beloved stretch of movies in Hollywood history. Documenting the period between the arrival of […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Radical Virtuosity: Ana Mendieta & The Black Atlantic
    Radical Virtuosity: Ana Mendieta & The Black Atlantic
    $15.00 | , , Add to cart

    Reclaiming the artist Ana Mendieta as a formally innovative maker of performative art who forged connections to the marginalized around the world.The artist Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) is remembered [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • Jean Genet – What Remains Of A Rembrandt Torn Into Four Equal Pieces And Flushed Down The Toliet
    Jean Genet – What Remains Of A Rembrandt Torn Into Four Equal Pieces And Flushed Down The Toliet
    $175.00 | , Add to cart

    Hanuman Books, 10.5 x 7 cm.Softcover. 1988 edition. Light discoloration & foxing to both dustjacket and edges of pages. Noticeable corner crease/warp along upper right corner of front wrap. [...]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Jean Genet – The Thief’s Journal (Uncorrected Proofs)
    Jean Genet – The Thief’s Journal (Uncorrected Proofs)
    $350.00 | , , Add to cart

    Grove Press, uncorrected proofs for the 1964 edition, presented in a spiral binder. Staining to & writing on both front and back wraps.Some general wear & discoloration to edges of […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Philip Pearlstein – Landscape Aquatints
    Philip Pearlstein – Landscape Aquatints
    $18.00 | , Add to cart

    A selection of Philip Pearlstein’s illustrations from 1978-1980 Staple-bound zine with dustjacket. Moisture damage/staining along upper edge

    GENRE: Art/Photography
  • Gallery Of Photography: Vision
    Gallery Of Photography: Vision
    $12.00 | , Add to cart

    A pamphlet featuring work from the Vision Gallery, based out of Boston, circa 1980s Staple-bound zine with some discoloration

    GENRE: Art/Photography
  • James H. Forest – Thomas Merton’s Struggle With Peacemaking
    James H. Forest – Thomas Merton’s Struggle With Peacemaking
    $6.00 | , Add to cart

    “Written by Merton’s friend Jim Forest and drawing heavily upon their extensive correspondence, this booklet explores Merton’s beliefs about Christians and war, his life as a monk and his [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • D.M Thomas – News From The Front (signed)
    D.M Thomas – News From The Front (signed)
    $20.00 | , Add to cart

    “A collaborative work “featuring a fictional encounter between a businessman and a Portuguese girl on holiday in London” (from the front flap). The authors take turns writing [...]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Jean Genet – May Day Speech
    Jean Genet – May Day Speech
    $20.00 | , , Add to cart

    Transcript of Jean Genet’s May Day Speech, given in support of Bobby Seale after his imprisonment. City Lights, 1970 staple-bound zine. Some light wear and discoloration.

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Claude Simon – The Flanders Road
    Claude Simon – The Flanders Road
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    On a sunny day in May 1940, the French army sent out the cavalry against the invading German army’s panzer tanks. Unsurprisingly, the French were routed. Twenty-six-year-old Claude Simon was […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Karl Ove Knausgaard – In The Land Of The Cyclops
    Karl Ove Knausgaard – In The Land Of The Cyclops
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    In his first essay collection to be published in English, the New York Times bestselling author of the My Struggle series Karl Ove Knausgaard explores art, philosophy, and literature with […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Julio Cortazar – Around The Day In Eighty Worlds
    Julio Cortazar – Around The Day In Eighty Worlds
    $15.00 | , , Add to cart

    Poems, essays, and anecdotes accompany stories about a man sinking into the ground, an invisible monster, a woman who hates yawns, and miniature jaguars North Point Press, 1986 Hardcover edition. [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Fernando Arrabal – The Red Virgin
    Fernando Arrabal – The Red Virgin
    $8.00 | , , Add to cart

    Victimization and betrayal are frequently the themes of this Spanish writer, who saw plenty of both as a youth during his homeland’s Civil War. Based on an actual case study […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive
  • Peter Handke – Repetition (1st US Edition)
    Peter Handke – Repetition (1st US Edition)
    $20.00 | , , Add to cart

    Set in 1960, Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke’s Repetition tells of Filib Kobal’s journey from his home in Carinthia to Slovenia on the trail of his missing brother, Gregor.  He […]

    GENRE: Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Criticism/Transgressive