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One of a series of tremendous designs by Malika Favre for a new Penguin edition of the Kama Sutra. • New interviews: “…Americans — mired in individualism — prefer to think in terms of identity than in terms of roles and masks. An American would never have called a novel Confessions of a Mask.” Nicholas [...]

A drawing from Bestiario Moderno by Domenico Gnoli (1933–1970). RIP Russell Hoban. Nina Allan celebrates a favourite writer while David Mitchell, writing in 2005, pays tribute to Riddley Walker. For me the gulf between Hoban and many of his contemporaries could be measured by his entry in the Writer’s Rooms feature the Guardian Review was [...]

Group I (Convertible Series, 2010) by Monir Farmanfarmaian. The four albums recorded by Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis under the name Dome are being reissued by Editions Mego together with Gilbert & Lewis’s Yclept album. I always preferred Gilbert & Lewis in their Dome incarnation (and Colin Newman solo) to the punk and post-punk stylings [...]

Calder & Boyars, 1972. Design by John Sewell. This must be the first space novel, the first serious piece of science fiction—the others are entertainment. Mary McCarthy defending The Naked Lunch in the New York Review of Books, June, 1963. McCarthy’s view—echoed a year later by Michael Moorcock and JG Ballard in the pages of [...]

Picador, 1982. Being an occasional cover designer I naturally have a more than passing interest in how the books of favourite writers are packaged. I’ve mentioned a couple of times how much I liked the covers that Thomi Wroblewski produced in the 1980s for UK editions published by Picador and John Calder. Wroblewski is a [...]

Naked Lunch (1991). So what happens when you take a regular scenario like this: There is a type person occasionally seen in these neighbourhoods who has connections with junk, though he is neither a user nor a seller. But when you see him the dowser wand twitches. Junk is close. His place of origin is [...]

The Cut-Ups (1966). More of the present preoccupation. Choosing Brion Gysin as a subject seems like a detour but the shots above are from Antony Balch’s 1966 film The Cut-Ups which also features William Burroughs, Ian Sommerville and someone-or-other’s cute boyfriend of the time who’s only ever credited as “Baby Zen”, a person about whom [...]

William Burroughs and Maurice Gerodias. More specifically, William Burroughs photographed in 1959 for Life magazine by Loomis Dean. This was no doubt a story based around the publication of The Naked Lunch by Olympia Press: in the full set there’s shots of Burroughs with Olympia boss Maurice Gerodias, some pictures of the author signing copies [...]

Seven (1973) by Soft Machine. Design by Roslav Szaybo. You’re the great, grey man whose daughter licks policemen’s buttons clean, You’re the man who squats behind the man who works the soft machine. Mick Jagger, Memo From Turner (1968) By coincidence this month I’d been re-reading some William Burroughs when I picked up a nice [...]

The Kurtz compound prior to destruction. An Apocalypse Now storyboard, one of a number which will be included among the extras on the Blu-Ray release of Francis Coppola’s film when it appears in the UK next month. The film is given a new cinema release on May 27th. Radio broadcaster Harold Camping, a man denounced [...]

A 1973 Ballantine edition of William Burroughs’ novel with a cover illustration from Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) by Salvador Dalí. Via the Burroughs Book Covers archive. The Sel Publishing House, Turkey, published a new translation of The Soft Machine by William Burroughs in January, an edition which is now under investigation by the Istanbul Prosecutor’s [...]

Nite Flights (1978) by The Walker Brothers. Cover design by Hipgnosis. something attacked the earth last nite with a kick that man habit-eye cut the sleep tight boys who dreamed and dreamed of a city like the sky Scott Walker quotes Brion Gysin (and who knows what else) in Shutout (see below), one of the [...]

The Figure 5 in Gold (1928) by Charles Demuth. It’s a little surprising to find I’ve been doing this for five whole years yet here we are. Having seen a number of blogs call it quits at the five-year point I should note that I don’t feel quite that exhausted although maintaining a discipline of [...]

That essential journal of esoteric culture, Strange Attractor, announced a fourth number this week sporting a psychedelic cover which may be the work of Julian House (no credit is given on the SA site). As to the contents: From Haiti and Hong Kong to the fourth dimension and beyond: discover the secrets of madness in [...]

It’s that time of year again when my good friend Ed Jansen unveils the latest edition of Passage, his Dutch-language webzine: The 14th issue of Passage contains articles about language, the dreamachine of Brion Gysin, the collaboration of Gysin with William Burroughs and Ian Sommerville (The Third Mind), a recently discovered photograph of Arthur Rimbaud’s [...]

Miracle of the Rose (1965). Photo by Jerry Bauer, design by Kuhlman Associates. [William Burroughs is] without a doubt…the greatest American writer since WWII. There are very, very few writers in his class; I think Genet is about the only one whom I’d put in the same category. All the British and American writers so [...]

One of a series of illustrations by Vera Bock for A Ring and a Riddle (1944) by M.Ilin and E. Segal. Via A Journey Round My Skull. • The Creator of Devotion: Photos from a Vogue Hommes Japan feature by Matthew Stone. And also here. • Dressing For Pleasure: Jonny Trunk gets out the rubber [...]

Did someone say “woody”? Plenty more toy antics at TheOneCam. • And yet more Haeckelisms: Praying in Haeckel’s Garden, recent works by artist Mary O’Malley. • Seasons of the Peacock, the perennial showoff as depicted by a handful of Art Nouveau artists. A couple of examples there I hadn’t seen before. • Dorian Cope presents [...]

A commemorative Borges coin. He says, “Two aesthetics exist: the passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms. Guided by the former, art turns into a copy of the environment’s objectivity or the individual’s psychic history.” There, of course, he sums up all of realism, no? “Guided by the latter, art is redeemed, [...]

A poster by Kazumasa Nagai. • Franco Maria Ricci creates the world’s largest maze. “The former publisher said he first confided his ambition to Jorge Luis Borges, who characteristically told him the world’s largest maze already existed and was called a desert.” Related: Mirror, Mask, Labyrinth, a review of two new collections of Borges’ poetry. [...]