The Paris Olympia Press

The Paris Olympia Press, successor to the famed Obelisk Press, run by Obelisk-founder Jack Kahane’s son Maurice Giriodas, picked up where Obelisk left off. The “dirty books” published by the Paris Olympia Press grew even dirtier than Kahane’s most explicit publications, and Giriodas’s avant-garde literary endeavors soon outstripped those of his father. The first to publish William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, the Paris Olympia Press drew acclaim and controversy for its literary contributions during the “golden age of erotica,” a time when starving artists and intellectuals, academics and journalists, wrote erotic fiction under the cover of pseudonyms to pay the bills. In The Paris Olympia Press, renowned bibliographer Patrick Kearney compiles a detailed account of the Press’s publishing activities, including biographical sketches of its authors, an introduction to the Press’s literary achievements, and a complete bibliography of works published. An extensive illustrated study, The Paris Olympia Press catalogs and comments on the early work of some of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.