A second helping of high strangeness from the acclaimed Strange Attractor anthology series.
Contents My Travels with Münchausen Richard Burdett In which the author deceives his friends on an adventure of the mind
Enter the Jaguar Mike Jay Digging up the ancient psychedelic temple cults of Peru's Chavínde Huantar
School for Shamans JasonLouv Our intrepid young author braves Maoist rebels and astral collapse to learn the secrets of Nepalese sorcery
The Temple at the End of Time John Rowe Jerusalem's Temple Mount and its role in all our ends
Haunts of the Halifax Slasher Tim Chapman A gentlemanly tour of the city's dark past
Admiral Byrd, Atlantis &amp; the Hollow Earth Theo Paijmans A letter, a legend and a flight beyond the poles
Under Petticoat Rule An anonymous manuscript reveals one boy's restrictive upbringing. Introduction by Peter Farrer &amp; Cathy Ward
An Animist Manifesto Graham Harvey A call to arms. And antennae, branches, tentacles etc.
Dr Price's Final Transmutation Guy Ogilvy How the Royal Society found, then lost, the secrets of alchemy
Life from Earth: The Golem and Homunculi Gary Lachman The mystical origins of artificial life. Photography by Maud Larsson
Robot Power, Robot Pride Ken Hollings How the robot found its self
Should they Live: on the Use of Dead Babies Don Mader The hidden meaning of a sinister 19th century religious print
Mould Art Discovered by Doug Harvey Beauty grows in unexpected places
The Court of Lust John Branston Waldo Sabine: parapsychologist, poet, feminist, martyr
Sandoz in the Rain: The Life and Art of Wilfried Sätty John Coulthart on a lost visionary hero of the psychedelic revolution
Boris Vian for Anglophones Doug Skinner The scandalous oeuvre of the man who shocked his world
Richard Jefferies and the Agitated Pool of Life Neil Mortimer introduces this early, apocalyptic ecologist
Anagrams for Maya Deren Kevin Jackson Artist, film maker, voodoo priestess
Change in a Parallel World: CFRussell, Louis Culling and the Book of Changes Steve Moore presents an eccentric history and a new I Ching
Spirits of Place: Strange Encounters of an Anglican Kind Alan Walker How the Church of England answered The Exorcist
One More Nightmare calling… the Heathen Robert J Wallis Loki the 'pervert god', Seidrsorcery and the Left Hand Path. Illustrations by Arik Roper and Carina Thorén
Terror by Night: the Sleeping Partner Roger Dobson Memoirs of a hag-ridden man
Folklore of Underground London Antony Clayton What rumours lie beneath the city's streets?
Cesare Thodol Mark Samuels On brain fungus and other horrors. Illustrated by Betsy Heistand

Strange Attractor

Literature & Fiction

Literary

A third helping of high strangeness from the acclaimed Strange Attractor anthology series.
Contents Contra Genesis– Catherine Eisner Unusual cases of extra-genital conception, extra-uterine gestation, and other anomalous exits
Burmese Daze– Erik Davis In which the author submits to the pleasures of a transgender spirit possession festival
Adventures in the Fourth Dimension – Mike Jay A Victorian time machine and history's first theme park ride
Ego in Exotica Sum – Ken Hollings In memoriam Martin Denny, crown prince of the exotica sound
A Psychoactive Bestiary– Richard Rudgley The joy of zootoxins, from the ant to the giraffe
Liberté, Légalité, Éternité– David Luke Some notes on psychonautic misadventures in time
Kandinsky's Thought Forms – Gary Lachman The occult roots of modern art
Magic Words – Steve Moore Virgil the Necromancer in mediæval legend
Abu'l-Qasim al-Iraqi – Robert Irwin 12th century Arab alchemists on the edge of knowledge
The Electrochemical Glass – Richard Brown A slow-evolving artwork from a living alchemist
The Man Behind the Screen – David Rothenberg Hans Christian Andersen's greatest and least-known work
The Mole of Edge Hill – John Reppion Joseph Williamson, Liverpool's tunnelling philanthropist
La Maison de Poupées – Robert Ansell A photographic study of a magnificent compulsion
The Dirty Thirties – Alexis Lykiard From Arthur Koestler's Encyclopædia of Sexual Knowledge
Paint it Black – Stewart Home Autohagiography of an artist
Redonda and Her Kings – Roger Dobson The island life of early science fiction author MP Shiel
Magic in Paris – Phil Baker Demons of the opium den in Thirties Paris
The Dark Man's Dreams – Doug Skinner An introduction to Xavier Forneret, Surrealism's lost poet
Ghosts: A short Story by Lady Vervaine
Plus original artworks by Alison Gill, Josephine Harvatt, Betsy Heistand, Katie Owens, Arik Roper.

Strange Attractor (Strange Attractor Anthology)

The eagerly awaited fourth edition of the acclaimed anthology series.
From Haiti and Hong Kong to the fourth dimension and beyond: discover the secrets of madness in animals; voodoo soul and dub music; ancient peacock deities; Chinese poisoning cults; the history of spider silk weaving; heathen mugwort magic; sentient lightning; Jesuit conspiracy theories; junkie explorers; Dali's Atlantis; the resurgence of Pan (in London's Crouch End); anarchist pirates on Madagascar; an ancient Greek Rip Van Winkle; French anatomical waxworks; Arthur Machen's forgotten tales and the full text of Alan Moore's unfinished John Dee opera.
Contributors Richard Barnett, Mark Blacklock, John Cussans, Erik Davis, Paul Devereux, Roger Dobson, Joanna Ebenstein, Stephen Grasso, Gyrus, Ken Hollings, Mike Jay, Phil Legard, David Luke, Eleanor Morgan, Alan Moore, Steve Moore, Michael Neve, Andy Sharp, Robert Wallis, Sean Walsh
Artwork by Joel Biroco, Julian House, Phil Legard, Eleanor Morgan, Arik Roper &amp; Nathalie Tayton.

Collected for the first time, these essays delve into the mysteries of the prehistoric human mind with intelligence, passion and a radical approach to the unknowability of the evocative but obscure early chapters of the human story. Starting from personal experiences with megalithic monuments and sites of ancient rock art, Gyrus unfolds implications and speculations that keep one eye on the latest academic research, the other on the unproven possibilities that intimacy with prehistoric relics affords. Also includes a foreword by acclaimed antiquarian, Julian Cope.

Archaeologies of Consciousness

Gyrus

History

London has harboured many curious characters, but few more curious than the artist and visionary Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956).A controversial enfant terrible of the Edwardian art world, the young Spare was hailed as a genius and a new Aubrey Beardsley, while George Bernard Shaw reportedly said "Spare's medicine is too strong for the average man."But Spare was never made for worldly success and he went underground, falling out of the gallery system to live in poverty and obscurity south of the river. Absorbed in occultism and sorcery, voyaging into inner dimensions and surrounding himself with cats and familiar spirits, he continued to produce extraordinary art while developing a magical philosophy of pleasure, obsession, and the subjective nature of reality.Today Spare is both forgotten and famous, a cult figure whose modest life has been much mythologised since his death. This groundbreaking biographical study offers wide-ranging insights into Spare's art, mind and world, reconnecting him with the art history that ignored him and exploring his parallel London; a bygone place of pub pianists, wealthy alchemists and monstrous owls."...an elegant and comprehensive biography... [Baker's] deep sympathy for his subject is nicely balanced by his scepticism towards some of Spare's sources of esoteric thought. There is a wealth of detail here ... A stunning tribute to an unjustly neglected artist." - Noel Rooney, Fortean Times'I cannot recommend Austin Osman Spare too highly. Phil Baker has done a wonderful job of bringing the complexities and contradictions of Spare's life to the fore, and in making the London of Spare's time come to life vividly and richly. Hopefully this book will encourage a reassessment of Spare which is long overdue' - Phil Hine

Austin Osman Spare: The Life & Legend of London's Lost Artist

Arts & Photography

BAKER

History & Criticism

This book – the first in a two-volume set – delves into the first half of Franco's career and shines a light into the darkest corners of the Franco filmography and uncovers previously unknown and unsuspected facts about their casts, crews and production histories.
Jesús 'Jess' Franco is an iconic figure in world cinema. His sexually charged, fearlessly personal style of filmmaking has never been in vogue with mainstream critics, but for lovers of the strange and sado-erotic he is a magician, spinning his unique and disturbing dream worlds from the cheapest of budgets.
In the world of Jess Franco freedom was the key, and he pushed at the boundaries of taste and censorship over and over again, throughout an astonishingly varied career spanning sixty years. The director of more than 180 films, at his most prolific he reached a supercharged frenzy that yielded as many as twelve films per year, making him one of the most prolific filmmakers of all time.
Franco was the winner of a Lifetime Achievement prize at the 2009 Spanish Goya Film Awards, but his appeal does not depend upon mainstream respect; instead fans around the world have embraced his cinema, first on video and then more and more frequently on DVD and Blu-Ray. Where once he was castigated for slapdash haste, many fans today not only accept but even revel in the rough edges of his work. His delirious improvisations and raw, punkish spontaneity turn the basics of popular cinema, sex and violence, into a whirl of sensations, a seductive and bewitching spectacle that could only be the work of one man.
Franco's taste for the sexy and horrific, his lifelong obsession with the Marquis De Sade and his roving hand-held camera style birthed a whole new strain of erotic cinema. Disturbing, exciting and defiantly avant-garde, films such as Necronomicon, Vampyros Lesbos, Virgin Among the Living Dead and Venus in Furs are among the jewels of European horror, while a plethora of multiple versions, re-edits and echoes of earlier works turn the Franco experience into a dizzying hall of mirrors, further entrancing the viewer who dares enter Franco's domain.
Stephen Thrower has devoted five years to examining each and every Franco film. This book – the first in a two-volume set – delves into the first half of Franco's career: from his avant-garde comedy Tenemos 18 años in 1959, through the groundbreaking surgical horror story The Awful Dr. Orlof and the art-horror masterpiece Necronomicon, to his grisly psycho-killer opus Exorcism in 1974. Ably assisted by the esteemed critic and researcher Julian Grainger, Thrower shines a light into the darkest corners of the Franco filmography and uncovers previously unknown and unsuspected facts about their casts, crews and production histories.
Unparalleled in scope and ambition, Murderous Passions brings Franco's career into focus in a landmark study that aims to provide the definitive assessment of Jess Franco's labyrinthine film universe.

Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco

Thrower, Stephen

Grainger, Julian

Humor & Entertainment

Telling the story of forbidden culture, bootleg technology and human endeavour, this is the secret history of Russian X-ray records and of the people who made, bought and sold them.
Many older people in Russia remember seeing and hearing mysterious vinyl flexi-discs when they were young. They had partial images of skeletons on them, could be played like gramophone records and were called 'bones' or 'ribs'. They contained forbidden music.
In the cold war era, the Soviet recording industry and permissible musical repertoire were ruthlessly controlled by the State. But a secret and risky subculture of bootleg recordings arose. Incredibly, bootleggers built homemade recording machines and found an extraordinary way to copy banned gramophone records – they used X-Rays clandestinely obtained from hospitals.
X-Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone tells the secret history of these ghostly records and of the people who made, bought and sold them. Lavishly illustrated with images of discs collected in Russia, it is a unique story of forbidden culture, bootleg technology and human endeavour. Contributions from Russian musical commentators and interviews, including one with the last bootlegger standing, set the scene for the intersection of ideological, technological and historical events that created this brief Samizdat musical culture.
In a time when songs can be copied in an instant and when streaming services provide virtually infinite choice and access, X-Ray Audio provides a poignant reminder of the immense cultural value of music and the extraordinary lengths people to which people will go to listen to what they love.

X-ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone

Music

A seventy-nine-card, hand-painted tarot deck created c.1906 by the mystic and artist Austin Osman Spare, reproduced in its entirety, accompanied by contemporary images and texts.
In the spring of 2013, a seventy-nine-card, hand-painted tarot deck created c.1906 by the mystic and artist Austin Osman Spare, was identified within the collections of The Magic Circle Museum in London.
Austin Spare's lifelong interest in cartomancy is well documented, yet very few of his own fortune-telling cards were thought to have survived. This compelling new example of the artist's early work demonstrates his precocious involvement with the currents that shaped the British Occult Revival at the beginning of the twentieth century, and his interactions with some of the period's artistic and political protagonists including Aleister Crowley, Arthur Ivey, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Pamela Colman Smith. 
Magic Circle Museum curator and artist Jonathan Allen set about tracing the deck's provenance, its place in the artist's oeuvre, and within the wider histories of cartomancy, potentially re-writing the history of popular Tarot in the early twentieth century.
Lost Envoy reproduces Austin Spare's tarot deck in its entirety for the first time, alongside new written and visual contributions from Jonathan Allen, Phil Baker, Helen Farley, Alan Moore, Kevin O'Neill, Sally O'Reilly, and Gavin Semple.

Lost Envoy: The Tarot Deck of Austin Osman Spare

An examination of the myths of the Moon goddess and how she appeared to the original creators of those myths in ancient Greece.
Waxing and waning and reborn with each new month, the Moon has always been the supreme symbol of cyclical change in the western world. 
Metaphorical representations of the Moon's goddess also seem to undergo similar changes, each new century reinventing her in its own image. For Hesiod, she was a distant figure in the celestial pantheon, to Keats she was an intimate muse; Selene's recurring role in music, literature, and song is a powerful testament to our continued fascination with her myth.
A deeply erudite and meticulously researched survey, this book explores the perennial curiosity our closest orbital neighbor continues to instill, providing at once an unprecedented body of historical research and a critical armature for the author's lauded prose reverie Somnium. 
Despite the importance of the Moon to recent developments in esoteric scholarship and mythography, Selene doesn't attempt to present a “Moon-Goddess for the twenty-first century,” but rather looks at the myths of one specific Moon goddess and how she appeared to the original creators of those myths in the literature of ancient Greece. 
In doing so, Selene marks the point at which classical scholarship comes closest to a physical embrace with its ethereal subject matter.
“An impeccable and flawlessly researched piece of classical scholarship.” ―Alan Moore

Selene: The Moon Goddess & the Cave Oracle

Moore, Steve

Ancient Civilizations

An anthology of conversations and essays, memories and commentary from the heyday of British pop music writing.
In its heyday, from the 1960s to the 1980s, the UK music press was the forging ground for a new critical culture, where readers could encounter anything from comics and cult films to new musical forms and radical underground politics. It created an off-mainstream collective cultural commons improvised through a networked subculture of rival weeklies, monthlies, and fanzines, including such titles as NME, Melody Maker, Sounds,Record Mirror, Black Echoes, Black Music, Let It Rock, Street Life, Zigzag, and Smash Hits. 
This anthology of conversations and essays, memories and commentary explores how this uncharted space first came about, who put it together, what it achieved, and where it went. Along the way, it unearths the many surprising worlds explored by this network of young anarchists, dreamers, and agitators who dared to take pop culture seriously, and considers what remains of their critical legacy.
Contributors Valerie Wilmer, Charles Shaar Murray, Richard Williams, Penny Reel, Jonh Ingham, Jon Savage, Cynthia Rose, Paul Morley, David Toop, Bob Stanley, Barney Hoskyns, Jonathon Green, Simon Frith, Paul Gilroy, and many others
With cover and illustrations by legendary comics artist Savage Pencil.

A Hidden Landscape Once a Week: The Unruly Curiosity of the UK Music Press in the 1960s-80s... in the Words of Those Who Were There

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Books by Strange Attractor

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

Strange Attractor

Strange Attractor (Strange Attractor Anthology)

Strange Attractor

Archaeologies of Consciousness

Austin Osman Spare: The Life & Legend of London's Lost Artist

Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco

X-ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone

Lost Envoy: The Tarot Deck of Austin Osman Spare

Selene: The Moon Goddess & the Cave Oracle

A Hidden Landscape Once a Week: The Unruly Curiosity of the UK Music Press in the 1960s-80s... in the Words of Those Who Were There