Book Works (London, UK) commissions artists' publications. The Semina series is dedicated to publishing unclassifiable prose from contemporary artists and writers. Inspired by the nine-volume magazine series of the same name by Wallace Berman in the 1950s/60s that covered the avant-garde, unclassifiable, and still revolutionary artists of the time, Semina will produce nine books that all have in common a disregard for the established protocols of fiction writing.
SUC has heavily synopsized book descriptions written by, and from, Bookworks.
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Index by Bridget Penney (No.1). Uncredited and found text is woven throughout, in a literalization of the search for "original" spoken language. Covent Garden theatre murder, Victorian explorer Sir John Franklin’s ship Terror frozen into Arctic ice, the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, a rural idyll in Somerset, magician and forger Cagliostro, revolutionary bigot Lord George Gordon, Marie Antoinette and transvestite spy Chevalier D’Eon, Masonic rituals. Poetic mysteries. Designed by Fraser Muggeridge. Offset, b/w. Edition of 1,000. 5.25" x 7.75", 128 pages. $22.
One Break, A Thousand Blows! by Maxi Kim (No.2). A novel about Japan. This is interesting, something many Asians and Koreans particularly struggle with - "wanting to negate Japan, but not by writing a novel about Japan, but by writing falsely about it." Sexuality and textuality, being anti-metaphorical, escaping the logic of modernism and postmodernism for a pre-modernist, post-human morphogenetic aesthetic. Books as occult divination. Designed by Fraser Muggeridge. Offset, b/w. Edition of 1,000. 5.25" x 7.75", 128 pages. $22. Add to cart
Bubble Entendre by Mark Waugh (No.3). Brazen sadists, high-flying hopheads, invisible strippers, the destiny of objects. Dirty, dingy and drug fuelled, Willhelm Reich might have penned this book if he'd been force-fed LSD and subjected to a steady diet of dubstep and grime. Claridge’s terrorist siege, TV spectacle, hard-boiled noir meets classic French theory, a zombie author, an insanely unofficial fictional updating of Derrida's ‘Of Grammatology’. Offset, b/w. Edition of 1,000. 5.25" x 7.75", 128 pages. $22. Add to cart
