Dirty Books

Regular price €18.50
A01=Barry Reay
A01=Nina Attwood
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
amateur pornographers
Anaïs Nin
Author_Barry Reay
Author_Nina Attwood
automatic-update
avant-garde literature
Beat literature
book history
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=AGHX
Category=HBTB
Category=NHTB
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Pre-order
Delta of Venus
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_non-fiction
erotica
gay books
Gay literature
Henry Miller
Jack Kahane
Language_English
lesbian books
lesbian literature
LGBTQ literature
literary modernism
literary pornography
Maurice Girodias
modernism
Obelisk Press
Olympia Press
PA=Not yet available
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Forthcoming
publishing history
queer books
Queer literature
sexual revolution
Sexus
softlaunch
The Rosy Crucifixion
Tropic of Capricorn
women writing pornography
writing pornography

Product details

  • ISBN 9781526181466
  • Weight: 426g
  • Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
  • Publication Date: 28 Jan 2025
  • Publisher: Manchester University Press
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

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An intimate history of the pornographic publisher behind some of the greatest works of the twentieth-century avant-garde.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, in New York and in Paris, daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature.

The authors of the books were young, impecunious writers, poets and artists. Most of them wrote to survive, but some relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided - men writing as women, women writing as men - and some, such as Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, went on to become influential figures in modernist literature.

Dirty books tells the stories of these writers and their remarkable publishers: Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press and his son Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, whose catalogue and repertoire anticipated that of the more famous US publisher Grove Press.

Nina Attwood is the author of The Prostitute’s Body (2011) and a co-author of Sex Addiction: A Critical History (2015)

Barry Reay is the author of Sex in the Archives (2019) and Trans America (2020)