“Rigaud was born in 1903 in Port au Prince, Haiti, where he spent the greater part of his life studying voodoo tradition. In Haiti, he studied law, and in France, ethnology, psychology and theology. The involvement of voodoo in the political struggle of Haitian blacks for independence was one of his main concerns after he returned to his country… Secrets of Voodoo traces the development in Haiti and the Americas of this complex religion from its sources in the brilliant civilizations of ancient Africa. This book presents a straightforward account of the gods, or loas, and their function, the symbols and signs, rituals and the ceremonial calendar of voodoo; and the procedures for performing magical rites are given.”

Publisher: City Lights
Paperback: 219 pages
Illustrated

“The mystic's moment of illumination shares with great poetry the liberating power of the deepest levels of consciousness… Poetry, Wilson argues, is a contradiction of the habitual prison of daily life and shows the way to transcend the ordinary world through an act of intense attention—and intention.”

Publisher: City Lights
Paperback: 227 pages

“Overshadowed by the extravagance and self-promoting polemics of Surrealist-dominated French thought, Daumal's sober brilliance was not apt to attract the notoriety on which André Breton and company thrived… Daumal's unsparing lucidity; the vast range, depth and purpose of his erudition; the humor that never ceases to question all claims to ‘truth’ or ‘knowledge’—particularly his own; his lifelong efforts to make poetry an expression of lived experience and to eradicate the empty ‘chatterings’ that so-called poetry willingly accommodates; his confrontation of intense childhood fears and physical frailty to illuminate the great mystery of death—these alone would warrant him a place in any pantheon of letters.” Includes “Introduction to the Grand Jeu,” “Pataphysics and the Revelation of Laughter,” “Asphyxiation and Absurd Evidence” and more.

Publisher: City Lights
Paperback: 174 pages

A collection of short works published by small presses both foreign and domestic, focusing on Burroughs' experiments in language cut-up and photomontage drawn largely from the 1960s. Also includes The Retreat Diaries (1976), a day-by-day assemblage of “bits of dreams and poetry and associations cut in together” recorded on a Buddhist retreat in Vermont; and Cobble Stone Gardens (1976), an alternately bizarre and tender reminiscence of the author's childhood dedicated to the memory of his mother and father. Enhanced by the inclusion of “Burroughs in Tangier” by Paul Bowles (1959) and Alan Ansen's affectionate appreciation “Whoever Can Pick Up a Frying Pan Owns Death” (1959), The Burroughs File is an excellent compilation that provides the reader with Burroughs' principal literary output prior to his return to full-length fiction with The Wild Boys (1970). Writing to Ansen, Burroughs states: “Unless writing has the danger and immediacy, the urgency of bullfighting, it is nowhere near my way of thinking… I am tired of sitting behind the lines with an imperfect recording device receiving inaccurate bulletins… I must reach the Front.” MDG

Publisher: City Lights
Paperback: 230 pages
Illustrated

A short collection of correspondence (commencing in 1953) between Burroughs and Ginsberg focusing on Burroughs' travels through the Peruvian jungles in search of yage, an hallucinogenic plant used by Amazon Indian doctors for the purpose of locating lost bodies and souls. Most exciting, perhaps, is encountering Burroughs in an epistolary mode; his arch observations and bitchy wit bereft of the allegorical/nonlinear trappings of his celebrated novels (though many of the images in Naked Lunch are in fact taken from notes on the hallucinations caused by yage). Seven years later Ginsberg is in Peru and writes Burroughs an account of his own terrors with the drug, appealing to his mentor for counsel; a request Burroughs responds to somewhat cryptically: “There is no thing to fear. Vaya adelante. Look. Listen. Hear. Your AYUASKA consciousness is more valid than 'Normal Consciousness'? Whose 'Normal Consciousness'? Why return to?” The volume concludes with an epilogue (1963) containing a brief reflective missive from Ginsberg as well as “I AM DYING, MEESTER?,” a disturbingly elegiac cut-up by Burroughs provoked, presumably, by memories of his search for the drug: “Flashes in front of my eyes naked and sullen—Rotten dawn wind in sleep—Death rot on Panama photo where the awning flaps.” For all students of Burroughs as well as those interested in the literature of drug-induced altered states. MDG

Publisher: City Lights
Paperback: 72 pages

Passionate adventures of a young boy attempting to realize his sexual identity in a society that disowns him. First published anonymously in 1928; purported to be semiautobiographical. Rich with erotic detail. As André Gide noted, “Some of the obscenities” are “described in the most charming manner.” Includes nudes drawn by Cocteau. GR

Publisher: City Lights
Paperback: 76 pages
Illustrated

Collection of essays, letters, poems and fragments from the genius who suffered the indignities of institutionalization, psychiatric torture and critical neglect. Includes “All Writing Is Pigshit,” “Fragments of a Journal in Hell,” “Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society,” “Electroshock,” “Theatre and Science” and “Letter Against the Kabbala”… “Every dream is a piece of suffering torn out of us by other beings, by chance, with the monkey paw they throw upon me every night, the cinder in repose in our self, which isn’t a cinder but a machine—gunning as if the blood were a scrapiron and the self the ferruginous one.”

Publisher: City Lights
Paperback: 252 pages
Illustrated

Under other circumstances, Jacobs would be hailed as a savvy businessman filled with entrepreneurial chutzpah. Instead, he turned his unique talents into a 20-year criminal career during which he made millions of dollars via his sophisticated credit card scams, counting among his victims corporations such as Western Union and Proctor and Gamble, as well as casinos, airlines and just about every other business imaginable. Unfortunately, Jacobs’ severe addiction to gambling caused him to lose most of those millions as quickly as he acquired them, leaving the titular appellation “genius” open to question. Long-suffering urbanites may or may not appreciate the scheme in which he sublet an apartment under a false name, then “rented” it to approximately 60 different individuals, collecting a hefty deposit from each before disappearing. Even his numerous straight businesses functioned on the border of illegitimacy, probably not unlike most Fortune 500 companies. Come to think of it, Jacobs used the name “Donald Trump” for one of his scams, and but he and the Donald have never been seen in the same room together. At the very least, Jacobs’ tale will make you guard your credit cards with your life. LP

Publisher: City Lights
Hardback: 205 pages
Illustrated

Eroticism, unlike sexual activity, Bataille argues, “is a psychological quest and not alien to death.” In Erotism he pursues his historical inquiry into the erotic through subjects ranging from orgies and witches’ Sabbaths, trance possession and mystical ecstasy, cruelty and organized war, the notions of sin and religious sacrifice to taboo and death.

Publisher: City Lights
Paperback: 276 pages
Illustrated

“Like the fictional narratives of novels, the texts that follow—the first two at any rate—are offered with the intention of depicting the truth. Not that I’m led to believe they have a convincing quality. I didn’t wish to deceive. Moreover there is not in principle any novel that deceives. And I couldn’t imagine doing that in my turn better than anyone else. Indeed I think that in a sense my narratives clearly attain the impossible. To be honest, these evocations have a painful heaviness about them. This heaviness may be tied to the fact that at times horror had a real presence in my life. It may be too that, even when reached in fiction, horror alone still enabled me to escape the empty feeling of untruth…”

Publisher: City Lights
Paperback: 164 pages