Discusses the drug's discovery in 1943, the CIA's covert research program investigating its effects and the crucial role that organization played in bringing it to the masses, its use by psychiatric pioneers, its impact on the antiwar movement and political rebellion in the late '60s and much more. A landmark contribution and a fascinating piece of social and political history. AK

Publisher: Grove
Paperback: 213 pages

“The Marquis de Sade, vilified by respectable society from his own time through ours, apotheosized by Apollinaire as ‘the freest spirit that has yet existed,’ wrote The 120 Days of Sodom while imprisoned in the Bastille. An exhaustive catalog of sexual aberrations and the first systematic exploration—a hundred years before Krafft-Ebing and Freud—of the psychopathology of sex, it is considered Sade’s crowning achievement and the cornerstone of his thought. Lost after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, it was later retrieved but remained unpublished until 1935. In addition to The 120 Days, this volume includes Sade’s ‘Reflections on the Novel,’ his play Oxtiern, and his novella Ernestine. The selections are introduced by Simone de Beauvoir’s landmark essay ‘Must We Burn Sade?’ and Pierre Klossowski’s provocative ‘Nature as Destructive Principal.’”

Publisher: Grove
Paperback: 800 pages

The owner of the Hollywood Movie Posters shop has put his extensive personal poster collection of classic science fiction and horror movies into a lavish show-stopper of a massive full-color tome. Borst has solicited the likes of Stephen King, Forrest J. Ackerman, Clive Barker, Robert Bloch, and Harlan Ellison to set the stage with essays on the lore and fascination of horror and SF movie posters. Wisely, the collection ends with the 1960s, since the movie-poster-as-art-object sadly seems to have become a distant memory. SS

Publisher: Grove
Hardback: 256 pages
Illustrated

In the late 1970s, Legs McNeil was the “resident punk” around the New York office of the seminal underground publication Punk magazine. In this volume, he and co-author McCain gather together reminiscences (presented verbatim as an “oral history” and without commentary) of the movers and shakers in that city’s punk rock and proto-punk scenes, from the Velvet Underground and MC5 to the Ramones, the Dead Boys and even those limey interlopers the Sex Pistols. Some may quibble with the authors’ assertions that New York was the solitary birthplace of punk rock, or that the scene died with the arrival of the Sex Pistols in the U.S. and their implosion soon after. But the book is crammed with sleaze and gossip aplenty as well as hair-raising tales of heavy drug usage and indiscriminate sexual activity which will keep readers turning pages far past their bedtimes. The sensitive of heart take note: not since Romeo and Juliet have so many major characters died in the last act. LP

Publisher: Grove
Hardback: 320 pages
Illustrated

“Sam Peckinpah was born into a clan of lumberjacks, cattle ranchers and frontier lawyers. After a hitch with the marines, he made his way to Hollywood, where he worked on a string of low-budget features. In 1955, he began writing scripts for Gunsmoke; in less than a year he was one of the hottest writers in television, with two classic series, The Rifleman and The Westerner, to his credit. From there he went on to direct a phenomenal series of features, including Ride the High Country, Straw Dogs, The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and The Wild Bunch.
Peckinpah was both a hopeless romantic and a grim nihilist, a filmmaker who defined his era as much as he was shaped by it. Rising to prominence in the social and politicial upheaval of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Peckinpah and his generation of directors—Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, Robert Altman—broke with convention and turned the traditional genres of Western, science fiction, war and detective movies inside out. No other era in Hollywood has matched it for sheer energy, audacity and originality, and no one cut a wider path through that time than Sam Peckinpah.”

Publisher: Grove
Hardback: 416 pages

Novelized account of the author’s obsessional and haunting relationship with a girl in Paris; explores eroticism, psychic power and insanity. With shocking honesty, Breton confronts the ultimate futility of his romantic search for a flesh-and-blood creature who embodies his fantasy of the femme-enfant, the ideal Surrealist woman.

Publisher: Grove
Paperback: 160 pages
Illustrated

A collection of manifestos originally published in 1938: “We cannot go on prostituting the idea of the theater, the only value of which is in its excruciating, magical relation to reality and danger.” He repudiates all literature written to be performed, wishing to destroy all forms of language and all social properties in order to bring life into the theater and transform actors and audiences into “victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.”

Publisher: Grove
Paperback: 159 pages
Illustrated