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Books published by Strange Attractor Press

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    - A Girl's Life in the Incredible String Band
    by Rose Simpson
    £15.99

    A memoir by a member of the Incredible String Band that charts a journey from hippie utopia to post-Woodstock implosion.Between 1967 and 1971 Rose Simpson lived with the Incredible String Band (Mike Heron, Robin Williamson and Licorice McKechnie), morphing from English student to West Coast hippie and, finally, bassist in leathers. The band's image adorned psychedelic posters and its music was the theme song for an alternative lifestyle. Rose and partner Mike Heron believed in, and lived, a naive vision of utopia in Scotland. But they were also a band on tour, enjoying the thrills of that life. They were at the center of "Swinging London” and at the Chelsea Hotel with Andy Warhol's superstars. They shared stages with rock idols and played at Woodstock in 1969. Rose and fellow ISB member Licorice were hippie pin-ups, while Heron and Robin Williamson the seers and prophets of a new world.Through a haze of incense and marijuana, they played out their Arcadian dreams on stages brilliant with the colors of clothes, light-shows, rugs, cushions, and exotic instruments. Like most utopias, the ISB's imploded. Never seeing herself as a professional musician, Rose retained an outsider's detachment even while living the life of a hippie chick. Her memoir gives a voice to those flower-wreathed girls whose photographs have become symbols of the psychedelic sixties.

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    - Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
    by Erik Davis
    £18.49

    An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson.

  • Save 17%
    by Victor Segalen
    £12.49

    Works by the polymathic French author Victor Segalen, including a previously untranslated essay, a novel, and a libretto.Victor Segalen (1878-1919) had one of France's most curious literary careers, applying his imagination to musicology, ethnography, exploration, medicine, synesthetics, Chinese history, and the occult. This collection gathers together his previously untranslated essay "Synesthestics and the Symbolist School” and his novel In A Sound World, a work of fantasy concerning an inventor lost in his own immersive harmonic space. Segalen's medical training (he had a career as a ship's doctor) inspired an interest in the link between the prevailing Symbolism of the time and synesthesia, the condition whereby one sense affects the perception of another.This edition also includes an essay by the musician and cultural historian David Toop that explores the historical context of Segalen's ideas. Also included is Segalen's libretto for Orpheus Rex, a collaboration with the composer Claude Debussy, which he would use as an opportunity for further explorations of his synesthetic concepts. This book makes available all three texts for the first time in English.

  • Save 18%
    by Cathi Unsworth
    £11.49

    A gripping crime novel inspired by the "Jack the Stripper” killings in 1960s London.Bad Penny Blues is the latest gripping crime fiction from Cathi Unsworth, London's undisputed queen of noir. Set in late 1950s and early 1960s London, it is loosely based on the West London "Jack the Stripper” killings that rocked the city. The narrative follows police officer Pete Bradley, who investigates the serial killings of a series of prostitutes, and, in a parallel story, Stella, part of the art and fashion worlds of 1960s "Swinging London,” who is haunted by visions of the murdered women.

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    - Poems & Prose from Victor Neuburg & the Vine Press
    by Justin Hopper
    £15.99

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    - The Screenplay for a Horror Film That Never Was
    by Mark E. Smith
    £15.99

    The first ever publication of Mark E. Smith's supernatural film treatment, co-authored with Graham Duff.In 2015 Mark E. Smith of The Fall and screenwriter Graham Duff co-wrote the script for a horror feature film called The Otherwise. The story involved The Fall recording an EP in an isolated recording studio on Pendle Hill. The Lancashire landscape is not only at the mercy of a satanic biker gang, it's also haunted by a gaggle of soldiers who have slipped through time from the Jacobite Rebellion.However, every film production company who saw the script said it was 'too weird' to ever be made. The Otherwise is weird. Yet it's also witty, shocking and genuinely scary. Now the screenplay is published for the first time, alongside photographs, drawings and handwritten notes. The volume also contains previously unpublished transcripts of conversations between Smith and Duff, where they discuss creativity, dreams, musical loves (from Can to acid house) and favourite films (from Britannia Hospital to White Heat). Smith also talks candidly about his youth and mortality, in exchanges that are both touching and extremely funny.

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    - On the Trail of LSD's Cosmic Courier, Michael Hollingshead
    by Andy Roberts
    £15.49

    A biography of a key figure in psychedelic history: the man who turned Timothy Leary on to LSD.

  • Save 14%
    - A Walker's Guide
    by Tom Bolton
    £11.99

    Tracking eleven rivers beneath London that have been culverted, placed in tunnels, or diverted into the sewer system.Below the pavements, out of sight, a network of secret rivers pulses beneath the capital's busy pavements. The second volume of London's Lost Rivers explores eleven more rivers that have been buried, hidden or mislaid across the city—watercourses that have been culverted, placed in tunnels, or diverted into the sewer system. But while they may be hidden from view, clues remain, and this book will show you how to find them. These eleven walks trace the routes of buried rivers, tracking the impression they have left on the landscape and cityscape of London. Walks include the little-known Cock and Pye Ditch that shaped Covent Garden, Tottenham's Moselle River (not to be confused with the French version), the East End's unsavory-sounding Black Ditch, and the Ravensbourne, linking rural Bromley to the heart of the British Navy at Deptford. Accompanied by S. F. Said's haunting and evocative Polaroid photographs, this guidebook tracks routes that are recorded on no map, stripping back the layers to reveal London's veins and arteries.

  • Save 11%
    - A Life in Fifteen Gigs
    by Graham Duff
    £15.99

    A chronicle of a lifetime's passion for gig-going, by one of British television's most respected writers.

  • Save 15%
    - A Memoir of Ironfoot Jack, King of the Bohemians
    by Ironfoot Jack
    £10.99

    The life of escape artist, fortune-teller, author and raconteur "Ironfoot Jack," aka Jack Rudolph Neave (1881-1959), the self-styled "King of the Bohemians" in London's Soho.

  • Save 12%
    - London's Lost Neighbourhoods
    by Tom Bolton
    £11.49

    Telling the stories of ten areas of London—some of the city's most famous, and infamous neighbourhoods—which have disappeared from the A-Z.London is in a state of constant transformation, layer upon layer built up over centuries of destruction and reconstruction. There is so much change all around us that we scarcely notice it, but among the areas now vanished and forgotten are some of the city's most famous, and infamous, neighbourhoods.Vanished City takes us to ten areas, well-known in their day, which have disappeared from the A-Z. Each chapter tells the stories of places once known to every Londoner, including the most feared neighbourhood in the Western world, London's first Olympic Park, its first port, the original Grub Street, a high society spa resort, an occult square, a landscape of ancient, mythical kings, a notorious slum, and the streets stalked by the first London serial killer.Lost London lies right under our noses, in places we think we know and places we never thought to visit. Vanished City peels back the layers to reveal London as it used to be.

  • Save 21%
    by Aleksandra Mir
    £13.49

    The story of Alexandra Mir's Space Tapestry: Faraway Missions, with reproductions of the finished work and images from its collaborative creation with twenty-five young artists.

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    by Ken Hollings
    £11.99

    A radical retelling of our relationship with the cosmos, reinventing the history of astronomy as a new form of astrological calendar.Astronomy is another form of cinema. Time is fragmented and extended. Matter becomes light in motion. The camera remains fixed, looking outwards into the darkness, while the earth moves beneath our feet.A carefully constructed text in sixty numbered sections, The Space Oracle reinvents the history of astronomy as a new form of astrological calendar. This radical retelling of our relationship with the cosmos reaches back to places and times when astronomers were treated as artists or priests, to when popes took part in astral rites and the common people feared eclipses and comets as portents of disaster. Panoramic and encyclopedic in its scope, The Space Oracle brings astronauts and spies, engineers and soldiers, goddesses and satellites into alignment with speculative insights and everyday observations. The universe, Hollings argues, is a work in progress—enjoy it. Ken Hollings is a writer, broadcaster, and cultural theorist based in London. He has given readings, lectures and presentations of his work at the Royal Institution, the Berlin Akademie der Künste, the Venice Biennale, Tate Britain and the Royal College of Art, where he currently teaches. His previous two books, Welcome to Mars and The Bright Labyrinth are published by Strange Attractor Press."Ken Hollings is a master at connecting the dots between avant-garde art history, outré culture and weird science.” —David Pescovitz, Boing Boing

  • Save 20%
    by Mark Pilkington
    £18.49

    The return of the Strange Attractor Journal, offering a characteristically eclectic collection of high weirdness from the margins of culture.

  • Save 23%
    - Communiques from the Guild of Transcultural Studies, 1976-1991
    by Dave Tomlin
    £15.49

    Vignettes of a peculiar occupation: the Guild of Transcultural Studies in the abandoned Cambodian embassy.

  • Save 21%
    by Steve Moore
    £21.99

  • Save 23%
    by John Cussans
    £16.99

    There are zombies among us! From the rotting hordes of TV's The Walking Dead to the blockbuster nightmares of World War Z and 28 Days Later, our popular culture is overrun with the ravenous undead. But where do these strange creatures come from, and what peculiar tales of mesmerism, freemasonry, pig sacrifice and revolution would they tell if they could talk? Artist and writer John Cussans tracks the zombie from Hollywood back to its origins in the voodoo folklore of Haiti, a Caribbean island with a history that is a strange composite of fact and fantasy in the long struggle for independence from colonial intrusion. Turning a keen eye on the way Haiti has provoked mysterious images in the popular culture of the twentieth century, Cussans asks how the sensational imaginings of William Seabrook, Graham Greene, and Wes Craven, among others, have served to inform impressions of the country on the world stage, and in turn, how these representations might have influenced the way that Haiti formulates an image of itself.

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