Books published by Strange Attractor Press

The first in-depth biographical study of the British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun,This book offers the first in-depth biographical study of the British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, situating her art within the magical contexts that shaped her imaginative life and work. After decades of neglect, Colquhoun's unique vision and hermetic life have become an object of great renewed interest, both for artists and for historians of magic. Although her paintings are represented in such major collections as Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery, Colquhoun's rejection of both avant-garde and occult orthodoxies resulted in a life of relative obscurity. Her visual and written works have only recently received adequate recognition as a precursor to contemporary experiments in magical autobiography and esoteric feminism.After rejecting the hectic social expectations and magical orthodoxies of London's art and occult scenes, Colquhoun pursued a life of dedicated spiritual and artistic enquiry embodied in her retreat to Cornwall. Genius of the Fern Loved Gully balances engaging biography with art historical erudition and critical insight into the magical systems that underscored her art and writing.

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.

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.

The first anthology on animal music and communication, with contributions from leading scientists, researchers and musicians.

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.

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.

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

A journey deep into the heart of the trash experience: tales from the underground and exploitation movie scene in America during the 1960s.

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

Two women see something uncanny in the skies over west London in the summer of 1989.It's the summer of 1989, a time of global flux just before the collapse of the Berlin wall and of South Africa's apartheid; a time of signs and portents...Two women see something uncanny in the skies over west London.Maeve, the wife of the local vicar, finds she has lost nearly an hour of her life. In search of this lost time, she uncovers the memory of an encounter with aliens and, worse, a mysterious event from her childhood in Ireland, which she finally redeems in the underworld of an IRA-connected pub...Her husband Alistair has his own nightmare: preparations for the visit of an African bishop and his entourage for a Christian conference, whose left-wing agenda is threatened by the attendance of a famous and enigmatic nun...Meanwhile, Heather's sighting comes as a revelation that leads her, like a questing Grail knight, through strange ordeals, from a menacing cult to an alternate reality; from a mental hospital to, finally, an encounter with her own hidden depths.A companion volume to the author's critically lauded Daimonic Reality, a classic nonfiction study of otherworld journeys, The Good People is a modern fairy tale that dramatizes with wit the interweaving of revelation and delusion, the natural and the supernatural, worldliness and sanctity—ultimately suggesting that our humdrum lives are shadowed by the alien dimension of myth.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

A memoir from one of Britain's legendary singers, folklorists, and music historians.A legendary singer, folklorist, and music historian, Shirley Collins has been an integral part of the folk-music revival for more than sixty years. In her new memoir, All in the Downs, Collins tells the story of that lifelong relationship with English folksong—a dedication to artistic integrity that has guided her through the triumphs and tragedies of her life. All in the Downs combines elements of memoir—from her working-class origins in wartime Hastings to the bright lights of the 1950s folk revival in London—alongside reflections on the role traditional music and the English landscape have played in shaping her vision. From formative field recordings made with Alan Lomax in the United States to the "crowning glories” recorded with her sister Dolly on the Sussex Downs, she writes of the obstacles that led to her withdrawal from the spotlight and the redemption of a new artistic flourishing that continues today with her unexpected return to recording in 2016. Through it all, Shirley Collins has been guided and supported by three vital and inseparable loves: traditional English song, the people and landscape of her native Sussex, and an unwavering sense of artistic integrity. All in the Downs pays tribute to these passions, and in doing so, illustrates a way of life as old as England, that has all but vanished from this land.Generously illustrated with rare archival material.

The first substantial scholarly volume devoted to artist Tessa Farmer's work.

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.