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Housmans radical booksellers since 1945

Thursday 12th June 7pm

Stewart Home brings you a trippy night of occultism, sex and London
psychogeography to celebrate the first publications in Book Works Semina
series. Readings by Stewart Home, Maxi Kim, author of One Break, A
Thousand Blows! and Bridget Penney author of Index.

Stewart Home has long been an underground legend in Europe, North America
and Brazil. The author of numerous books including...and Blood Rites of the
Bourgeoise, forthcoming from Book Works, and the final title in the Semina
series which he is editing.

Maxi Kim is the grandson of illiterate Korean peasant farmers. He is a
recent graduate of CalArts MFA Writing Program, currently researching a Ph.D
at the University of Greenwich. He has worked with performance artists Gina
Clark & Janice Lee, editorially with Matias Viegener and Christine Wertheim,
and organised events with Chris Kraus and Mark von Schlegell. This is his
first novel.

Bridget Penney was born in Edinburgh, lived in London and settled in
Brighton. She is the author of one previously published book Honeymoon with
Death (Polygon, Edinburgh 1991), which was short-listed for the Saltire
Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award.

Full details of the two books are: (if you need to expand)
One Break, A Thousand Blows!
By Maxi Kim (2008)

One Break, A Thousand Blows! is a novel about Japan. The protagonist is a
metaphor, wanting to negate Japan, but not by writing a novel about Japan,
but by writing falsely about it, using Japan as a screen for the author¹s
innermost hopes and desires. One Break, A Thousand Blows! aims to express
the claim that there is no gap between sexuality and textuality; it aims to
be anti-metaphorical, to escape the logic of modernism and postmodernism and
express a pre-modernist, post-human morphogenetic aesthetics in all its wild
sacred expressivity.

Cannibalising every book it references One Break, A Thousand Blows! is
heavily invested in bibliolatry, its polymorphous protagonists subjected to
the occult use of books for divination.

Maxi Kim is the grandson of illiterate Korean peasant farmers. He is a
recent graduate of CalArts MFA Writing Program, currently researching a Phd
at the University of Greenwich. He has worked with performance artists Gina
Clark & Janice Lee, editorially with Matias Viegener and Christine Wertheim,
and organised events with Chris Kraus and Mark von Schlegell. This is his
first novel.

Index
by Bridget Penney (2008)

With locations ranging from a murder scene outside a Covent Garden theatre
to the Victorian explorer Sir John Franklin¹s ship Terror frozen into the
Arctic ice ‹ and taking in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, a rural idyll
in Somerset and an extraordinary Masonic ritual on the way - Index is a
spellbinding novella that provokes curiosity and ultimately satisfies it
with a poetics of mystery that transcends conventional narrative closure.

In the book fictionalised versions of the famous magician and forger
Cagliostro; the revolutionary bigot Lord George Gordon; Marie Antoinette and
the transvestite spy Chevalier D¹Eon, are woven into a thematic exploration
of revolution, repression, seduction and death. The use of uncredited
Œfound¹ texts and deliberate forgeries blur the line between what might have
happened and what is merely imagined. Mapped onto this web of memory and
imagination are Roland and Julie, the survivors of a king¹s unsuccessful
experiment to uncover the truth about human nature and the original spoken
language.

Bridget Penney was born in Edinburgh, lived in London and settled in
Brighton. She is the author of one previously published book 'Honeymoon with
Death' (Polygon, Edinburgh 1991), which was short-listed for the Saltire
Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award.