Dirty Books: Erotic Fiction and the Avant-Garde in Mid-Century Paris and New York

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Description

From the 1930s to the 1970s, in New York and in Paris, daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature. The books were written by young, impecunious writers, poets, and artists, many anonymously. Most of these pornographers wrote to survive, but some also relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided men writing as women, and women writing as men and some (Anas Nin, Henry Miller) went on to become influential figures in modernist literature.

Dirty Books tells the stories of these authors and their remarkable publishers: Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press and his son Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, whose catalogue and repertoire anticipated that of the more famous US publisher Grove Press. It offers a humorous and vivid snapshot of a fascinating moment in pornographic and literary history, uncovering a hidden, earlier history of the sexual revolution, when the profits made from erotica helped launch the careers of literary cult figures.

Reviews

'Avant-garde art has long been associated with the shock of the new but in Dirty Books, Barry Reay and Nina Attwood show the extent to which erotic fiction fuelled modernist writing in London, New York and Paris. Drawing on a motley cast of characters from Anas Nin to Alexander Trocchi, Dirty Books is a gripping account of sex, censorship and the avant-garde. ' Douglas Field, co-editor of James Baldwin Review and author of All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin (OUP, 2015).

By pushing the boundaries of legally and artistically valid expression, avant-garde literature often blurred the lines between art and pornography. But Reay and Attwood go further, arguing that even the sleaziest paperbacks from Obelisk and Olympia Press also contain unheralded moments of aesthetic brilliance. Filled with absolutely wild quotes from a plethora of titles and authors well beyond the modernist canon, Dirty Books just might be your guide to a whole new reading list!
David Church, Indiana University

A short guide to the world of twentieth-century, English-language pornography where pseudonyms abounded, men wrote as women, women wrote as men, classics were eroticized, and new works were passed off as classics of the genre. Reay and Attwood describe a dizzying world where sex and money chased each other into books.
Lisa Z. Sigel, author of Governing Pleasures, Making Modern Love, and The Peoples Porn

'Dirty Books lays bare the secret history of the mid-century literary underground, where modernist classics and porn-for-hire traveled along the same clandestine transnational circuits. A unique combination of scholarly analysis and anecdotal wit, it promises to be the authoritative resource on this crucial strand of modern literary history.
Loren Glass, DEO of English at University of Iowa

'Barry Reay and Nina Attwood's Dirty Books is proof-positive that the infamous have more fun. Maybe. Gathered in this clutch of microhistories of literary publishers and their coteries are tales elucidating the glittering and sometimes brutal oscillations between pornography and art in the period right before the sexual revolutions of the late 1960s.'
Andy Campbell, USC Roski School of Art and Design

Author Bio

Nina Attwood is the author of The Prostitutes Body: Rewriting Prostitution in Victorian England (2011) and a co-author of Sex Addiction: A Critical History (2015)

Barry Reay's most recent books include Sex in the Archives (2019) and Trans America (2020)