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

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Description

An intimate history of the pornographic publisher behind some of the greatest works of the twentieth-century avant-garde.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, in New York and in Paris, daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature.

The authors of the books were young, impecunious writers, poets and artists. Most of them wrote to survive, but some relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided - men writing as women, women writing as men - and some, such as Anas Nin and Henry Miller, went on to become influential figures in modernist literature.

Dirty books tells the stories of these writers 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

'Reay and Attwood tell the story of Obelisk and Olympia with admirable scholarly precision.'
The Literary Review

'Reay and Attwoods chapter on Kahanes Obelisk Press... is one of the best.'
The Spectator

'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, author of All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin

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 eroticised 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 (2011) and a co-author of Sex Addiction: A Critical History (2015)

Barry Reay is the author of Sex in the Archives (2019) and Trans America (2020)