The grisly 1947 murder of aspiring starlet and nightclub habitué Elizabeth Short, known even before her death as the “Black Dahlia,” has over the decades transmogrified from L.A.'s crime of the century to an almost mythical symbol of Hollywood Babylon/film noir glamour-cum-sordidness.

A powerful chronicler of the American Nightmare through his gripping examinations of near-mythic Southern California murders (the Black Dahlia, Tate-La Bianca), John Gilmore now draws upon his personal experiences to turn his sights on our morbid obsession with Celebrity and the ruinous price it exacts from those who would pursue it. With caustic clarity and 20/20 hindsight, Gilmore unstintingly recounts his relationships with the likes of Janis Joplin, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Jane Fonda, Jean Seberg, and Lenny Bruce on the way up and at the peaks of their notoriety. In baring his role in James Dean’s attempts to push the bounds of sexual experimentation, Gilmore explores the actor’s legendary fascination with speed and death. With hip, vivid prose, Gilmore describes his illuminating and often haunting first-hand encounters with Hank Williams, Ed Wood, Jr., Brigitte Bardot, Sal Mineo, Eartha Kitt, Charles Manson, Jayne Mansfield, Vampira, Steve McQueen and many other denizens of the 20th century’s dubious Pantheon.

A compendium of psycho-physiological investigations compiled from the furthest reaches of forensic medicine, sexology, psychiatry, anthropology and hard science research. The focus of this compilation is the pursuit of a neurobiological basis for mystical and ecstatic experience. The Amok Journal: Sensurround Edition brings together accounts of the search for the erotic in the mechanical, the sublime in the visceral, and the spiritual in the electromagnetic, from explorations of the subtle effects of infrasound to death-defying grasps at the ultimate orgasm. The field of inquiry is the prodigious psychic démi-monde of hallucination, schizophrenia, religious fervor, ecstatic possession, sexual obsession, mass hysteria, and private ritual, as documented by the rational methodology of science. Heavily and graphically illustrated.

Georges Bataille presents the case of the most infamous villain of the Middle Ages: Gilles de Rais. Fascinated with the depths of human experience — the meeting points of sexuality, violence, ritual, spirituality, and death — Bataille examines with dispassionate clarity the legendary crimes, trials and confessions of this grotesque and still horrifying 15th-century child-murderer, sadist, alchemist, necrophile and practitioner of the Black Arts.

NSK is a full-color illustrated book documenting the controversial theories, statements, visual arts, music, film, video and theater work of the internationally acclaimed Slovenian arts collective from 1980 to 1989. NSK encompasses the innovative pop group LAIBACH, the IRWIN painter group, the Cosmokinetic Theater “Red Pilot,” as well as philosophy, architecture, TV and motion picture departments. Strikingly designed and compiled by the New Collectivism graphic studio on behalf of NSK; includes 260 full-color reproductions.

A Cold Fire Burning brilliantly depicts an interracial love story amidst the political changes of the early Seventies. Shadow is a working-class black man in the ghetto of Newark, NJ. An affair with Terri, a liberal white woman who works at a storefront drug rehab center, begins to throw his sense of the world into turmoil. When the racial and psycho-sexual tensions inherent in their relationship finally reach the boiling point, Shadow rejects Terri and everything she represents to him and winds up the leader of a rag-tag band of would-be black nationalist urban guerillas. Tragedy ensues when Shadow tries to transform their revolutionary rhetoric into reality on the harsh streets of Newark.

“This terrible tale haunts the reader....a remarkable achievement in bringing together the chords of fear.” —Los Angeles News-Advocate

ISBN 1-878923-07-2 (trade paper) · $14.95 · 178 pgs · Illustrated