Rare Books

Franz Kamin

In this richly integrated collection of stories, poems, & other texts, the intermedial composer-performer Franz Kamin generates a personal mythos out of his musical, mathematical, biographical, & mystical concerns.

“Once, while I was listening to a lecture on dreams, I noticed that the girl in front of me had fallen asleep on her arms. Where was she then? It would be gentle to guess that Franz Kamin is busy exploring the geography of her elsewhere. Yet the force in his work is like that of all the other explorers, whose images become gentle and benign only in hindsight (Audubon, for instance, fleeced Keats’ brother at cards). It is transgressive, impatient of the natives, hasty, not yet polished up for presentation to the Socit’ d’Ailleurs. Here are his travel diaries, still stained with blood and lime squash.” – Robert Kelly

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D., is the woman who has transformed the way the world thinks about death and dying. Beginning with the groundbreaking publication of the classic psychological study On Death and Dying, through her many books and her years working with terminally ill children, AIDS patients and the elderly, Kubler-Ross has brought comfort and understanding to millions coping with their own deaths or the deaths of loved ones. From her work in war-ravaged Poland to her pioneering counseling of the terminally ill, to her legendary seminars on death and dying at the University of Chicago, to her eye-opening discussions with those who had been revived after death, each experience provided Kubler-Ross with a piece of the puzzle. In a culture determined to sweep death under a carpet and hide it there, Kubler-Ross consistently defied common wisdom to bring it into the light and hold it there for us to see and not be afraid.

In The Cocoon and the Butterfly, drawing on thousands of accounts of “near death experiences” that she has accumulated over the years from persons of all ages and circumstances, Dr. Ross develops the image of the butterfly’s emergence from a cocoon as a symbol for the new beginning that such experiences portend for us when we die.

Hannah Weiner

Dawn Nelson

The aim of this unique how-to book is to address the often unmet need of the aged, the ill, and the dying for intimate, nurturing contact. Compassionate touch, as defined by the author, is a gentle, sensitive, and non-intrusive program of massage, touch therapy, and comfort care, supported by such helping skills as active listening, reflective communication, intuitive feedback, guided relaxation, and breathing awareness. It aims to ease both physical and emotional pain, in a way that medication and medical procedures simply cannot. Written with great clarity and sensitivity, this is an ideal book for massage therapists and bodyworkers looking to expand their skills; furthermore, it is an essential reference for all caregivers and family members.

Alfred A. Tomatis

This autobiography was originally published in French (1977). The Tomatis Method, which helps develop listening and communication skills, is used in 15 different countries. Tomatis addresses his experience with some of the most difficult therapeutic and educational problems (e.g., stuttering, autism, dyslexia, balance, motor control, and integration) and shows how they are affected and controlled by the ear. His account will be welcomed by speech therapists, performing artists, educators, and psychotherapists.

“What Tomatis has done with sound and hearing is virtually a Copernican revolution.” -Jean Houston, Ph.D., author of The Possible Human

“Tomatis’ work is the long awaited foundation for what may well be the most important research in sound, learning and health.” -Don Campbell, author of Introduction to the Musical Brain and Rhythms of Learning

“In the tradition of Buckminster Fuller, Emanuel Swedenborg and Nicola Tesla, Tomatis is an irrepressible pioneer.” -Marilyn Ferguson, author of The Aquarian Conspiracy

Sean Haldane

The only “how-to” book on emotional crises as distinct from long-term emotional problems, Emotional First Aid shows how to handle intense emotional episodes as well as crises between parents and children. Haldane argues that these crises must be dealt with on an individual basis if one is not to be invasive in coming to another’s aid, and that emotional first aid can help avoid the necessity for psychotherapy just as physical first aid can prevent extended medical treatment.

Edmond Jabes,
Pierre Joris (trans.)

The fate of the individual among disintegrating tradition is a major theme of Edmund Jabes. In this book of literary and philosophical conversations, France’s leading Jewish writer adds an intimate, personal dimension to his formidable 40-year career. Compelling in its inquiry into the fate of reading and writing in our time, it is also profoundly ambiguous, open to a multiplicity of possible readings. This work offers insight of a new kind into this major writer’s growing canon in English—thoughts on his own works combine with stories of his youth in Egypt, his exile in 1956, other writers and artists, the Kabbalah, and projections for a postmodern world.

George Quasha and Charles Stein

This essay, discussing a two-part installation at Galerie des Archives in Paris by the internationally celebrated artist, Gary Hill, explores the enigmatic nature of the work of art as an object and of objects in general, as such issues pertain to Hill’s work and these installations in particular. The text is by two well-known poet/artists who have a long history of association and collaboration with Gary Hill. This book is handsomely illustrated with photographs of the installation and other relevant works by Hill and is presented in a bilingual, French-English edition.

Excerpts from the text:

“There are works of art that require initiation. This does not mean that they require explanation, special consensus, or any other prescriptive bearing. It does mean that one must discover an _appropriate mode of entry_ which is more than informational. This can involve radical reorientation, as in the case of _HanD HearD_, which directly (but non-coercively) introduces us to the posture of awareness appropriate to our participation in the piece.”

“Considering more particularly the piece _HanD HearD_, we discover that its way of being a text imposes nothing on the mind, yet it offers an _image_ (a hand in front of a person’s face) as a possible _posture_ of awareness. And because the “text” has no “content” other than this posture, it grants the participant _direct access_ from the beginning.”

This text is a psychotypographic romance caught listening to the voices inside the voice from which it issues. It mates willingly with its Reader, releases quickness & lightness in the marriage of syntax, then returns to the underground where Lily & Hands receive their power to discourse.

Rosmarie Waldrop

Writing from America to her sister in Germany, the protagonist of this shattering first novel reconstructs the life of her parents—in the author’s words, “just those ‘ordinary people’ who helped Hitler rise.” Unflinching in her appraisal, she imagines how her father’s latent anti-Semitism was triggered by his wife’s affair with a Jew, who was later sent to a concentration camp. The tone darkens as the narrator realizes that she and her sisters are living out variants of their mother’s sexual model.

“Wonderfully, relentlessly absorbing, Hanky’s several overlapping tales leave one marvelling at the beauty, economy and humor with which Waldrop interweaves the complex tensions of Hitler’s Germany in a family drama of repeated infidelity. Delightfully rich and bawdy and as strong-willed as its characters.” -Lydia Davis

“Rosmarie Waldrop’s haunting novel, superbly intelligent, evocative and strange, reverberates in the memory for a long time, a song for the dead, a judgment.” -Angela Carter

Healing Fiction — meaning both “fiction that heals” and “the process of healing the fiction itself” — is a radical revision of the act of therapy. One of the most influential psychological writers of our time, Hillman conceives and practices therapy as an imaginative art, intimately bound with poetics — the making with words, fictioning. To heal the symptom, he argues, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself. Three essays “revision” the work of Freud, Jung and Adler through the role of fiction in their thought and practice.

“Stein has found a channel to his own imagination. When his mind is moving and seizing the gorgeous or gritty images as they wind upward in the spine or shiver from the brain, he carries the reader effortlessly into his discoveries.” – Bill Zavatsky

Jacqui Bishop and
Mary Grunte

OUT OF PRINT

Maria Negroni

Islandia tells us of a race of exiled, conquering, Nordic heroes, who have landed on and settled an island (presumably Iceland) and remained there for generations, self-enthralled by their own identities as sung in their own Sagas. Islandia also tells us of the sophisticated and complexly ironical, lyrical verses of the author’s own persona, herself isolated, self-reflective, and exiled—in present-day New York City. These two tellings approach each other without ever quite touching, across a chasm of mutually re-enforcing but sharply distinct senses of absence. The work is brilliantly translated from the Spanish by Anne Twitty and is presented here in a bi-lingual edition.

The Mirror is a concise and straightforward introduction to the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Dzogchen, “The Great Perfection,” by one of the most famous and widely respected masters of the tradition and author of many important works, several of which are now in English translation. To insure the survival of Dzogchen outside of Tibet, this precious and long-secret teaching has in recent years been taught openly by great masters cast abroad by the Tibetan diaspora. In The Mirror, Norbu Rinpoche presents the quintessence of this most sophisticated and refined, yet pristinely simple and direct path to spiritual attainment.

Jack Liskin

Moving Medicine is an exuberant story of the inspired life of a major innovator on bodywork and health, Dr. Milton Trager: his journey from muscle-happy beach acrobat, boxer, dancer and local Miami celebrity, through the discovery of his healing gift, to his stature today as the internationally recognized genius of a major bodywork system based on “freedom and lightness” of body and mind. Along the way we learn of his successes in rehabilitating “hopeless” cases ( such as polio, MS, and osteoarthritis), his founding of an institute that has taught thousands who have brought benefit to many more thousands, and his discovery of a remarkably easy and straightforward approach to movement reeducation. In addition to telling his life story, Moving Medicine presents a detailed account of Dr. Trager’s work and serves as a complement to his own book, Movement as a Way to Agelessness (the new edition of Trager Mentastics, Station Hill). Milton Trager’s work will benefit anyone wishing to lead a healthier and more dynamic life.”-Deepak Chopra