Adam Parfrey – författare

Teary, big-eyed orphans and a multitude of trashy knockoffs epitomized American kitsch art as they clogged thrift stores for decades.

When Adam Parfrey tracked down Walter Keane—the credited artist of the weepy waifs—for a San Diego Reader cover story in 1992, he discovered some shocking facts. Decades of lawsuits and countersuits revealed the reality that Keane was more of a con man than an artist, and that he forced his wife Margaret to sign his name to her own paintings. As a result, those weepy waifs may not have been as capricious an invention as they seemed.

Parfrey''s story was reprinted in Juxtapoz magazine and inspired a Margaret Keane exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum. Director Tim Burton made a movie about the Keanes called Big Eyes, which came out in 2014.

Citizen Keane is a book-length expansion of Parfrey''s original article, providing fascinating biographical and sociological details.

"Here is a window inside the Jihad... presented here in its bare face without a distorting commentary.”—Jeremy Glover, Headpress

"(C)ontains essays and fascinating images that will render you serious, humbled and even a bit sympathetic... Extreme Islam''s deranged carnival succeeds in shocking most when the ‘extremists’ themselves are lucid, poignant and poetic."—R.U. Sirius, LA Weekly

The Process Church of the Final Judgment was the apocalyptic shadow side of the flower-powered ’60s and perhaps the most notorious cult of modern times.

Hundreds of black-cloaked devotees, often wearing a satanic “Goat of Mendes” and a swastika-like mandala, swept the streets of London, New York, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, and Toronto, selling magazines and books with titles like Fear and Humanity is the Devil. And within the group’s “Chapters,” members would participate in “Midnight Meditations” beneath photographs of the Christ-like leader.

Celebrities like Marianne Faithful, James Coburn, and Mick Jagger participated in Process publications, and Funkadelic, in its Maggot Brain album, reprinted Process’ “Fear Issue.”

Process’ “Death Issue” interviewed the freshly-imprisoned Charles Manson leading to conspiracy hysteria in such books as Ed Sanders’ The Family and Maury Terry’s The Ultimate Evil. A lawsuit against Sanders’ Manson book led to the removal of its Process-themed chapter by Dutton.

Love, Sex, Fear, Death is the shocking, surprising, and secretive inside story of The Process Church, which was later transformed into Foundation Faith of the Millennium, and most recently as the Utah-based animal sanctuary, Best Friends.

Included will be text by Timothy Wyllie, a formative member of the Process and Foundation Faith organizations; interviews with other former Processeans; rare reproductions of Process magazines; never-before-seen photographs; and fascinating transcripts from holy books and legal actions.

The special limited edition will be hardcover, signed, numbered, and slipcased, and it will include a facsimile edition of the notorious “Death Issue.”

The Secret Source reveals the actual occult doctrines that gave birth to “The Law of Attraction” and later inspired the media phenomenon known as The Secret. Follow the trail into ancient Egypt to uncover where the law of attraction was first recorded, and how it was brought back to America to foment the New Thought movement and the prosperity cults of modern times.

The new, enlarged edition will have a new section on Sex Magic and its relationship with the law of attraction.

Maja D’Aoust conducts popular lectures on esoterica.

Adam Parfrey is releasing this fall a visual history of fraternal orders, Ritual America.

"Adam Parfrey is one of the nation''s most provocative publishers."—Seattle Weekly

"Secret society historian Craig Heimbichner follows the Middle Path to wisdom. He works the graveyard shift in the secret lodge."—Joan d''Arc, Paranoia magazine

Secret societies—now a staple of bestseller novels—are pictured as sinister cults that use hooded albinos to menace truth-seekers. Some conspiracy books claim that fraternal orders are the work of serpentine aliens and interbred humans who wish to supplant earth of its energy, and later, its very existence.

On the other side of the aisle, books by high-ranked Freemasons—skeptical in tone but no less partisan in approach—protect their organization''s public image by denying the existence of its most contentious ideas.

Ritual America reveals the biggest secret of them all: that the influence of fraternal brotherhoods on this country is vast, fundamental, and hidden in plain view. In the early twentieth century, as many as one-third of America belonged to a secret society. And though fezzes and tiny car parades are almost a thing of the past, the Gnostic beliefs of Masonic orders are now so much a part of the American mind that the surrounding pomp and circumstance has become faintly unnecessary.

The authors of Ritual America contextualize hundreds of rare and many never-before printed images with entertaining and far-reaching commentary, making an esoteric subject provocative, exciting, and approachable.

Adam Parfrey is the author of Cult Rapture: Revelations of the Apocalyptic Mind and It''s a Man''s World: Men''s Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps. He is editor of the influential Apocalypse Culture series Love, Sex, Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment.

Craig Heimbichner has recently appeared on a National Geographic documentary about the Bohemian Grove, contributed to the Feral House compilation Secret and Suppressed II, and wrote about the famous occult order the O.T.O. in Blood and Altar.

Teary, big-eyed orphans and a multitude of trashy knockoffs epitomized American kitsch art as they clogged thrift stores for decades.

When Adam Parfrey tracked down Walter Keane—the credited artist of the weepy waifs, for a San Diego Reader cover story in 1992—he discovered some shocking facts. Decades of lawsuits and countersuits revealed the reality that Keane was more of a con man than an artist, and that he forced his wife Margaret to sign his name to her own paintings. As a result, those weepy waifs may not have been as capricious an invention as they seemed.

Parfrey''s story was reprinted in Juxtapoz magazine and inspired a Margaret Keane exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum. And now director Tim Burton is filming a movie about the Keanes called Big Eyes, and it''s scheduled for release in 2014. Burton''s Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp, was based upon the Feral House book edited and published by Parfrey about the angora sweater-wearing B-film director.

Citizen Keane is a book-length expansion of Parfrey''s original article, providing fascinating biographical and sociological details, photographs, color reproductions, and appendices with legal documents and pseudonymous essays by Tom Wolfe inflating big eye art to those painted by the great masters.