Pariah Press – förlag

Obscenity & the Arts is the first new work from Anthony Burgess in over twenty years. The story of his struggle with censorship, religious conservatism and a vengeful government on the island of Malta between 1968 & 1974 has never been told before.Renowned authors Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch and The Whole Woman) and Andrew Biswell (The Real Life of Anthony Burgess) provide newly commissioned essays on the wider themes provoked by Burgess’s difficulties in Malta—which still resonate today: how to define and discern obscenity and pornography, and the recurring problem of state censorship. The fulcrum of the work is a full transcript of Burgess’s lecture at the University of Malta in 1970—previously printed as a short-run pamphlet from the Malta Library Association in 1973 but, made available here to an international readership for the first time. The book also incorporates previously unseen archive documentation and photography (including images taken by the author himself) which emphasise Burgess’s extraordinary term in Lija. Obscenity & the Arts is a non-fiction compendium of primary source materials and learned explication. A pocket-size work of virtuosity and craft. As featured in: TLS, The Guardian, Il Giornale, Malta Independent on Sunday, Times of Malta and Review 31, and a course text at King's College London.

On Saturday 15th June 1996 the Irish Republican Army detonated a 3300lb lorry bomb on Corporation Street, city centre Manchester. The vernacular/found photographs of this edition — presented here as facsimile versions of the original prints — were discovered by Nirvana Heire during the electrical decommissioning of the Rylands Building, Market Street, Manchester in November 2022.These thirty-nine granular, unpolished images possess a cinemtic aspect: panoptic views of trashed cityscapes against close-up damage to shop fronts. While the abstracted, spare and repetitive nature of these snapshots offers a stark rumination on the structural defacement wreaked upon the metropolis. A lack of human presence throughout much of the work, allied to an absence of authorial background, impart a singularly uncanny tone.The easy typological platitues of found-photography publications are jettisoned; 3300 is stripped back to its barest essentials. In an era of overwrought book design this work is sparse, angular and thoughtful.Nirvana Heire is an artist living and working in Manchester. An electrician and founder member of the bands Handle and DUDS, 3300 is his first photobook.

LINDEN ARCHIVES is a strictly limited edition, selected archival work capturing the 1990s LGBTQ+ club, pub and Pride scene across the UK, from Brighton to Newcastle — with excursions to Berlin and Gran Canaria. Celebratory in tone, it is the second publication by photographer Stuart Linden Rhodes (following on from ‘Out & About with Linden: A Queer Archive of the North’, 2022/3).A large-format photobook that seeks to encapsulate a peoples defiant in the face of the AIDS crises and discriminatory laws. Included in this work are many images that have fallen foul of Instagram's unjustly censorious algorithm — alongside uninhibited photographs of Vivienne Westwood, Jean Paul Gaultier, Derek Jarman, Take That, Julian Clary, Peter Tatchell, Paul O'Grady, East 17 and many more. We're delighted that Russell Tovey has provided an introductory preface to the work.'Linden' was the roving reporter for APN and the Gay Times during the early to mid 1990s, his columns for those magazines were entitled: Out & About with Linden. Stuart Linden Rhodes was also a lecturer at a local further education college, the pseudonym 'Linden' adopted due to concerns generated by draconian Clause 28 legislation sanctioned by Tory governments of the era. At home in North Yorkshire during the 'rona lockdowns of 2020-21, Stuart established the Linden Archives online as a way to preserve his work and look back fondly on the brash, thriving gay scene of the 1990s. More recently, his photography has featured on BBC television & radio and in Mastermind Magazine, Crotch, The Guardian, You Otter Know and Photography – A Queer History. Imagery from the archives have been exhibited at the Grundy Art Gallery, Queer Britain, Moray Pride, Vane Gallery and the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum as part of the Museum of Youth Culture.

"Frenchman Jacques Revel arrives in Bleston, an industrial city in the north of England—also a thinly disguised, reimagined Manchester—to begin employment as a shipping clerk. Lost under the spell of a dark, dank, labyrinthine metropolis, he endeavours to solve the puzzle of an attempted murder. We follow his erratic odyssey in diary form as a growing sense of unease envelops him and mysterious fires erupt throughout the city.Passing Time, originally published in France as L'Emploi du temps (1956), is the great, forgotten Manchester novel, a book of enormous imagination and vitality. Melding Greek myth with Proustian method to formulate a brilliant study of alienation and the nebulousness of memory. A work that attempts to excavate Britain's proto-capitalist past and industrial forebears—interrogating their affect on modernity and the human soul.""Mr. Butor writes well, and with so thorough an awareness of what he wants to achieve that criticism is pre-empted... He is so disinclined to dramatize that I would suspect his principal gifts are those of a lyrical philosophical poet rather than a novelist—a sort of urban Wordsworth who has lost faith in tranquil recollection.""New York Times""Butor's most accessible work in English. Sentences last whole paragraphs, with their Claude Simon-like sub-clauses and meanderings—personally I rather like that kind of writing.""Adrian Tahourdin, TLS""Judging by this novel the experience [of working in Manchester] has marked him for life, for Passing Time is not so much a hymn, as a whole oratorio of hate. The mood suggests Kafka at his most paranoid; the method harks back to Virginia Woolf but here the stream-of-consciousness has become a turbid flood, the dark Irwell, mazy as the Ganges delta.""The Guardian""Passing Time is as revelatory as Butor's critical writing on time and space: here is a model for the metaphysical noir tradition that has borne such rich fruit in the quest narratives of tortured detectives seeking to escape labyrinths of their own making. It's about time this Manchester root of the nouveau roman was given fresh attention. Respect to Pariah for breathing new life into this almost forgotten classic.""Mark Blacklock, author of Hinton and I'm Jack"