KOMA/AMOK BOOKS

IT'S A MAN'S WORLD: Men's Adventure Magazines
By Adam Parfrey

Evil criminals, damsels in distress, torture happy Nazis, fierce attacking animals, bikers, beatniks, secret agents, jungle queens the detective pulp magazine turned into something new in the 50's and 60's they became men's adventure magazines with amazing artwork.

MAN'S EXPLOITS, RAGE, ESCAPE TO ADVENTURE these were a few of the magazines that helped veterans deal with the confusion of jobs, girls and the Cold War after coming home from World War II.

IT'S A MAN'S WORLD looks back at the last great run of pop illustration by reproducing more than 150 covers and interior images, as brilliant as pulp's best. Contributions from Bruce Jay Friedman, Josh Alan Friedman and David Saunders help bring us inside the offices, showing us how the writers, illustrators, editors and publishers put together two decades of these adventure magazines.

Original art from Mort Kunstler, Norman Saunders and Norm Eastman are featured within, and Bill Devine's annotated checklist of the many thousands of adventure magazines is essential for collectors of the genre.

Large format hardcover book, 9 x 11, Text and many, many lavish color plates, some black & white.

Feral House $29.95 287 pgs. hardcover Heavily Illustrated

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SHIT MAGNET:One Man's Ability to Absorb the World's Guilt
By Jim Goad

Jim Goad is the man behind ANSWER ME! Magazine and the superb book, THE REDNECK MANIFESTO. SHIT MAGNET, written while Goad was imprisoned two and one-half years for beating his girlfriend (and says it was worth it to see the fear in her eyes), is the proactive explanation of the fecal events and personages that have filled his life since birth. Goad's book is both a confession and accusation, in which his writerly gifts are called upon to make sense of a life that seems to have attracted a lot of SHIT!

Feral House Books $16.95 328 pgs. ppbk. No Illustrations

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AMERICAN HARDCORE: A Tribal History
By Steven Blush

This is the first complete, feisty and sordid history of hardcore punk rock. Angrier, less pretentious and more stripped-down than its artsy, drug-addled predecessor, this harder, faster form of music was not very pretty an angry and violent outlet to unfocused rage.

Amazing oral histories from stars and now forgotten participants are interspersed with informed commentary and history. This book explains the rise and burnout of a scene that began in 1980 and fell apart by 1986. Steven Blush provides a national perspective on the genre, explaining all the different regional scenes, complete with many, many photos and a discography.

Feral House $19.95 345 pgs. ppbk. Extensively Illustrated

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LEXICON DEVIL: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the GERMS
By Brendan Mullen with Don Bolles and Adam Parfrey

THE GERMS, the notorious L.A. band whose only full-length album, G.I., is considered one of the best punk rock albums of all time, had its brief history terminated in December 1980 when singer-leader Darby Crash overdosed on heroin.

Darby Crash is today, what the Velvet Underground and the Stooges were to earlier generations: a legendary, but little understood icon, a brilliant and charismatic Sun God, sacrificed on alter of Rock and Roll. This never-before told story is as tragic as any Pasolini film, yet as absurdly hilarious as "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" and, it's a story that could only have happened in Los Angeles.

LEXICON DEVIL is more than a punk rock biography, it is a remarkable view of private lives in a surreal period of L.A. and punk history. Extensively illustrated with tons of amazing black and white photos.

Feral House $16.95 312 pgs. ppbk. Heavily Illustrated

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ACKERMANTHOLOGY!
Compiled by Forrest J. Ackerman 65 Astonishing Sci-Fi Short Stories

When a man has read, written, edited and lived science fiction for a full 70 years, as Forrest J. Ackerman has, his collection of sci-fi shorts is certain to contribute to the pleasure of the connoisseur, and delight the newcomer to modern literature's hottest field. Herein are timeless tales of aliens, robots, spacemen, future societies, extraordinary experiments, intergalactic love and other dimensions - written with the humor, the horror, and suspense developed by the undisputed geniuses of the twist in the tale, from Asimov, Bradbury and Wells to lesser-known masters of the trade. 65 short sci-fi tales.

Pascal Bussy has written a uniquely definitive account of Kraftwerk's history, delving beyond their publicity shunning exterior. Former group members and collaborators have broken their usual silence, providing an in-depth examination into their working methods and complex technological imagery. For the first time the intense mythology that has built up around this hugely influential group is uncovered. This is the best book on the subject of Kraftwerk period.

Just before the turn of the millennium, nearly 100 churches have been torched and desecrated by adherents of Black Metal, the most extreme form of underground music on the planet.

In an escalating unholy war, Black Metal bands and their obsessive fans have left a grim legacy of suicide, murder and terrorism spreading from Norway to Germany, Russia, America and beyond...

LORDS OF CHAOS features hundreds of rare photos and exclusive interrogations with priests, police officers, Satanists and leaders of demonic bands who believe the greater evil spawns the greatest glory.

"... paints a portrait of a fantastic realm where Satanism, neo-paganism and National Socialism energized a musical scene in which fantasy was actualized in the burning of churches in Norway..." - Jeffrey Kaplan

"Mary Woronov burned herself into my brain when, as a college student in 1966, I first saw her smoldering, imperious performance in Andy Warhol's epic film, CHELSEA GIRLS. She was one of the most original, stylish and articulate sexual personae of the royal House of Warhol. I never forgot her, and I followed her subsequent movie career with great fascination. Mary Woronov's memoir of the Warhol years is an important contribution to the historical record of a hugely influential movement in modern American art and culture. Many years later, it can be clearly seen that the Warhol Factory, with all its riveting decadent excesses, was as seminal an avant-garde circle as that of the Dadaists and Surrealists." - Camille Paglia

BUBBLEGUM MUSIC IS THE NAKED TRUTH
Edited By Kim Cooper & David Smay

The Dark History of Prepubescent Pop, From the Banana Splits to Britney Spears

Bubblegum music is rediscovered and reinvigorated by this fun and thorough cyclopedia about a vilified genre and its Faustian pursuit of the perfect pop song. Amazing book. "...clever without a touch of meanness" - Rod McKuen

Feral House $19.95 344 pgs. ppbk. Extensively Illustrated

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Serge Gainsbourg is one of the world's great eccentrics. His kinky obsessions, smothering fashion with tastelessness have catapulted him into super stardom in France.

"This is his only novel and you have never read anything like it - it will make you squirm. It will make you laugh. It may also very well make you sick. Gainsbourg's vision is his own: authentic and convulsive. Don't forget to hold your nose." - John Zorn

A rousing tale about a man with a gas problem - farting - he makes the best of his situation. Afterword by Russell Mael from the band SPARKS where he mentions an interview with Gainsbourg and what he says about Whitney Houston.

A COLD FIRE BURNING powerfully depicts an interracial love story set amidst the political changes of the early Seventies. Shadow is a working-class black man in the ghetto of Newark, New Jersey. A highly charged 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 sexual tensions of their relationship reach the boiling point, Shadow rejects Terri and he winds up the leader of a rag-tag band of black nationalist urban guerrillas. Tragedy ensues when Shadow tries to transform their revolutionary rhetoric into reality.