Hanuman Editions pays homage to the editors and contributors of Hanuman Books, from 1986 to 1993. Tracing its roots at Kalakshetra Press in present day Chennai, southern India and the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, this first series comprises six reissued books (by John Ashbery, Cookie Mueller, Eileen Myles, Dodie Bellamy, René Daumal, and Max Beckmann) as a dedication to the original project.
Softcover small book, 4"x3", printed in United Kingdom, 2023
"…isn’t really a storm of course because unlike most storms it isn’t one till it’s over and people go outside and say will you look at that. And by then it’s of course starting to collapse. Diamond rubble, all galled glitter, heaps of this and that in corners and beside posts where the draft has left them—are you sure it’s this you were waiting for while the storm—the real one—pressed it all into the earth to emphasize a point that melts away as fast as another idea enters the chain of them in the conversation about earth and sky and woods and how you should be good to your parents and not cheat at cards."
Published in 1987 as a standalone volume by Hanuman Books, John Ashbery's The Ice Storm is an extended prose-poem by one of the most important and influential poets of our time.
Compiled and edited by George Scrivani for Hanuman Books in 1988, On My Painting collects six texts from the pioneering German artist Max Beckmann, who fled Nazi Germany after his paintings—increasingly moody and reflective of the existential terror of the time—were labeled "degenerate". In addition to the titular essay, this volume contains short pieces "Creative Credo" and "The New Program", extracts from his Diaries, three "Letters to a Woman Painter", and the text of a speech given to the philosophy faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, shortly before his death in 1950.
Already a member of The Feminist Writers’ Guild and one of the principal founders/proponents of the New Narrative movement, Dodie Bellamy published her first book with Hanuman Books in 1991. Feminine Hijinx brings together two long pieces, "Complicity" and "The Debbies I Have Known", along with a new introduction by the author, written for this reissue.
Garden of Ashes, Cookie Mueller's second entry into the Hanuman Books canon(following 1988's Fan Mail, Frank Letters, and Crank Calls) brings together ten stories, autobiographical accounts of her ascent to cult-cinema superstardom, with tales dedicated to several of her fellow Dreamlanders, including "Edith Massey: A Star" and "Divine".'
First published by Hanuman Books in 1986, Bread and Water is the debut short story collection by the renowned poet Eileen Myles, assembling six stories with an autobiographical flavor, of being a queer, working-class poet with a penchant for mischief. Stories include: "Light Warrior", "21, 22, 23…, "Merry Christmas Mr. Title", "Bath, Maine", "Bread and Water", and "Everybody Would Go Play Cards at Eddie and Nonie's".
"At the beginning, there was error. Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down & cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation."
In this brief, dense essay, The Lie of the Truth, René Daumal bids us to resist the very notion of the truth, and to recognize it as an artistic and metaphysical dead-end.
