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—PO Box 2638, Santa Fe, NM 87504
—To request a complete catalog please email: brnbx@nets.com

SEE THE NEW WEB SITE: www.burningbooks.org!!

Burning Books is an artist-run, weirdness-driven organization dedicated to avant-garde fiction, music, and art founded in 1979 by writer/editor Melody Sumner Carnahan and artist/designer Michael Sumner in Oakland, California. The BB imprint has produced nineteen books and numerous audioworks, often with co-publishers including the University of Iowa International Writer's Program, Archer Fields (NYC), East-West Cultural Studies (NYC/Japan), Zerx Press (Albuquerque), and High Mayhem (Santa Fe). BB author/artists include John Cage, Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley, Madeline Gins, Mark Weber, Toma Longinovic, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Arakawa, et al. In 1989 Burning Books moved to New Mexico where the two founders continue to produce art and books, posters, pamphlets, and audioworks. Recent installations include the Museum of Fine Arts, Center for Contemporary Arts, MOV-iN Gallery and IPI 2007 (College of Santa Fe), Mills College, San Francisco Center for the Book, Donkey Gallery (Albuquerque), and High Mayhem Gallery. "With an incendiary incentive to make our world more elegant and convincing, we make good books and get them into the hands of interesting people." Alere flammam, to feed the flame.

"The people at Burning Books run one of the more exciting small presses in the country. Their ideas are daring and substantial; they take risks . . . but do so with well-honed instincts and bookmaking skills." Paul Schiavo, American Book Review

"With perfect design and perfect prose, releases from Burning Books are like a long ride in a fine mind." --Zane Fischer, SFR

"I am glad you do what you do." --John Cage

Link to Amazon and buy Thirteen by Melody Sumner Carnahan.
—Thirteen short works of fiction. Excerpt: "In the cities: sacred voracious animals buckle into the seat of delusion, their faces tied in fists. Time proceeds in profile to a stop. On every third corner a thousand birds of terror shout in anger–in error–about invasion, diplomacy, corporations, profit, incest, murder, research. But I am of znew mind… one of the first. A product of biology, philosophy, and disaster …"

Link to Amazon and buy Perfect Lives by Robert Ashley.
—The complete libretto and 38 pages of commentary by Ashley.
"If you don't do these embarrassing things you'll never be a composer….When you go into a room, lock the door, and decide that you are going to compose music, you are doing a criminal activity, and if you can't face it you'll never be a composer." -Robert Ashley

Link to Amazon and buy The Guests Go in to Supper —Interviews with and texts by: John Cage, Robert Ashley, Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Charles Amirkhanian, Michael Peppe, K. Atchley." A remarkable cast of artists and musicians whose works deal with language….If you buy only one book on the contemporary, experimental performing arts, this is unquestionably the one to get." -Dean Suzuki, Option Magazine

Link to Amazon and buy Helen Keller or Arakawa by Madeline Gins.
—"Part aesthetics, part psychology, part time-bending historical fiction, Helen Keller or Arakawa is a romp through language, philosophy of perception, and discourse that demands much of the reader and delivers much as well. For anyone interested in the current direction of avant-garde aesthetics and the postmodern novel, Gins offers up a fiction that is essential reading." -Jordan Jones, The Los Angeles Reader