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Burning Books

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

books by Burning Books

The Guests Go in to Supper

"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 The Guests Go In To Supper on Small Press Distribution

The Time is Now

—Melody Sumner Carnahan’s cryptic, enigmatic fiction has found form for thirteen years in collaborations with composers and musicians. When The Time Is Now was first published by Burning Books, Carnahan gave the book to friends asking them to put the words to music using any story they liked. The works on the audio CD accompanying this third edition were created from 1983 to 1996.

—"Nineteenth-century composers had Goethe and Heinrich Heine and Maurice Maeterlinck to set to music. Today we have Santa Fe writer Melody Sumner Carnahan, whose enigmatic texts have formed the basis for more pieces of music I know than any other recent writer can claim. It's easy to hear what makes her writing so attractive to composers. Her short, commanding sentences leap off from each other at arresting right angles. This is manna for musicians. . . .Sumner Carnahan writes the most musical prose since Gertrude Stein."— Kyle Gann, The Village Voice, February 16, 1999

Link to The Time is Now on CD Baby

Link to The Time is Now on Small Press Distribution

Thirteen

—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 Thirteen Stories on Small Press Distribution

Perfect Lives

"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 Perfect Lives on Small Press Distribution

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

Link to Helen Keller or Arakawa on Small Press Distribution