Amok Books  

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"Long before you could seek out the fate of the foreskin or search through an Internet database on crime, Stuart Swezey's Amok Books was the source of anomalous data in America. The first Amok Dispatch, a newsprint catalog listing 300 titles on everything from conspiracy theory to Dada classics, was a loud and obnoxious monster truck on the information frontage road of 1986." --Patrick Hughes via [1]


"When Amok began, I was very influenced by the ideas of William Burroughs, Throbbing Gristle, RE/Search Publications, Klaus Maeck's film Decoder and the Decoder Handbook which he edited as a companion, which all revolved around the idea of an Information war."--Stuart Swezey[2]

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Amok Books is an American publisher founded by Stuart Swezey. Amok means "to go mad with uncontrollable rage".

The Amok Dispatch sourcebooks (volume 1 to 5), co-edited by Stuart Swezey, feature bibliographies of extreme information in print.

Amok also publishes English translations of Georges Bataille books.

Amok First Dispatch

"This project became the Amok First Dispatch, a thirty-page newsprint catalogue listing 300 titles. The titles were arranged according to an original set of categories which I came up with (Control, Exotica, Mayhem, Natas, Neuropolitics, Orgone, Sensory Deprivation, Scratch'n'Sniff, Sleaze, Tactics) to organise this extreme and heretical list of book titles into a coherent Amok world view."[3]


Amok Fourth Dispatch

Stuart Swezey interviewed by Jack Sargeant

The Amok Fourth Dispatch — with its cheesy-yet-sinister painting of a maniacally grinning middle-aged suburban mother — was, when published in 1990, one of the first texts to recognise the dictum that wars, at least in the West, are now concerned with information: access to information, understanding information, withholding information, and disseminating information. Knowledge — as Foucault once wrote — is intrinsically linked to power, as such the book is indispensable. The 350-plus pages of this telephone book sized tome formed a theoretical and practical brainscape to the multiple (and frequently dangerous) literatures that formed and/ or explored the murky terrains of neglected/banned /bizarre/curious/illegal/sexy information. fringecore.com

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