We seek to revive the legacy of Hanuman Books, the legendary and cult series of chapbooks that were printed in southern India and published out of the storied Chelsea Hotel in New York City between 1986 and 1993.
Beginning in the fall of 2023, we will publish a set of six books every six months, inviting the most provocative and urgent voices of our epoch to speak in new tongues about the horror and exhilaration of our era, and of the mysteries of life which never, somehow, lessen. We will also, in certain volumes, present genealogies of the avant-garde through revisiting the work of earlier artists and the republication of select entries in the original Hanuman list, all the while inviting new reckonings, excavations, and insights into the artistic movements and attitudes of the past.
The books are designed to pay homage to the playful kitsch of the original series, preserving the small format meant to mimic the chapbook form of the Hanuman Chalisa (a folk compendium of chants to the Hindu god Hanuman, sold very cheaply in the bazaars of India) that made them perfect for slipping illicitly into any pocket.
Founded by American curator Raymond Foye and artist Francesco Celemente, Hanuman Books were printed and handbound at C. T. Nachiappan’s Kalakshetra Press in Madras, southern India. Dedicated mainly to the extreme deconstructive edge of the countercultural poetic, musical, and artistic currents of the 1960s and 1970s, spanning the era of the Cold War, the AIDS crisis, the Harlem Ballroom scene, the Beats, Warhol’s Factory etc. Hanuman Books sought to marry the folk-minimal-artisanal with the cutting edge, playfully marketing their books as ‘secret’ documents of an avant-garde subculture, meant to be passed on covertly at street corners just as millenarian chapbooks of medieval times were supposed to have been.
The original series featured a panoply of artists, authors, and counterculture thinkers. Bob Dylan wrote one, as did Jack Kerouac, Patti Smith, David Hockney, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Simone Weil, Candy Darling, John Ashbery, William Burroughs, Cookie Mueller, Willem de Kooning, Francis Picabia, Eileen Myles, and more.
The editors of the proposed redux of Hanuman Books would like to retain the playful yet critically precise object like spirit of the original, while radically reconceiving it for our turbulent, globalized times. Under the name Hanuman Editions, we seek to produce a register of a culture that has morphed, splintered, and merged into many new domains. Though art, literature and music remain central to our vision, we cannot ignore television, the digital humanities, gaming, pornography, artificial intelligence, and all the rest. We cannot shy away from areas dismissed as popular or mass culture, because the truly subversive must operate from within.
We think with minds open at all times, looking to alter and expand our scope as we proceed. We recognize that a planetary-scale revolutionary cultural program, one free of the strictures of a single or small group of metropolises, would be a non-local phenomenon, and as such, we imagine these books as a constellation, a set of disparate points that, nevertheless, from the proper angle, may intimate the outline of just such a project.