“Two Assassins is a unique collaborative work, part detective story, part literary scholarship, part historical research, and part personal memoir that seeks to unravel a mystery: what the 11th-century Persian master of the Assassins, Hassan Sabbah, really meant for William Burroughs. Oliver Harris sheds light on the many untold backstories and dark textual secrets behind Burroughs’ invocations of Hassan Sabbah…
American photographer, poet and publisher Ira Cohen was born to deaf parents in the Bronx in 1935. After having dropped out of Cornell University, having married and having had two children with his wife Arlene Bond, Cohen sailed to Tangier in 1961, where he stayed for four years. In those years Cohen published his seminal Gnaoua journal with contributions by Jack Smith, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, Harold Norse a.o. Cohen returned to the US…
Ira Cohen produced his Kathmandu Portfolio during a week’s stay in Rotterdam at his friend Gerard Bellaart’s place in 1976. The portfolio of 12 photographs was a joint production of John Chick’s Bardo Matrix imprint from Kathmandu, with whom Cohen and Angus MacLise had teamed up in 1974, and Gerard Bellaart’s Cold Turkey Press from Rotterdam. The jacket was silkscreened black and silver and Ira Cohen’s photos inside were printed offset as 12 separate postcards…