Hanuman Books

Radical French authors, such as Jean Genet, Henri Michaux, René Daumal and Francis Picabia were mixed with Lower East Side writers like William Burroughs, Nick Zedd and Gary Indiana.

Hanuman also published texts by visual artists Max Beckmann, David Hockney, Willem de Kooning, Jack Smith and Francis Picabia.

Nachiappan’s expertise gave Hanuman volumes a distinct look and feel, a tactile object-like quality that grounded their critically deconstructive approach to the countercultural currents of the late twentieth century.

"...the Hanuman canon, a publishing endeavor that articulated a new vision of a possible avant-garde lineage in its short life span between 1986 and 1993, linking the energies and efforts of the eighties Lower East Side with threads from earlier poets, painters, musicians, and thinkers.

If you were to line up the whole Hanuman pantheon on a shelf chronologically and take a random core sample of a few titles ... you would be mining several distinct trajectories of literature, art, music, and underground culture from the past century.

Hanuman Books logo created by Francesco Clemente
cover of Patti Smith 's Hanuman Book Woolgathering (1992)