Western Civilization Bites Back

Bowden at Full Volume

Jonathan Bowden died in 2012, leaving behind a body of lectures, essays, paintings, and novels that defies easy categorization. Western Civilization Bites Back is the third posthumous collection of his prose, edited by Alex Kurtagic and published by Counter-Currents. It gathers essays and lecture transcripts on subjects ranging from Homer and the origins of Western literature to Yukio Mishima's ritual suicide, from Aleister Crowley's occult project to Oswald Spengler's cyclical history.

What the Book Covers

Bowden's method was to take a figure, a book, or an idea and deliver it with maximum rhetorical force. He was not a careful scholar. He was a performer who happened to work in prose and speech. The essays here cover canonical Western figures (Homer, Nietzsche) alongside marginal and controversial ones (Savitri Devi, Wyndham Lewis), treating them all with the same intensity. The title essay is Bowden's signature piece: a compressed, confrontational argument that Western civilization contains resources for its own renewal, if anyone has the nerve to use them.

The collection is uneven in the way that posthumous collections always are. Some pieces are polished essays. Others are transcriptions of live talks, with all the repetitions and digressions that implies. What holds them together is Bowden's voice, which is unlike anyone else's in the genre: theatrical, allusive, deliberately provocative, and delivered at a pitch that rarely drops below fortissimo.

About This Edition

• Author: Jonathan Bowden
• Editor: Alex Kurtagic
• Publisher: Counter-Currents Publishing
• Format: Paperback
• ISBN: 9781935965770