EQUUS PRESS

20/06/2025

To honour the approaching 1st anniversary of Harold's passing, Ondřej Polák reviews his PERFORMANCES FOR THE END OF TIME (Equus, 2022), reading the book as a "a chronicle of a post-postmodern apocalypse [...], a series of short, performative vignettes documenting what, at the time of writing and publishing, indeed felt like the end of times, and after all, might have very well been just that [...]; a Ballardian crash that is horrible to watch, but also impossible to turn one’s gaze away from."

Harold Jaffe’s Performances for the End of Times (2022) is a chronicle of a post-postmodern apocalypse. Jaffe delivers exactly what the title promises – a series of short, performative vignettes do…

16/06/2025

Merry Bloomsday to one and all from peerless purdy Prague!
And which title better to celebrate the JJ-Day with than Louis Armand's THE COMBINATIONS (Equus, 2016), clearly the most Ulyssean book in the Equus backlist.

A Joycean tour-de-force in protean style, narrative architectonics, novelistic encyclopaedism, self-ironic metafiction, and a generally comic ethical outlook on life.

Where Joyce plunges us into the one day in Dublin as smelled-heard-felt-& seen by his modern-day Jewish Everyman Bloom, Armand takes us through an entire year in Golemville as suffered through by his Noman Němec (Slavic for "German/mute fellow").

Both great novels treat us to the full scope of the nightmares of history their two respective (post)colonial broken hearts of Europe cannot awake from, and both relay these to us in the subaltern languages of the outlaw, the outsider, the ne'er-do-well, graven on the tables of the only law they adhere to--the lawlessness of literature as experiment.

“When an ambitious novelist or playwright decides to compose a modern realistic work [...] the dusty so-called classical units become unexpectedly useful again. They provide a center to the chaos. Joyce’s Ulysses happens all in Dublin, in a single day. Beckett’s plays are models that even Boileau would have approved of. Now Louis Armand, the Australian writer who has lived in Prague for over twenty years at last count, has produced a major modern epic “novel,” having Prague instead of Dublin for locale. At about 900 pages, it is a good deal longer than Joyce’s Ulysses: if you enjoy the latter, you will find The Combinations to be almost 200 pages more fun & you will not want to miss it.”—Ricardo Nirenberg

a novel, by Louis Armand ISBN 978-1-7394310-2-0. 4th (corrected) edition. Paperback. 888pp + ###vii. Publication date: May 2024 (1st edition published May 2016). Equus Press: London. Order fro…

09/06/2025

“A striking and unstable admixture of visual and textual storytelling in which Armand cements himself as just the kind of mad-scientist-cum-philosopher-cum-avant-gardist needed to survive the technocratic authoritarianism of the mid-twenty-first century. Bring on the Armandgeddon!” — Wayne Bradshaw
Louis Armand's A TOMB IN SECTION is available for order from Lulu.com, Bookshop.org, Barnes&Noble, E-Bay, and other venues. For more info visit: https://equuspress.wordpress.com/a-tomb-in-h-section/

09/06/2025

"This 'parentless book,' whose protagonist, seemingly both a ghost in the machine and a body of living matter, is in the process of writing a (non)book, presumably, the very book we are given to read, is a direct product of an age, where parents have been superseded by algorithms, moulding the generations to come."
--Ondrej P***k reviews Zak Ferguson & R.G. Vasicek's 404_Memoir of a Nobody (Equus, 2022).

This peculiar piece is the product of the collaboration of writer/filmmaker/publisher Zak Ferguson and the “machine poet” RG Vasicek, “crafted – by Prague-ian and Brighton–ian” (84). The text, how…

02/06/2025

"Anizar manages to combine some highly poignant mediations on the absurdities of creativity in today’s oh-so-unoriginal world with a clever absurdist satire that never takes itself too seriously, a perfect blend of humorous rampage and serious intellection."
--Ondřej Polák reviews Louis Armand's ANIZAR (Equus Press, 2024).

“Q: What does literature become when it ceases being aware of itself & simply acts?  A: Psychosis.” (54) This book object by Golemgrad’s very own Louis Armand is, unlike his Prague-centred…

26/05/2025

One from the vaults: MOURNING, by Richard Makin (2015)

“The writing is that it is. This is prose you must learn to experience before you begin to interpret […] the pages in their beautiful and delirious abstraction are ordered poetry.”
—Iain Sinclair

“Without recognisable characters or plot, Mourning continues to mine textual sources – science-fiction scripts, dictionary definitions, the languages of arcane ritual and of everyday life – achieving an astonishing non-narrative, never-ending coherence.”
—Ken Edwards

“Opening with a necessary forgetting, this beautiful and disturbing book works through an accumulation of faltering incipits which force us, quoting Gertrude Stein, to ‘begin again and again and again.’”
—Jeff Hilson

“Flowing almost as one continuous thought, drifting through abstract notions, Mourning is not only a tour-de-force in interior monologue, but it is a poignant dialogue with all the past ghosts that haunt the present, and the one major spectre hovering over the writing process: the reader.”
—David Vichnar

“Makin’s work is an experimental prose that connects, at its extremes, with both the novel and the installation.”
—Michael Peverett

“Mourning is an extraordinary and distinct achievement. It is a demanding and enriching read characterized by highly wrought sentences, which cover a range of discourses and fictional events. It is not a conventional novel.”
—David Caddy

“Richard Makin is a writer with a tempestuous relationship to language. His writing, whatever else it happens to be about, also has, at all times, itself as its subject. He writes urgently about the negligibility of language, of literature. His novels communicate hopelessness as to the possibility of effectively communicating.”
—Natalia Holtzman

More information & ordering details: https://equuspress.wordpress.com/mourning/

21/05/2025

A TOMB IN H-SECTION, by Louis Armand, is now available as Print-on-Demand for order via Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, E-Bay & Amazon.

"A TOMB IN H-SECTION is what happens when you let a genius play. Charming, lighthearted, and irreverent. A joy to read.”
—Charlene Elsby

For ordering details and more information please see here: https://equuspress.wordpress.com/a-tomb-in-h-section/

19/05/2025

One from the vaults: MENTAL SHRAPNEL, by Phillip O'Neil (Equus Press, 2020).

Something happened to Chris Mahler during the war in Bosnia – it left him too traumatised to remember. Jasmina was the love of his life. She was killed in the siege of Sarajevo & his ability to live & love again died with her. Or so he believes. Now a shell-shocked survivor, he is the patient, strapped to a bed under the care of the mysterious Dr Steinfelder.

Mahler’s trauma & amnesia can be cured. But what will he remember if it is? Is Mahler the perfect Guinea Pig the doctors have been hoping to find? Or is it a case of kill or cure? Mahler must go to war once more & this time the stakes are higher than ever before, discovering that in the twenty-first century, psychiatry is the newest & deadliest weapon of war.

“Phillip O’Neil’s book is a study in hell. […] This is a book that shoves you, then looks at you expectantly; waiting to be shoved back. A dynamic absolutely of our times.”—Joseph Darlington, Manchester Review of Books

“The latest contribution to the Equus project, Philip O’Neil’s MENTAL SHRAPNEL, is a refreshing, remarkable departure from the overwhelming horde of canned, lifeless fiction that threatens to eat literary history whole. O’Neil’s first novel makes almost everything else look like dreck. It’s precisely what the co**se of modern literature needs to bring it back to life.”—D. Harlan Wilson

“Sinequanon threads of Gonzo journalism tie hot shards of Philip K. Dick’s paranoid fantasies to Kingsley Amis’ insouciant British humour in this 400-page pill, as we are flung between war-torn Sarajevo & post-communist Prague between the early 90s & the late 00s.”—Michael Rowland

“Equal parts memoir, war narrative, & love story, Mental Shrapnel takes you deep into the wounded psyche of a man forced to put himself back together when the health care “system” fails him completely. Mental Shrapnel also paints an intimate nuanced picture of the city of Prague that will be instantly recognizable to longtime residents or serve as a psychedelic walking tour for those who have never traversed the narrow, labyrinthine streets of the city. Not a novel for the faint of heart, but still a compelling read full of wit, heart, and history.”—Jeffrey Howe

a novel, by Phillip O’Neil ISBN 978-1-9996964-0-5. 392 pages. 1st edition. Paperback. Publication date: October 2020. Equus Press: London & Prague. Price: € 12.00…

09/05/2025

Two copies of Louis Armand’s A TOMB IN H-SECTION are now available from Prague 1's Shakespeare and Sons Bookstore and Cafe. More precisely & quite appropriately, from its downstairs comic-book section!

09/05/2025

Currently in its final proofreading and blurbing stage of development (DM us for an ARC!) Ansgar Allen's JONATHAN MARTIN is forthcoming in late spring with Equus.
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This historical novel covers the life of Jonathan Martin from his birth in 1782, to his death in 1838, drawing from historical sources, not least his own half-crazed autobiography, to reconstruct his early years growing up in northeast England to become a shepherd and a tanner, and then a sailor after he was press-ganged into the navy. Jonathan served in the navy for several years and witnessed some of the worst horrors of the Napoleonic Wars. And yet, his account of those years is curiously self-absorbed, and occasionally (though perhaps unintentionally) comedic.
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As a foretaste of the book's many riches, Equus runs an instalment of its Chapter One, accompanied by an image of York Minster, to which Jonathan set fire in February, 1829.

Currently in its final proofreading and blurbing stage of development (DM us for an ARC!) Ansgar Allen’s Jonathan Martin is forthcoming in late spring with Equus. This historical novel covers…

05/05/2025

One from the vaults: THE WEATHER IN FRITZ BEMELMANS PARK, by Holly Tavel (2015)

The 18 stories in this collection offer a kaleidoscopic view of childhood’s forgotten tropes and dizzying leaps of logic, and are by turns hilariously paranoid, discombobulated, claustrophobic, and filled with yearning.

“If J.G. Ballard and Jorge Luis Borges wrote steampunk or Terry Gilliam teamed up with the Church of the SubGenius, it might come close to approaching the tone of these twisted tales.”
—Karl Wolff

“Tavel’s fiction has the delicious feel of children’s literature, without being child-like, or for children. Her worlds are magically palpable, rendered in precise detail and a moody palette just beyond reach of reality."
—Angela Woodward

“Tavel’s stories seem to ask: Why is memory always inevitably in the service of preserving mental homeostasis through suppression, displacement, concealment? Why do we find past memories always already, as it were, pre-processed and re-programmed by present desire?”
—David Vichnar

“Reading Holly Tavel’s The Weather in Fritz Bemelmans Park is like going to a grand exotic circus where one can see wonders and spectacles in every direction. These stories are fantastical, whimsical, and a provocative delight.”
—Robert Lopez

“Tavel’s stories mix media, registers, and diction as the author leaps and pirouettes across great associations, yet Tavel is never in danger of falling, nor is the conjured world doomed to vanish—the sentences are too finely made. Please open this cabinet of wonders.”
—Anthony Tognazzini

“Precise, perverse, sly, and entrancing, these stories open up layer by layer like Matryoshka dolls. Tavel’s narrators take giddy, surprising leaps – into the animal and the inquisitive, into the superheroic and epic and subjunctive realms.”
—Nelly Reifler

stories, by Holly Tavel ISBN 978-0-9571213-9-3. Paperback. 152pp. Publication date: November 2015. Equus Press: London. Price: € 15.00 (not including postage). Order direct from Equus Press (paperb…