EQUUS PRESS

03/03/2025

Proof copy of A TOMB IN H SECTION, by Louis Armand, has just reached the Equus vaults as its first 2025 release, the ARC’s currently with reviewers / blurbers, one of the finest-looking text/image productions in our 15-year history.
Watch this space as more reveals are forthcoming…

19/02/2025

We at Equus are thrilled to announced the forthcoming publication, in spring 2025, of Ansgar Allen’s JONATHAN MARTIN, a historical novel of 45k words, ft. 14 illustrations, currently in its last stages of editing & design production.

"On 27 May 1838, Jonathan Martin lay down and died. It was his fifty-sixth or fifty-seventh year. The bed on which he lay was at the lunatic asylum known as Bethlem, or Bedlam. That evening, another lunatic would take his place, and the room in which he lived would be occupied by another man’s thoughts. This seemed a good place to start. It avoids identifying the beginning of the book with the moment its hero rises up. This book will not perpetuate the illusion in which fiction is confused with actuality. It does not start with Jonathan’s birth, or even his most notable achievement, but mentions it as an aside.”

12/02/2025

Here's a refresh-post on a trio of recent Equus titles, Performances for the End of Time (2022), by Harold Jaffe, 404_Error: Memoir of a Nobody (2023), by R.G. Vasicek & Zak Ferguson, and Anizar (2024), by Louis Armand.
To be reviewed on the website in the coming weeks... Watch this space!

Have you missed us? We have missed you! Let’s start by hitting the refresh button on all things Equus. As a reminder, here are three recent Equus titles, published over the last three years, …

13/01/2025

"Singed is a tiny monument of literary hybridity. Its title is a pun involving burning (sinjed) and a voice (singed). It is polymorphous and polyphonic. By turns, an incantation, an inventory, an archive binge, a fictionalized memoir, and a meditation on music and literature (including the pop, high, and low of both). [...] The book actively attempts to mold an interpretive framework by sifting through the ashes."
Karl Wolff reviews Daniela Cascella's SINGED (Equus, 2017), courtesy Driftless Area Review.

Singed can be seen as a chimera and a rhizomatic desiring-machine.

30/12/2024

"This book’s a cypher, it is actually an upcycled real estate catalogue. [...] This book contains the secret to the cheapening of all houses, I told them. Read it closely and ask yourself why Armand writes humxn and not human, for instance, or why he rearranges words as he does, and then ask yourself how this might cheapen all houses."

"The beauty of this book and its writing is its demonstration, this book is a demonstration of possibility. When I read Armand, I said, I sometimes have the feeling that everything is not dead and closed off and the world is not stuck, that it is not finally fixed in its ways, after all, and there is still some leverage."

"A real estate catalogue to cheapen all houses" - Ansgar Allen reviews Louis Armand's ANIZAR (Equus, 2024)

Happy New Year to one and all from Equus Press! See you in what is shaping up to be a busy 2025!

Review of >> ANIZAR by Louis Armand

03/12/2024

Published just over a year ago…

VAMPYR: A CHRONICLE OF REVENGE + GLITCHHEAD, by Louis Armand

A double-barrelled anti-novel of the end times, set in the heart of Golemgrad, from the author of The Combinations… This is a new unabridged deluxe large-format edition of these two masterworks of verbovisual writing in a single volume, bringing together for the first time the continuing adventures of Offensia & that nefarious underground organisation, THE Š.V.E.J.K! This unique volume stages the long-overdue duel between VAMPYR and GLITCHHEAD.

“How do you infiltrate a mind & systematically implode it? Read Vampyr.” (Ryan Madej)

“Certainly one of the most unique (anti-)novels to come out of the pandemic era, as punctual as it is fang-punctured.” (George Salis, The Collidescope)

“It’s a wild ride.” (Tom Bowden, The Book Beat)

by Louis Armand. ISBN 978-1-7394310-1-3. Paperback, 720 pp. Publication date: October 2023. Order print copies from Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, Magers&Quinn or Amazon. You can also download…

02/12/2024

Some pics & vids from yesterday's Prague Book Fair at The Globe...

02/12/2024

Rick Harsch’s detailled exposé on the many books & memorabilia picked during his trip to Prague as part of PMF Prague Microfestival: from Louis Armand’s CLAIR OBSCUR & THE COMBINATIONS to David Vichnar’s academic & translation output to GOOD SOLDIER ŠVEJK to Hülstrunk to A.M. Ripellino’s MAGIC PRAGUE to Melchior Vischer’s SECOND THROUGH BRAIN (& other titles) & many more “incidentals.”
Well worth the listen at:

27/11/2024

"The book itself is structured like a randomly scattered cluster of me(n)tal shards; like so many fractured pieces of glass. The reader is forced to put the story together like trying to gather up a broken mirror. Each chapter is titled with a date and a city name. And no... of course not; most certainly, the dates are not ordered chronologically. It's not a history book it's mental shrapnel, which means it's up to you, the afflicted reader, to pick those pieces out of the flesh of this perfectly toxic thriller."

Giorgi Vachnadze reviews Phillip O'Neil's Mental Shrapnel (Equus, 2020), courtesy Becoming Press.

cargo.site

21/11/2024

"And that he could already testify on those days when he felt good about his own writing that this book by Holly Tavel was actually rather magnificent, and that he agreed it might be nice to see another book by Holly Tavel, whose lines he felt like he already knew, especially the funny ones."
Ansgar Allen's review-cum-tale of how he came across Holly Tavel's THE WEATHER IN FRITZ BEMELMANS PARK during his last visit to Prague and his participation in PMF Prague Microfestival. Courtesy Erratum Press.

Review of >> The Weather in Fritz Bemelmans Park by Holly Tavel

05/11/2024

Our friends at Asterism Books have been busy promoting our output.
Check out our Equus page on their unique treasure trove of 160+ small press production.
https://asterismbooks.com/search?query=Equus%20press

05/11/2024

13/10/2024

Join us Tuesday 8 pm at Kampus Hybernska, for an Equus evening, courtesy PMF Prague Microfestival.
The four Prague-based horsemen of Equus Press will read from their recent and forthcoming works.
Louis Armand will read from "Anizar" (2024);
Ken Nash from Life Raft (2020);
Phillip O'Neil from Joker Wild (work in progress);
and Michael Rowland from Infinity in Bits (2021);
introduced by Equus managing editor, David Vichnar.
More info: equuspress.com

26/08/2024

One from the vaults:
LIFE RAFT, by Ken Nash (2019)

Life Raft departs from The Brain Harvest in a few significant ways. Most apparently in the length and complexity of its stories. Many stories in Life Raft, such as “Clam Neck Beach” and “Tourists,” are less obviously fantastical in nature as those found before. But, most significantly, the extremes of life and death throughout Life Raft feel more urgent and pressing. The stakes higher, the way forward more perilous. Nash makes us aware that in this turbulent world of ours, art is only a precarious raft. Yet, miraculously, it seems to sustain us.

“Twenty-six tales of everyday strangeness. Each of the stories contains a kernel of brilliance, something observed or invented that will change the way you look at the world.”—Joe Darlington

“In these deft, quirky, darkly hilarious stories, the mundane realities of vacations, conferences, and dive bars, of delayed flights and broken furnaces, are intruded on at every turn by the surreal and absurd.”—Holly Tavel

“In Ken Nash’s brilliant and delightful new story collection, the world does not merely stand on end, it tumbles over again and again. Here is a world that is at once familiar and recognizable, and yet also strange and bizarre enough for the unexpected and magical to happen.”—Joshua Mensch

“If Ken Nash didn’t exist, we would have to invent him. But we can’t. Because inventing Ken Nash is a job for one person only: Ken Nash. We’re lucky we get to enter his weird and deeply affecting worlds.”—Donna Stonecipher

by Ken Nash ISBN 978-0-9931955-9-4. 264 pages. 1st edition. Paperback. Publication date: November 2019. Equus Press: London & Prague. Order from Bookshop.org, from Barnes and Noble, or via Prin…

12/08/2024

A blast from the past (DM us for review copies):

MOURNING, by Richard Makin (Equus, 2016)

Mourning is the final part of a trilogy by writer, poet and artist Richard Makin, following Work in Process and Dwelling.

“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, it 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

“Owing much to Nouveau Roman particularity and the decadence of fin-de-siècle prose, privileging arcane objecthood over organised personhood, Mourning is richly dark and thick with corporeal and writerly materialities. It is also, as it recognises only partly with tongue-in-rectum, ‘screamingly funny in its own way.”
—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

a novel, by Richard Makin ISBN 978-0-9931955-2-5. Paperback. 254pp. Publication date: May 2015. Equus Press: London. Price: € 18.00 (not including postage). Order direct from Equus Press (paperback…

01/08/2024

MIDSUMMER PUBLICATION PLAN ANNOUNCEMENT.

We at Equus are happy to announce the planned publication, in autumn-winter 2024, of three new titles, very much their own but joined in a common pursuit of innovative modes of expressive fiction.

LOYAL BETRAYALS, by Karl Wolff.

Loyal Betrayals is the story of Rem Otarsk, a low-caste Contractor working for the warlord derisively known as The Beard. The Beard is one of three warlords controlling Muthantir, a coastal megalopolis that was once the capital city of the Muthantir Empire. The Empire collapsed following its defeat in the Pentecene War, a conflict involving all the major political powers and lasting over one hundred years. Prior to his work as a Contractor, Rem fought in The War, first as a lowly infantryman and then ascending to the Order of the Stiletto, a covert organization focusing on assassination and dirty tricks. Now broken and defeated, he spends his time doing hits for the Beard, huffing Aphex Grey, and working hard to bury the past. Unlike other veterans, the Order outfitted him with numerous biological and mechanical modifications to his body. But even these enhancements can’t kill the demons that haunt him.

SANDFACE, by Ilker Artiran.

"exterior live ice distills biocide grounding in metaphysics of doll meat between me and him to boil as living creatures of the dead reality sanitizing smell of rot change of accents in the curse cluttering and clinging carries the sentimental system in which i wear as a kind of unconscious waiting fear sandface shaped by wind accuses me of advanced paranoia [...] waking up with the scream on a scale that he can be comfortable bend a man enough who follows his signs the first symbolic characteristic of noise which occurs in covered code tissue not a loss regenerating because of antibodies and sorrow acquires a movement now wants to stop rotating with a muted hum of ice decaying outside of an exterior life asks permission to give birth to death"

JONATHAN MARTIN, by Ansgar Allen.

This historical novel covers the life of Jonathan Martin from his birth in 1782, to his death in 1838. It draws 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 pressganged 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. The story is largely chronological in its presentation, with some intrusions of later events in the earlier tellings. The intention here is to deploy devices in the context of a historical novel akin to Godard’s famous ‘jump cut’ in film. The fragmentary form of the novel is important, in that it allows a more sympathetic rendering of Jonathan’s deranged outlook, without pretending that it can simply be reproduced. The text toys with the reader’s conflicting desires to find out ‘what really happened’ whilst, at the same time wishing to be told a complete and convincing story.