EQUUS PRESS

17/07/2025

A BLAST FROM THE PAST:
CAIRO (2014), by Louis Armand.

What do a crashed satellite, a string of bizarre murders and a time-warp conspiracy have in common? Welcome to CAIRO, where the future’s just a game and you’re already dead.

Set between New York, London, Prague, Cairo and the Australian desert, the book follows a disparate collection of narrators. Lawson is an Aboriginal geophysicist in central Australia, tracking meteorite debris to sell to collectors. Osborne, a lost soul in New York City, is recovering from a mental breakdown with the help of the mysterious Dr Suliman. Joblard is a former heavyweight boxer turned low-level thug, working for a p**nographer with a fascination for the weird. Shinwah is an assassin from the future, tasked with hunting down anachronisms – future technology – in our present. The fifth protagonist begins the novel nameless and confused, waking in a Cairo that doesn’t yet exist, led by instinct through its decaying ruins to an uncertain destination. An apparent accident, the destruction of a previously unknown satellite, brings each of these characters into conflict with shadowy forces...

“A genre defying anti-novel… Like communism it is the movement of vast majorities unfettered by a state!”
—Stewart Home

“Unflinching in its portrayal of human greed.”
—The Guardian

“A mind-bending underworld odyssey.”
—Joe Darlington

“Hard to find this kind of fusion-lit combining highbrow sci-fi with semi-noir mystery; nearly impossible to find it done well.”
—Vincent Farnsworth

“A timely reminder of what fiction can do when it chases ideas, Cairo will reward those looking for a way to escape the enclosure of realism.”
—Jennifer Mills

“CAIRO… is a reflection not only of the current independent European publishing scene, but also of literature’s ability to globalize.”
—Mycah McCrary

“CAIRO is the best psychogeographic sci-fi detective novel I’ve read. An original take on the genetically engineered, p**nographic surveillance state that we are living in right now.”
—Phil Shoenfelt

“CAIRO is downright playful… filling us in on not only the tangible space, but also its sonic properties, its perfume, truly creating in three dimensions the underbelly of the underbelly.”
—Benjamin Woodard

“Armand’s prodigious gifts as a storyteller, wordsmith, imagineer and general fiend are copiously and carnivorously on display in this wonderful, horrifying book.”
—Thor Garcia

“CAIRO is a dazzling cross-genre novel, blending sci-fi, noir fiction, surrealism and satire all mixed with a smidge of Pynchon.”
—Ken Nash

“A gripping, lively, intelligent novel both rooted in tradition and absolutely current. And hip: why give up style when all the lights might go out?”
—Lou Rowan

“A dark, challenging, dystopian novel that is addictive to read. It warps the boundaries of genre, time, identity and place. I’ve not read anything quite like it before.”
—Michele Seminara

“Cairo is an anachronism waiting to happen, a black hole, a black-market book, a demolition of the corporate oasis, a walk through the city of the dead.”
—A.J. Carruthers

For more information & ordering details, please visit:

a novel, by Louis Armand ISBN 978-0-9571213-7-9. Paperback. 366pp. Publication date: January 2014. Equus Press: London. Shortlisted for the 2014 Guardian Not-the-Booker Prize Order from Equus Press…

06/07/2025

"Writing into the crisis with the intensity of a neural flashbang, Louis Armand’s A TOMB IN H-SECTION reads like JOHNNY PULP jacked into a Beckett deathloop, Burroughs fed through a state surveillance mainframe, and Stewart Home exorcising the ghosts of ideology with a crowbar and a modem.
This is fiction beyond fiction—an ontological breakdown in real time, where Stephen Barber’s brutalist history as p**n poetics meet the derailed syntax of post post-anarchy and the scorched ruins of cyberpunk.
Armand doesn’t just critique the spectacle—he rewires it from the inside, fusing the Rhizoidal and the radioactive into a language that bleeds, glitches, and refuses containment.
A comicbook apocalypse, a metaphysical riot, a malware opera of memory and collapse—A TOMB IN H-SECTION is the book the end of history has been hallucinating."
Richard Marshall
https://equuspress.wordpress.com/a-tomb-in-h-section/

27/06/2025

"Through these metamorphoses the eye struggles to hold on to individual identity; the golem is its own ancestor. Remember, the present will seem to multiply in a book with no beginning and no end, a relentless prayer to the morning star, the evening star, an oblique confession of faith. In the book, you have to decide the next step. The graphic novel does not chronicle the zone, it manifests the zone: I alone build the anatomy within which I walk."
Richard Makin, "Necrologue"--In Response to Louis Armand's A TOMB IN H-SECTION

Writing offers only one chance, forever. A sea in a landlocked country covers the entire territory. We light out: steampunk vaudeville, a sealed covenant of shapelessness brought to life by the rea…

25/06/2025

Excerpts from Richard Makin's NECROLOGUE, text written in response to Louis Armand's A TOMB IN H-SECTION (Equus, 2025), the entire text forthcoming.

"The exploded morphological structure evokes Dante's description of God as the book of the universe, whose pages are scattered through time and space. [...]
Spawn of mudman and mudwoman. Multi-user dungeon. Multi-user dimension. And a namecan be mud. Identities are plotted, deconstructed and realigned. [...]
The characters split immortality between them, spending half their time at the earth's molten core, the other half in deep space. Low murmurs are carried on the wind. [...]
Read and scan: this redoubt of the soul soars high above every approach road, and withbreathtakingly complex simplicity. Undeniably, these are the most subversive thoughts ever to have emerged from the human brain pan (pathos and defiance are our watchwords)."

https://equuspress.wordpress.com/a-tomb-in-h-section/

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/