EQUUS PRESS

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.

03/07/2024

We at Equus Press are heartbroken at the recent passing of Jaffe (1938-2024).

Year-long editor-in-chief of the seminal literary-cultural journal "Fiction International," Hal was the author of 30 books, including 14 collections of fiction, four novels, and two volumes of essays. His works have been translated into 15 languages, including German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, French, Turkish, Dutch, Serbo-Croatian, and via PMF Prague Microfestival, recently also Czech. Always uncompromising in his sociopolitical critique as well as stylistic vision, Hal was a cultural force to be reckoned with. Our condolences to his family.

In 2022, Equus was the proud publisher of Hal’s Perfor-mances for the End of Time, a generically hybrid book comprised of brief performative texts and concluding with a short play called “Faust & Mephisto.“ The brief texts are caustic, eerie, and ironically comical. Each text is usually repeated more times with the same title but different con-tent, yet each text is ultimately about endings—small, lar-ge, and colossal. A series of dirges for the living-yet-already-departed, Performances for the End of Time “per-form” not a foreboding of what may be, but a scathing in-dictment of what now already is.

“This book is a blues sympathy. And a jazz suite. With a hip hop rhythm. […] Jaffe has written a timeless collection for the end of time.”—Larry Fondation
“From the beginning, Harold Jaffe has interrogated culture and our place as its victim. This volume haunts as it opens the curtain, revealing the end of time.”—Toby Olson
“A luminous, ambitious, and disturbing experiment of glo-bal vision […], weaving eloquent vulgarity into wisdom through a raw linguistic tapestry eclipsing despair.”—Aimee Parkison
“The damnedest, clearest-headed, most caring take on the world today there is.”—Tom Whalen

by Harold Jaffe ISBN 978-1-9996964-8-1. Paperback, 176 pp. Publication date: October 2022. Equus Press: London & Prague. Price: € 12.00 (not including postage). Order directly from Equus P…

21/06/2024

A book couch at the Lviv Art Center last night ft. books by Equus & Litteraria Pragensia Books, as well as copies of Alienist Magazine, VLAK Magazine: Contemporary Poetics & the Arts, PMF Prague Microfestival anthologies, and Krotch Magazine.

07/06/2024

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

“Phillip O’Neil’s book is a study in hell. […] This is a brutal book. Its shifts in tone are often jarring. And yet that gives it a texture and a patina unlike any other book I’ve read.I would expect no less from Equus Press, whose experimental texts are at the forefront of the contemporary avant garde. As publishers, they don’t flinch from discomfort, and works of twisted brilliance like Mental Shrapnel are the result.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

“Literature would be dead if it weren’t for publishers like Equus Press, a second-to-none specialist in narrative innovation, unique voices, and marginalized lines of flight. 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. [...] Mental Shrapnel is the author’s nostalgic su***de letter to Prague, left on a mantlepiece over the flaming fires of hell, propped up by a bowl of rotting oranges.”—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…

03/06/2024

"At some point in the morning, Kafka gave the nurse a brusque sign that she was to leave the room. He then demanded a lethal dose of morphine from Klopstock. 'You've been promising it to me for four years.' Klopstock, who had been fearing this responsibility for weeks, balked and objected, but Kafka, who was now dependent on the decisions of others more than ever before, suddenly turned belligerent and accused Klopstock of being a murderer if he refused this final act of loyalty.
'You are torturing me; you have always been torturing me. I am not talking to you any more. I will die all on my own.' Klopstock injected Pantopon, an op**te, which was nearly as numbing as morphine. Kafka remained skeptical. 'Don't cheat me; you're giving mean antidote.'"
(Rainer Stach, KAFKA: THE YEARS OF INSIGHT, 570-1)

Here's Kafka's 11 Jun 1924 obituary notice in the "Národní listy" daily. In an irony he would have no doubt cherished, this compulsive walker and sportsman's death notice ended up tucked in between ads for "'Vera' American shoes" and "Berson shoe soles" whose effect renders "foot fatigue impossible."
An eery flashback to Joyce's Ulysses, where Mr Bloom spots an ad for "Plumtree's potted meat" right "under the obituary"(e.g. U 8.139) for his friend Paddy Dignam.

31/05/2024

Equus are happy to announce the publication of the 4th corrected edition of Louis Armand's THE COMBINATIONS, the “European anti-novel” in all its unrepentant glory, following in the tradition of Sterne, Rabelais, Cervantes, Joyce, and Perec. Kafka’s The Trial meets Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.

In 8 octaves, 64 chapters and 888 pages, THE COMBINATIONS is an unprecedented “work of attempted fiction” that combines the beauty & intellectual exertion that is chess with the panorama of futility & chaos that is Prague (a.k.a. “Golem City”), across the 20th-century and before/after.

For the new corrected edition, 16 brand-new blurbs have been collected, from Ansgar Allen, Mike Corrao, Matthew Hall, Richard Makin, Tobias Ryan, Gary J. Shipley, John Trefry, R.G. Vasicek, D. Harlan Wilson, Karl Wolff, Madelaine Culver, Richard Marshall, Joe Darlington, Michel Delville, Zak Ferguson, and Michael John Rowland.

THE COMBINATIONS is available via Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and as Kindle.

https://equuspress.wordpress.com/the-combinations-4th-corrected-edition/

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…

28/05/2024

"If Tranter’s 'Generation of ’68' seems (however problematically) to retain a certain romantic appeal today, this may have less to do with the aspirations of '1968' to which Tranter nailed his manifesto, than with the unedifying spectacle of contemporary poets parading their gongs like some Latin American junta festooned in gold braid and brass. Behind the clamour of self- congratulation, the strains of disillusionment sound not so joyfully."

To end the two-week walkthrough the recent special issue of JEASA magazine (devoted to the work of Louis Armand) back at the beginning, here is another memorable quotation from the interview which opens it, of possible interest to Meanjin Quarterly, Australian Literary Studies, Australian Poetry Network (APN), courtesy of Journal of Australian Studies.

Available online at: https://www.australianstudies.eu/?p=2033
Photo of Louis Armand.