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EQUUS PRESS

"Modernity today is not in the hands of the poets, but in the hands of the cops" // Louis Aragon

EQUUS believes that such a doubly marginalised position allows for a writing both idiosyncratic and authoritative in its distance from which it can take a stand, make a change, and matter – an ability increasingly rare in titles conforming to the dictates of the book market and tastes of mass readership.

28/11/2025

Annonce du vendredi noir:

Louis Armand’s A TOMB IN H-SECTION now (again) available from Shakespeare & Sons in the comic book section downstairs, snuggled in-between Batman and Joker.

18/11/2025

Come in we are open!
When & where: For the next three days, from 10 am till 5:30 pm, as part of the Humanities Week, we’ll be running a bookstand at the Main Bldg of the Faculty of Arts.
On offer: titles from Equus Press, Litteraria Pragensia Books, Alienist Magazine, VLAK Magazine & PMF Prague Microfestival, all at major discounts…

Pojďte dál, máme otevřeno!
Kde a kdy: Po další tři dny vždy od 10:00 do 17:30 budeme mít v provozu knižní stánek jako součást týdne humanitních věd na hlavní budově FF UK.
Nabídka: tituly z nakladatelství Equus Press, Litteraria Pragensia Books, Alienist Magazine, VLAK Magazine a PMF Prague Microfestival, všechny ve výrazné slevě.

14/11/2025

Looking forward to our early-December release of Tobias Ryan's first novel, GLANTZ.

For everyone's weekend enjoyment, here's an Equus blurb, a sneak preview of its cover, designed by Yanina Spizzirri, and a link to a recent 3AM magazine "appreciation" article by Tim MacGabhann below.

In GLANTZ, Tobias Ryan delivers a claustrophobic study of inertia, conscience, and the paralytic rituals of everyday life.
Set against a backdrop of shoddy bars, shoddier streets, and a shoddiest society in slow collapse, GLANTZ traces the movements (and stasis) of its eponymous anti-hero: a figure perpetually on the verge of speech, prayer, and confession, yet caught in a spiral of waiting, repetition, and failed transcendence. Ryan’s prose cleaves to the observational intensity of Robbe-Grillet while steeped in the noirish atmospherics of Equus Press: lives lived in suspension, in the interstices between catastrophe and routine. The novel unfolds as a series of minor scenes—meals half-eaten, prayers unspoken, notebooks left blank—where nothing seems to happen, and yet where history, violence, and memory seep into every silence. GLANTZ tests the novel form at its limits, interrogating how narrative itself falters when confronted with lives lived under the sign of exhaustion. Its syntax performs its subject: recursive, hesitant, attuned to the granular detail of a man staring into his own hands for meaning. A book of uncanny prescience, GLANTZ mirrors our own moment of crisis and stasis. It is a novel of failed routines and the stubborn residue of memory, confirming Tobias Ryan as a crucial new voice in the Equus Press constellation of poetics.

https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/glantz-an-appreciation/

04/11/2025

👉🏻IN MEMORIAM: PHILLIP O'NEIL (1965—2025)👈🏻

We are deeply saddened to share the news of the passing of Phillip O’Neil, author of MENTAL SHRAPNEL (2020), a singular literary voice of uncompromising intelligence, wit, and poetic ferocity.

Phillip’s work was always driven by a restless curiosity and a refusal of easy solace — his was a writing alive to chaos, fracture, and fragile beauty.

Those of us who had the privilege to work with him knew his generosity of spirit, his sardonic humour, and his commitment to the craft of language as resistance and revelation.

At the time of his death, Phillip was working on a new manuscript, PAINTING EYES ON CHAOS — a haunting and urgent continuation of his lifelong project to find coherence in fragmentation. Equus Press are committed to work with his collaborators and hope to bring this final work into print in the near future.

We are planning a celebratory literary gathering in his honour later this autumn, bringing together readers, friends, and fellow writers to remember, read, and celebrate his words. Details to follow soon.

Phillip’s loss is immeasurable, but so is the reach of his voice. His work, as ever, remains the truest memorial.

🕯Rest in peace, Phillip.🕯

—Equus Press Team

31/10/2025

We are OPEN! The micro book fair at this year’s PMF Prague Microfestival has something to offer everyone: apart from Equus titles, there’s Litteraria Pragensia Books, Alienist Books, VLAK Magazine: Contemporary Poetics & the Arts, and also books from our fellow travellers: 11/11, Inside the Castle, Sweat Drenched Press, Erratum, Corona/Samizdat, and more! This weekend only at Hybernská!

23/10/2025

Two new Equus titles by Ansgar Alen & Michael Rowland, hot from the press, lying in wait for their launch at PMF Prague Microfestival!

20/10/2025

Ansgar Allen’s Jonathan Martin ready to strike (a match) again—in just 10 days at this year’s PMF Prague Microfestival!

10/10/2025

EQUUS PRESS SEPTEMBER RETROSPECTIVE

30. Ansgar Allen, JONATHAN MARTIN (2025)

JONATHAN MARTIN (forthcoming 1 Nov 2025) presents itself less as a “life novel” than as a necromantic reanimation of biography as ruin, disjunction, and haunted fragment. “On 27 May 1838, Jonathan Martin lay down and died … That evening, another lunatic would take his place, and the room in which he lived would be occupied by another man’s thoughts.”

This opening gesture already signals a necromodernist logic of succession, recurrence, and the absorption of subjectivity into haunted space. Allen does not begin with origin or ascent; he begins with death, as implosion rather than birth, insisting that a life as biography is always parasitic upon its own ending.
The novel is structured in fragments — archival scraps, trial documents, self-published pamphlet inserts, delirious registers — weaving together dream, ecclesiastical fury, and claustrophobic psychosis. Allen describes the book as “an act of negation … it tells us what literature is by telling us what it is not … it does not start with Jonathan’s birth … mentions it as an aside.” This refusal of teleology, this negative theology of biography, is quintessentially necromodern: identity survives (if it survives) not by coherence but by decomposition, margin, and interruption.

Within the Equus necromodernist canon, Jonathan Martin marks a bold pivot: it is no longer city-archive or glitch event, but biographical necropolis. The life of Jonathan—prophet, arsonist, inmate—is neither fully recoverable nor fully imagined: Allen treats historical source as spectral matter, medium to be excavated rather than exhumed. He rewrites the conventions of historical fiction, pushing biography toward ruin, exposing the hollowness of coherence and claiming the haunted residue of a life lived on the margins of reason and order.

To be launched at this year's PMF Prague Microfestival on Nov 1.

For more information & ordering details, please visit:
https://equuspress.wordpress.com/jonathan-martin/

09/10/2025

EQUUS PRESS SEPTEMBER RETROSPECTIVE

29. Louis Armand, A TOMB IN H-SECTION (2025)

A Tomb in H-Section inhabits the architecture of death itself. Set in and underneath the Josefov ghetto, the novel literalises necromodernism by making its ruins the stage for both spectacle and burial. Its proscenium is hauntological: the ghetto becomes a constructed set of memory, horror, and insurance cataloguing. The text orchestrates a grotesque pageant in which history recirculates as theatre — the past is not overwritten, but performed ad infinitum.

The novel invests deeply in systems of registration, inventory, and archiving. The subterranean labyrinths and Processing Plant beneath the detached fragment of Golemgrad are not only infrastructural sites but necro-archives—accounts of bodies, wires, crevices, shadows, and data. “Bet you didn’t know there’s a detachable piece of Ol’ Golemgrad smackbang in Hamburg Bay … that’s where the Processing Plant is … G.O.D. in his countinghouse … keeping the ledgers in good order” becomes a revelation that ruin is itself a logbook. The body lies wired on a slab, awaiting its transformation: here death is not the end but a coded interface.

Ghost-creatures, bubble-people, dissolving sunspots, rodent animism — the novel’s spectral cast dramatizes the collapse of human into trace, living into memory. “As Němec watched … bubble-people dissolved to sunspots … drifting & dissolving, dissolving & drifting” becomes not literary ornament but necromodern kinetics — where dissolution is the primary mode of existence. In A Tomb in H-Section, Armand doesn’t simply catalogue ruins; he choreographs them. The novel resurrects the co**se of literature not by negating its decay, but by staging it, choreographing its collapse into a recurring, haunted archive.

For more information & ordering details, please visit:
https://equuspress.wordpress.com/a-tomb-in-h-section/

08/10/2025

EQUUS PRESS SEPTEMBER RETROSPECTIVE

28. Louis Armand, THE COMBINATIONS (2016; 4th ed. 2024)

In The Combinations, Armand stages Prague not as backdrop but as a ruinous crucible of recursive texts. The novel’s chessboard structure (8 octaves, 64 chapters, 888 pages) literalizes necromodern time: each move is haunted by prior moves, every chapter a recursive echo in the city’s palimpsestic archive. The world is a combinatorial engine where the past is never past but always reactivated. As a reviewer notes with characteristic slyness: “Perhaps … when you stare long enough a crack in the wall is just a mirror.” That mirror reflects not identity but the spectral overlay of textual history—one crack among many in a city that is its own necropolis of memory.

Armand’s prose perpetually collapses the distinction between the animate and inanimate. Prague’s streets, buildings, monuments, even chessboard symbols become haunted by their own inscriptions. The novel often treats celluloid, silhouette, and ruin as interchangeable media of decay: “The city’s thousand-and-one fascinating tales” are retold not to reconstruct history but to scatter it. In this mode, reading becomes excavation: the text is not destroyed by its own excess—it is resurrected through it.
Within Equus Press’s necromodernist poetics, The Combinations is foundational: a city-archive that’s both labyrinth and tomb, where narrative is a ghostly combinatorial protocol. Nothing is transparent; every gesture is layered with spectral weight. It resets the terms by which we think of future, history, and text—not as linear progress, but as recursive survival through ruins.

For more information & ordering details, please visit:
https://equuspress.wordpress.com/the-combinations-4th-corrected-edition/

07/10/2025

EQUUS PRESS SEPTEMBER RETROSPECTIVE

27. Louis Armand, ANIZAR (2024)

ANIZAR unfolds as one of the clearest late articulations of Equus Press’s necromodernist poetics — a mode defined by recursion, glitch, and historical compost. The novel opens in a sun-bleached Alentejo, where “history, too, may be a dream, but we are not the dreamer.” It stages existence as theatre: a crumbling proscenium in which thought, language, and flesh perform their own decrepitude.

Armand’s protagonist, Albufarkas — “last of a long line of deadletters that turn up after the postal system’s been abolished” — becomes a necromodernist archetype: a revenant of obsolete systems, half-alive among the ruins of meaning. A key passage encapsulates this poetics of exhausted recursion:

“You die & the image of something dies w/ you. From now on just a settling of dust, the sifting of pixel-decay, slow data-rot, mildew on the motherboard… skeletons gradually unfleshed on the holodeck.”

Here, Armand fuses the medieval and the digital, the Gothic and the algorithmic: human decay expressed through the lexicon of obsolescent computation. The result is a syntax of entropic consciousness, where self and system decay at the same rate — a linguistic compost heap of “entropy and effluent.” Albufarkas’ dialogue with his alter ego, Antifarkas, literalises the necromodernist split between self and shadow, thought and its automated echo.

ANIZAR extends the poetics of Vampyr/Glitchhead and A Tomb in H-Section into a Southern European allegory: an archaeological fever-dream of empire, simulation, and entropy. As the narrator muses, “We live – oh we say we live, but heaven help us! – in a tide of vexatious effluent… we’re in the toiletcleaner, it’s drinking us!” This grotesque humour — both scatological and metaphysical — marks Armand’s writing as a literature of aftermath, where history survives only as data noise, waste, and parody.

In the necromodernist constellation, ANIZAR is the post-Cartesian counter-novel: a book conscious of its own decay, of “the room you could imagine walking into in a novel without a plot.” It reads like a transcript from civilization’s memory leak — one that insists, perversely, on continuing to write.

For more information & ordering details, please visit:
https://equuspress.wordpress.com/anizar/

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