Books
Confetti
Emmalea Russo
Published 1st September 2022
£10 - Paperback
Emmalea Russo's Confetti is a book of rigorous attention. Unafraid to let its subjects come apart, it devotes itself to following what is shattered into pieces or leaking across the ground. Confetti is a book that knows looking and loving make us more and less than whatever we might think a self is, and Emmalea Russo’s poems and diagrams provide glittering explorations of those processes. In seeing beyond the point to innumerable points, and mapping the links and abysses between them, Confetti achieves a dazzling verisimilitude that makes me feel close to the “almost something” that I am.
— Bridget Talone, author of The Soft Life
By turns cinematic, cosmic, alchemical, and geometric, Confetti uses language to alter the boundaries between film and daily life. Against a backdrop of screens, personal relationships extend into a play of light to create a meditation on disposability and permanence. Confetti soaks up dirt, shimmers, and gets thrown up into the air, landing on the ground in strange piles.
Emmalea Russo’s poetry and writings on film and visual art have appeared in many venues, including Artforum, BOMB, and Granta. She is the author of G, Wave Archive, Confetti, and Magenta (forthcoming 2023), as well as several multimedia chapbooks and artists’ books. She lives in New Jersey and edits the multidisciplinary journal Asphalte Magazine.
Communions
Adam Lehrer
Published 30th September 2021
£10
Also available online at the following:
(US): Barnes and Noble and Target (UK & EU): Book Depository, Abebooks (AUS): Booktopia
Lehrer makes me yearn for a time when being a critic was an artform in itself, and that makes me even more grateful to have him.
- Thomas Moore
…a gripping hybrid text about the paradoxes of drug addiction as a means of both freedom and enslavement, insight and stultification...Amidst the dull critical monoculture of the current moment, Lehrer's is a bold and unique voice.
- Geoff Shullenberger
Channeling hallucinated versions of dead artists and junkies, these fragments access the uncanny allure of shared experience. Elements of speculative fiction, criticism and encrypted auto-biography merge to form a disconcerting portrait of the artist as addict. Neither denunciation nor valorization, Communions is an attempt to probe the haunting singularity of opiate addiction and its ineradicable influence on art and culture.
Horizontal Rain
U.H Dematagoda
Published 31st August 2020
£10
Also Available for order at independent bookshops, or online at the following:
AbeBooks, IndieBound, Barnes & Noble (US), Waterstones (UK), Alibris, Better World books, Book Depository, Thalia (EU)
Eschews the film flam of the usual suspects in new and exciting ways...ice cool and ultimately modern...it literally pings with electricity. '
- Lee Rourke
‘Horizontal Rain is a disquieting philosophical dispatch from a phase of life many will recognise but prefer to forget; a study in male abjection on the booze-soaked margins…against a wider societal context of entropy and frustration’
- Rob Doyle
‘…this vivid portrait of romantic misadventure and male friendship is full of melancholy insights into the state of modern masculinity. Occasionally, it reads like a Glaswegian “Book of Disquiet”’
- Jude Cook, his ‘Book of 2020’
Set in Glasgow 2015. A man suddenly finds himself alone, but not for long. Soon his attention is consumed by another woman - sublime, inspired, unknowable - and different, he feels, from those who came before her. His friend, arrogant and unencumbered, taunts him as they drift aimlessly from one hangover to the next amidst a landscape of uniform grey, pulsating lights and insipid rain. Between querulous despondency and abject nihilism - an attempt to capture the disquiet of the decade just past, striking at the heart of a contagious male despair.
Cover image: Strawberry Moon on Iona by Sean Patrick Campbell (2018). https://spcampbellart.cargo.site/
Beyond
An Anthology
Published 19th June 2020
£10
Beyond is an anthology of short prose about the future and all of its disorientating and perturbing possibilities. We present work that ranges from the parallax of the present - into imagined realities which call back with responses and warnings to the ineluctable churn of our modern world. Frequently dark, often humorous, these writings bear the responsibility of interrogating our conception of normalcy, and pursuing its significance in a future which may be closer to hand than previously acknowledged.
Featuring work by Camilla Grudova, Joe Alexander, Matthew Crowley, Augustin Cambau, Leah Case, Nicholas E. Jung, Andrea Dandillot, Mickey J. Ellis, Gina Rodrigues, Mark Bolsover, and U.H Dematagoda.
Cover image: Chromatography #5 by Austrian painter Sarah Bildstein, from her series 100 Spectres. www.sarahbildstein.com
*Mature Content
Agonist
U.H Dematagoda
Published 31st May 2024
£12 - Paperback. Pre-orders open soon
A volume of experimental prose/poetry written about, and by, the internet:
“A feverish confrontation with the internet as digital palimpsest, a fragmented discourse upon its banal diabolical passions; hatred, humour, cruelty, obscenity, lust and poetry - often absurd, sometimes sublime. AGONIST speaks to the maddening anomie of the technological present, teetering on the spectral boundary between tedium and inspiration, image and text, contingent and absolute…framed by our tenuous presence against the all-encompassing void.”
Cover Art: Abstract Composition, 1921 by Wyndham Lewis.
©️Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust. All rights reserved 2024, Bridgeman Images.
The Shift
Augustin Cambau
Published 1st April 2024
£10 - Paperback.
Also Available in independent bookshops and online - US: Barnes & Noble, UK: Waterstones, Alibris, CAN: Indigo EU: Amazon (France), Dussmann (Germany), Bruna (Netherlands) Australia: Mighty Ape,
Confused and unwell, alone in a faraway land, through blind luck, and as suddenly as one moment changes to another, an ordinary man is confronted by a serene epiphany. Unsure of its mysterious origins, he returns to Paris indelibly marked and foolishly flees to the South, where his previously staid existence is thrown into exquisite chaos.’
A poignant debut novel by French painter Augustin Cambau, THE SHIFT is a rare meditation on the still extant possibilities of spiritual awakening, amongst all of the banality and tedium of everyday life.
Cover: ‘Dead on the Grass’, 2023, mixed media on wood panel by Augustin Cambau
Cursed Images
Reuben Dendinger
Published 31st August 2023
£10 - Paperback
Available online - US: Barnes and Noble, Greenlight Bookstore, Midtown Reader UK: Foyles EU: Lehmann’s, Saxo, Van der Velde Australia: Mighty Ape, Booktopia
“Reuben Dendinger’s Cursed Images is a triumph. It is a book that shows remarkable panache and assurance: in the potency of its weird conceptions, in its elegant and smooth-flowing prose, in the compelling narrative pace that keeps the reader enthralled, and in the subtle way in which the author draws upon the work of Lovecraft, Ligotti, Chambers, and others while remaining true to himself and shedding baleful insights upon our troubled age. With this one book Dendinger stakes his claim to be at the forefront of contemporary weird fiction.”
- S. T. Joshi, author of I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft
Driven by the cruelty of market society into wildernesses of neurasthenic horror, artists and lovers seek out phantoms of forgotten beauty. Cursed Images is a dream-journal of late capitalism, a Gothic tarot of desire and fear.
Cover: Venus by Anna Sebastian, 2021 - www.annasebastian.com