Dadaoism


Book Description

Dadaoism is the first anthology from Chomu Press. Editors Justin Isis and Quentin S. Crisp have selected twenty-six novellas, short stories and poems setting out an aesthetic manifesto of rich and stimulating prose style, explosively unhindered imagination and anarchic experimentation. From Reggie Oliver's 'Portrait of a Chair', in which consciousness is explored from the point of view of furniture, to John Cairns' 'Instance', a nano-second by nano-second account of a high-speed telepathic conversation, to Julie Sokolow's 'The Lobster Kaleidoscope' in which naive wordplay acts as a foundation for existentialist philosophy in a story of inter-species love; from those such as Michael Cisco, with growing followings, to unexpected new voices such as Katherine Khorey, Dadaoism sets out to present a mystery tour of the literary imagination and to demonstrate that outside of exhausted mainstream realism and uninspired genre tropes, contemporary English-language writing is thriving and creatively vital."




We Bury the Landscape


Book Description




I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like


Book Description

A collection of obsessive and yet crystalline stories set in contemporary Japan, written with savvy that is flawlessly streetwise, literary and metaphysically profound all at once. Futuristic in outlook, up-to-the-minute in setting and sophisticated in influence, these are stories for those who feel that literature has not caught up with the 21st century.




Crandolin


Book Description

In a medieval cookbook in a special-collections library, near-future London, jaded food and drink authority Nick Kippax finds an alluring stain next to a recipe for the mythical crandolin. He tastes it, ravishing the page. Then he disappears...So begins an 'adwentour' that quantum-leapfrogs from Central Asia in the Middle Ages to Russia under Gorbachev, from the secrets of confectionery to the agonies of making a truly great moustache, from maidens in towers to tiffs between cosmic forces. Food, music, science, fruitloopery, superstition, railways, bladder-pipes and birth-marked Soviet statesmen; all are present in an extraordinary novel that is truly 'for the adwentoursomme'.




Drowning in Beauty


Book Description

From the ashes of countless decayed Modernities comes Neo-Decadence, a profaned cathedral whose broken stained glass windows still glitter irregularly in the harsh light of a Symbolist sun. Behind this marvellously vandalised edifice, a motley band of revellers picnic in the graveyard of the Real, leaving behind all manner of rotting delicacies and toxic baubles in their wake. During the last eighty years, world culture has seen an explosion of popular aesthetics, art-forms and the movements associated with them: clothing, trends in fashion, tattoos, recreational drugs, musical sub-cultures, cosmetics, photography--all of which can be the subject of obsessions, damnations and salvations. Devices and formats, initially vulgar, are worshipped, only to be forgotten by all but the few initiates who, through their maniacal fixations, manage to uncover their hidden allure. These twelve stories and their preceding manifestos, then, arise from a shift in aesthetic consciousness: synaesthesia, ecstasy in extremes, the Divine and Infernal alike seen through a neurasthenic lens of supreme focus.




Nemonymous Night


Book Description

"Mike was a hawler, although he would have spelt it differently had he known the word at all. At this stage, it was unclear what a hawler was-or what a hawler did. But Mike knew he was one and probably knew what one was and what one did, even if he didn't know the name itself." Nemonymous Night is a tale of magic and dream. A rich collage of the British townscape and psyche. A spiral of details, mundane things imbued with significance and significant things that feel mundane. More outsider art than portrait. Missing children and angel wine - ocean liners and helicopters - and a drill vehicle bound for the core of the earth. DF Lewis's remarkable novel is brought back into print again, for the first time in hardcover.




The Society of Misfit Stories Presents...September 2019


Book Description

A journal of long-form literary genre fiction published three times a year. Featuring thirteen tales of the speculative, the strange, the peculiar, and the curious that don’t quite fit in with the mainstream. In I Called to Say You’re Dead, after the mob approaches him to collect on his deadbeat twin’s debt, a man comes up with what seems like a simple scheme to resolve the trouble. Then his assortment of misfit accomplices decides to make things difficult. In The Haunted Fleshies, a young girl’s past trauma and the stories from her brother’s favorite horror series complicates a murder investigation. In What Waits For Thee, a discontent woman is at the center of a sordid tale of infidelity, murder, and the undead set in the aftermath of the Civil War.




Link Arms with Toads!


Book Description

Self-reflective mirrors looking for their own reflections. Towns that migrate to the moon. Prisoners of elaborate dungeons and gigantic miniature solar systems. Robots, ghosts, rascals, explorers, troubadours, apemen and yetis. All are present in the multiverse of inversion and invention that is Link Arms with Toads! Rhys Hughes is a unique figure in contemporary fiction whose speculative whimsicality is not so much balanced as trampolined by tensile prose and puckish pensiveness. Link Arms with Toads! forms the ideal introduction to his work.




Human Pages


Book Description

A pre-internet Second Life, the business of Chance Company is to offer clients a vacation from their own lives in other, fabricated lives. In this labyrinth of identities, real or assumed, Agnes Darshel searches for her errant father, a search that involves her in the internal conflicts of Chance Company's creation myth and history. Against a dark, atmospheric background of Europe, the USA, South America and North Africa, themes of exile, real and self-imposed, and the consequences of being on the losing side politically are played out in a shifting underworld where mysteries and crime are never far from the surface.




I Am a Magical Teenage Princess


Book Description

In the stories of I Am a Magical Teenage Princess, Luke Geddes reexamines 1960s and contemporary popular culture with wit, insight, and pathos. A book for the magical teenage princess in all of us, this debut short story collection welcomes a unique and surprisingly wise voice to the world of letters.




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