Friday, November 11, 2016

The Academy Outside of Ingolstadt




It gives me great pleasure to announce the publication of The Academy Outside of Ingolstadt, a short novel that I wrote over a period of several months throughout the course of 2016. The book will be published on the Mount Abraxas imprint of Ex Occidente Press in Bucharest, featuring illustrations by Sasha Schneider and cover illustrations by the extremely talented Oliver Liebeskind. This book comprises what is easily the longest and most complex piece of fiction I've yet written. Among many other things, it is an homage to the work of Robert Walser and Octave Mirbeau.

*

On the eve of the Great War, a young man is sent away from home to spend a two-year period in an exclusive boarding school outside of Ingolstadt. What he’s done to merit his selection is a mystery to him, yet his family life is less than ideal and he finds himself drawn to the unfamiliar rigors of the Academy. The school maintains a pretense of nobility, and yet the teachings are perplexing and obscure, the rules and regulations only partially revealed, and the methods of instruction are replete with unexpected perils. By way of stealth, adversity, provocation, and deception, the novitiate is compelled to face a treacherous ordeal that very nearly leads to his undoing.

Several decades later he returns to the school, taking a position as a member of the faculty. As the secrets of his past are gradually unveiled before him, he finds himself once more upon the precipice of an abyss. After a final revelation, he comes at last to comprehend the true nature and extent of the Academy’s teachings. 



The Academy Outside of Ingolstadt will be available after the 20th of November. It can be pre-ordered, by request, from Cold Tonnage Books and Fantastic Literature in the UK, and from Ziesing Books in the US.

Sunday, September 4, 2016

The Temple Has Been Consecrated

And the Whore is This Temple is back from the printer, and its birth is every bit as immaculate as has been prophesied. This is a sumptuous, over-sized book, crammed with full-page images, translucent inserts, and tantalizing texts, poems, hymns, and blasphemies which are certain to submerge the reader into the baptismal waters of divine intoxication. The book is still available for advance order at Ziesing Books. Simply send an email to info@ziesings.com and ask them to reserve a copy. Shipping (from Ziesings) will begin in two weeks, once the books have made their way from Romania to California.










(photos by Geticus Polus)

Thursday, August 11, 2016

And the Whore is This Temple


Secret Chamber by David Herrerias

"Pity me! Succour me! Let us go to the temple!"
Gustave Flaubert, Salammbo

Publication is imminent for And the Whore is This Temple, the latest anthology from the Mount Abraxas imprint of Ex Occidente Press. This book promises to be the most sublime and audacious edition yet - an extra large volume overflowing with inserts and sacerdotal imagery, and featuring fourteen of the finest literary endeavors that have been published in recent history. Included are stories, litanies, poems and prayers, insufferable blasphemies issued forth from lips stained red with heresy, canticles to Moloch and the blessed Virgin, blueprints of De Civitate Dei, fragments of charred stone from the blasted churches of Antioch, lamentations for the forsaken priests of lost traditions, and seductions for the ancient oracles whose flames have long since died.

Contents

John Howard
Another Sea

Alcebiades Diniz Miguel
Tidal Wave of Virginal Blood

Thomas Strømsholt
The Waning of the Light

Avalon Brantley
Corpus: A Mandala of Anathomy and Metaphysiology

Leopold Nacht
The Savants of the House of Exile

Stephen Friedman
The Ophidian Revelation

Thomas Phillips
Picture at an Exhibition

Colin Insole
The Abdication of the Serpent

Rhys Hughes
The Nine Impossible Temples of Chaud-Mellé

Andrew Condous
Saints of a Cataphysical Syncretism

Charles Schneider
The Panopticon Virus

Jonathan Wood
Anima OV Animus

Adam S. Cantwell
The Chamber in the Universe

D.P. Watt
Imperium Sine Fine


The book should be back from the printers by the 20th of August. In the meantime, copies can be reserved with Ziesing Books by emailing info@ziesings.com. More information on this fabulous volume can be found on the Ex Occidente website.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Seduction of the Golden Pheasant

It is an honor and a privilege to announce that a second volume of my work will soon be published in the Mount Abraxas series from Ex Occidente Press in Bucharest. Seduction of the Golden Pheasant, a novella, is very similar in length, if not exactly in theme or temperament, to The Imperishable Sacraments. This salacious bird, at once unprincipled and bound to the highest ethic, is expected to be released from the printers in the first week of July, 2016.




Seduction of the Golden Pheasant follows the intrigues and compulsions of a young woman stationed in Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire on the outskirts of Tours. Valérie spends the season of her exile in a moderate chateau endowed with tastefully restrained décor. The interiors are embellished with a proclivity for discretion, the furnishings kept simple and refined. The single exception to the modesty of style is the wallpaper, with which Valérie harbors an ever-increasing obsession. A lush and exotic landscape of deep azure on milky white unfolds in an intoxicating arrangement along the many walls of the chateau. Mountainous hills contend with lavish valleys, terraced rice fields give way to forests flush with wild boars; perhaps the most enticing among its manifold motifs are the intricate temples that occasionally appear within the windings of a river or perched upon an elevated plateau. The holy temples depicted on the walls exert a feverish influence over the impressionable tenant. The fires that flame unseen upon their hidden altars beckon to her, drawing her ever further into a rich mosaic of forbidden pleasures both sensual and sublime. At the center of her passion lies the elusive golden pheasant, the celestial bird of Imperial China that dares defy the statutes of a fallen aristocracy. 

As with The Exaltation of the Minotaur, this exceptionally designed and bound volume features artwork at once devastating and sumptuous by Rotton Fantom. It can be pre-ordered, by request, from Cold Tonnage Books and Fantastic Literature in the UK, and from Ziesing Books in the US. 

Seduction of the Golden Pheasant is limited to 81 hand-numbered exemplars. 

Saturday, April 2, 2016

Booklore

I am extremely pleased to announce the upcoming publication of Booklore, in which appears a piece I've written on Alain Robbe-Grillet's Topology of a Phantom City (the book from which this weblog has inherited its name).



The anthology is edited by Jonas Ploeger and Alcebiades Diniz Miguel, and features illustrations by Erika Seguín Colás. Other contributors include Carl Abrahamsson, Avalon Brantley, Brian Catling, Andrew Condous, Brendan Connell, Quentin S. Crisp, Richard Gavin, Martin Hayes, Colin Insole, Timothy J. Jarvis, Andrew Liles, Chris Mikul, Daniel Mills, Reggie Oliver, Thomas Phillips, Ray B. Russell, Michael Siefener, Charles Schneider, Thomas Stromsholt, Supervert, Mark Valentine, Paul Wallfisch, DP Watt, Ron Weighell and Jonathan Wood.

Booklore is scheduled to begin shipping in the 2nd week of May, and may be ordered directly from the Zagava Press website.

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.” (Franz Kafka in a letter to his friend Oskar Pollak, 27. January 1905)

Thursday, February 18, 2016

The Exaltation of the Minotaur

I am ecstatic in every conceivable way to announce The Exaltation of the Minotaur, a new collection that has just been released on Mount Abraxas, the latest imprint to emerge from the perilous heights and sublime depths of Ex Occidente in Bucharest. 




By complex rites and protocols both infernal and divine, by fervent prayer and countless sleepless nights, by the recitation of venerable hymns, by subtle blasphemies, by outright lies, by mirrors placed at inconspicuous angles, by the provocation of destiny and by the steady application of blind luck may the contentious beast of Knossos be exalted. Care must be taken, precaution must be observed, for the process, once begun, is irreversible. When the heights of exaltation have been reached, heaven itself cannot contain the beast. The ancient wine of prophecy will overflow its chosen vessels and inundate the houses of the blessed and the damned.


The Exaltation of the Minotaur is partially revealed over the course of three lengthy narratives, stories steeped in complex rites and ceremonies, oracular automatons, and the treacherous perils of diplomacy. 
The Ivory Sovereign follows the tangled fate of a ruined professor as he plunges ever further into the impossible depths of a carnivalesque attraction. A bureaucrat, a woman of noble descent, and two insatiable occultists are drawn into to an inexorable unveiling of the minutia of providence in An Incident in the House of Destiny. The Hieromantic Mirror reveals strategies impenetrable and obscure within the procedures and formalities of a consulate.

This exquisitely designed and packaged volume, featuring fully illustrated dust-jacket and frontispiece by Rotten Fantom, is currently available for pre-order from Cold Tonnage in the UK, and will soon be available from Fantastic Literature Ltd. in the UK and Ziesing Books in the US.

The Exaltation of the Minotaur is limited to 83 hand-numbered exemplars only.

Sunday, January 31, 2016

The Gift of the Kos'mos


The Gift of the Kos'mos Cometh! has arrived, and it is every bit as lavish and exquisite as we could have hoped for. This is a truly massive tome replete with paeans, hymns, supplications and curses to the timeless, the imperishable, the black and adamantine, desolate or pregnant with the intoxicating dew of stars, uncharted or mapped with rigorous precision, a refuge of the pious and the lost, the blessed and the damned, a portal to the concealed, the obscure, the forbidden and the obscene.

Copies are available at Fantastic Literature Ltd. in the UK, and will be stocked at Ziesing Books in the US.