Friday, April 27, 2018

Drowing in Beauty

I am honored, soaked in ether, distilled, and ceremonially set aflame to announce the availability of Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology, published by Snuggly Books, edited by Daniel Corrick and Justin Isis, and including a story by myself.


From the publisher: 

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.

Daniel Corrick - Introduction
Brendan Connell - First Manifesto of Neo-Decadence
Justin Isis - Second Manifesto of Neo-Decadence
Brendan Connell - Molten Rage
Justin Isis - The Quest for Nail Art
Damian Murphy - A Mansion of Sapphire
Yarrow Paisley - Arnold of Our Time
Ursula Pflug - Fires Halfway
Colby Smith - Somni Draconis
Colin Insole - The Meddlers
DP Watt - Jack
Avalon Brantley - Great Seizers' Ghosts
Daniel Corrick - Chameleon is to Peacock as Salamander is to Phoenix
Quentin S. Crisp - Amen 
James Champagne - XYSchaton

Paperback, 256 pages
USA: $16.95

The book is available directly from the publisher, as well as Amazon, Book Depository, and several other distributors.