Two weeks before its official launch at Prague Microfestival, Equus are very proud to announce the arrival of proof copies of Phillip O'Neil's PAINTING EYES ON CHAOS, his final and most ambitious opus magnum. Set in the interzones of war & peace, O’Neil’s hauntological prose/poem of psychic doom & resurrection casts an eye beyond the mortality of authorship & its discontents, towards the unsaid & the unsayable. Painting Eyes on Chaos is a counterpart to Mental Shrapnel. Painting Eyes on Chaos is a sprawling, hallucinatory investigation into grief, memory, madness and the treacherous workings of language. Beginning with the mysterious death of Jazz, whose spectral presence haunts a fractured constellation of siblings, lovers, detectives and psychiatric patients, the novel spirals through the streets of Prague, the Arctic wilderness, war zones and the labyrinths of the unconscious. At its centre lies an encrypted microdrive, a missing truth and an investigation whose boundaries between witness and accomplice, victim and perpetrator, dream and reality become increasingly unstable. Combining detective fiction, epistolary confession, philosophical speculation, grotesque comedy and lyrical experimentation, O’Neil constructs a polyphonic narrative in which identities multiply, memories mutate and the dead refuse to stay buried. By turns savage, tender, hilarious and harrowing, Painting Eyes on Chaos brings the linguistic inventiveness and uncompromising psychological intensity of Mental Shrapnel to their fullest expression: a posthumous masterpiece of contemporary experimental fiction that asks what it means to bear witness when even the self has become a mystery. “To ‘paint eyes upon chaos’ is not to domesticate it but to allow it to return our gaze. It is to acknowledge that chaos already observes us: that memory, grief and language possess a life independent of our attempts to master them.”—@DavidVichnar “There is a melancholy aura of solitude inside each chapter’s core, punctuated by puns, pranks and irreverent O’Neilian pisstakes. Curious, colourful characters vie for pole position in a glorious, ghastly circus of frank, bucolic storytelling. Short stories, poetry, monologues, letters and dream sequences combine to produce a beautiful kaleidoscope of a tale – a ripping yarn.”—Michael Rowland For ordering details and more information, please visit equuspress.wordpress.com/pai…

Happy publication day to Ilker Artiran's SANDFACE / SYMNECROSIS, to be launched at this year's @praguemicrofest at the end of the month. “A visionary work of posthuman poetics situated somewhere between industrial noise, cybernetic fiction, and desert mysticism.” (@DavidVichnar) In SANDFACE / SYMNECROSIS, İlker Artıran constructs sprawling hallucinated landscapes witnessing the collapse of flesh, code, desert, machine, memory. Part epic poems, part cybernetic nightmares, part posthuman scriptures, the two texts unfold as immense fields of linguistic drift, populated by abandoned technologies, synthetic voices, industrial ruins, spectral identities, and faces emerging from, & dissolving back into, the sand. Written in relentless waves of associative montage, SANDFACE / SYMNECROSIS inhabit worlds where language itself has become a malfunctioning biosystem: a site of contamination, mutation, recursive self-construction. Bodies are rewritten as data, machines dream of flesh, consciousness flickers between noise & signal, presence & disappearance. What emerges is an ecology of intensities, a darkly lyrical meditation on technology, death, desire, & all the very unstable architectures of the self. Drawing on cut-up writing, cyberpunk, industrial music, experimental poetry & posthumanist theory, Artıran has produced a singular work of visionary excess: at once brutal & beautiful, philosophical & visceral, apocalyptic & strangely intimate. “To anywhere. To everywhere. I’m the whole, the sum of all work, the entire show.” Review copies available upon demand. For further information and ordering details visit: equuspress.wordpress.com/san…

FROM THE EQUUS BACKLIST: RICHARD MAKIN — MOURNING (Equus Press, 2015) “I can’t remember.” So begins one of the strangest books Equus has published. Mourning has no conventional plot to summarise, scarcely any characters to introduce, no reassuring fictional world waiting to be entered. Instead it has voices, scraps of science fiction, medical language, ritual, dictionary matter, jokes, commands, memories, quotations, invented memories, verbal debris. When the book appeared in 2015, Iain Sinclair called its pages “beautiful and delirious abstraction” and “ordered poetry”; Ken Edwards marvelled at the way its heterogeneous textual materials somehow achieve “non-narrative, never-ending coherence”. David Caddy, reviewing it for Tears in the Fence, located it somewhere between the Nouveau Roman, Burroughs, Prynne and Sinclair. A decade later, another aspect of Mourning seems increasingly striking: this is a book about what survives when context disappears. And yet the book's title gives this apparently impersonal procedure an extraordinary emotional charge. Mourning is precisely the work of living among fragments of something absent. Which may explain why the reader matters so much. The book cannot remember for us. We become the place where its fragments temporarily meet: 254 pages, without a map or as much as a handrail. equuspress.wordpress.com/mou…

COMING SOON FROM EQUUS PRESS: We’re very happy to announce this new Equus Press publication for autumn 2026, and to launch it at this year’s @praguemicrofest in late October, where İlker will join us from İzmir via a specially recorded video reading. İLKER ARTIRAN — SANDFACE & SYMNECROSIS “To anywhere. To everywhere. I’m the whole, the sum of all work, the entire show.” Beautifully designed & lavishly illustrated by the author's own photomontages are two extended blasts of posthuman writing from İzmir: flesh, sand, noise, code, industrial ruin, dead media, chemical desire, machine consciousness & the endlessly disintegrating fiction of the “I”. SANDFACE & SYMNECROSIS takes language to the point where poetry, fiction, theory & noise cease to be distinguishable: a 140-page verbal machine of cybernetic hallucination, bodily mutation, compulsive repetition & linguistic overload, accompanied throughout by Artıran’s stark industrial/anatomical collages. “All reality is noise...” More soon: book, programme, launch details & assorted machine debris.

Come one come all—we’re proud to be part of this year’s WORD, a literary cabaret, tonight at Anežka Café in Prague 1!

THE WORD IS OUT. This Friday, Equus Press will temporarily abandon its usual underground publishing operations and emerge into daylight to take part in WORD., Prague’s annual variety show celebrating writers, writing & the peculiar ecosystem that keeps both alive. We’ll be lurking in the dark shadows of the Book Corner, in congenial conspiracy with Litteraria Pragensia Books, bringing along a selection of objects made from paper, ink, unreasonable amounts of labour & questionable commercial judgement. Elsewhere in the former convent: poetry, fiction, comedy, performance, film & music from our friends & collaborators Ken Nash, Michael Rowland, Jo Blin, Urša Prah, Marko Luth, Cynthia Srpková, Darrell Jónsson & many others. More than ten performers in one evening, plus publishers, booksellers & assorted members of Prague’s literary underworld, all under the watchful eye of the tireless host & main organiser, the one & only Debbie Liebenberg. Come for the WORD. Stay for the words. Leave, ideally, carrying more books than you arrived with. Friday, 4 September, from 18:00 Convent of St Agnes, Anežská 812/12, Prague 1 connect.boomevents.org/en/de…

I.M. RICK HARSCH We are heartbroken to learn of the death of Rick Harsch, & bid farewell to a magnificent writer, a fearless publisher, & one of the warmest, brightest, most generous people we have had the privilege to know. Through Corona\Samizdat, Rick conducted his tireless literary operations from Izola, Slovenia. From that unlikely hub he unleashed on the unsuspecting world some unruly, uncompromising, & criminally overlooked writing with an enthusiasm entirely his own. His solidarity with fellow independent presses was equally uncompromising. In his wonderfully digressive YouTube videos, he devoted time & attention to several Equus books, discussing them with the wit & infectious passion that made him such a rare reader & advocate for a common cause. In October 2024, he joined us in Prague for the Prague Microfestival, bringing with him that unmistakable mixture of erudition, mischief, outrage & immense human warmth. We were enormously fortunate to visit Rick in Izola last February, to see the place from which Corona\Samizdat carried out its improbable & essential work, & to enjoy his company, conversation, & boundless hospitality. Rick was one of the great independents: a writer and publisher who understood literature not as a career structure or marketplace, but as a form of selfless friendship & stubborn collective life. His loss leaves the small-press community immeasurably poorer, and all of us who knew him bereft. Our love and deepest condolences go out to his family, friends, writers, readers, & the entire Corona\Samizdat community. The mission continues, as it must. But without Rick, it will be a lonelier one. Ave atque vale.

Recommended midsummer ritual: • Find a shady beer garden. • Order something cold. • Open THE UNNAMEABLE OBJECT. • Lose track of whether you're reading memoir, fiction, poetry, satire or collective hallucination. • Accept that Prague has won. The Unnameable Object is Michael Rowland's delirious 100 Prague Cantos, which coagulate into a fever dream of bars, festivals, squats, ghosts, poets, musicians, misfits, and the city that somehow contains them all. Memoir dissolves into fiction, satire into hallucination, until Prague itself becomes the unnameable object at the centre of the maze. Some books tell stories, this one tells a city. If you prefer dérives to destinations, read it while the evenings are still warm. Happy Midsummer from Equus Press. Further information & ordering details: equuspress.wordpress.com/the…

Too hot to handle? If the heatwave isn't enough, spend your summer with the man who set fire to York Minster. @AnsgarAllen's Jonathan Martin resurrects the incendiary life of the 19th-century prophet, pyromaniac, visionary—or all three at once—through a dazzling collage of trial records, pamphlets, dreams and fractured voices. Joycean in its linguistic exuberance, Beckettian in its bleak comedy, Woolfian in its shifting interiority, the novel burns through the comfortable certainties of history to ask where revelation ends and madness begins. The ideal reading for the hottest days of the year. Just don't leave it too close to an open flame. equuspress.wordpress.com/jon…

The one and only, indefatigable Joseph Schreiber (@roughghosts) reviews @TobiasvRyan’s dark grimy fable GLANTZ (Equus, 2025)

We're happy to announce the planned publication, in late October 2026, of two experimental novellas by Ilker Artiran, SANDFACE & SYMBIOSIS. "A visionary work of posthuman poetics situated somewhere between industrial noise, cybernetic fiction, and desert mysticism." In SANDFACE, İlker Artıran constructs a sprawling hallucinated landscape witnessing the collapse of flesh, code, desert, machine, memory. Part epic poem, part cybernetic nightmare, part posthuman scripture, the text unfolds as an immense field of linguistic drift, populated by abandoned technologies, synthetic voices, industrial ruins, spectral identities, and faces emerging from, & dissolving back into, the sand. Written in relentless waves of associative montage, SANDFACE inhabits a world where language itself has become a malfunctioning biosystem: a site of contamination, mutation, recursive self-construction. Bodies are rewritten as data, machines dream of flesh, consciousness flickers between noise & signal, presence & disappearance. What emerges is an ecology of intensities, a darkly lyrical meditation on technology, death, desire, & all the very unstable architectures of the self. Drawing on cut-up writing, cyberpunk, industrial music, experimental poetry & posthumanist theory, Artıran has produced a singular work of visionary excess: at once brutal & beautiful, philosophical & visceral, apocalyptic & strangely intimate.

Lungfish, by @LouisArmxnd, published earlier this year, is a multi-layered work of docufiction, weaving myth, memory & true crime into a sprawling narrative of Australia & its shadows. A late-80s phantasmagoria set in a rural Australian town, trailing a pack of whacked-out kids & a battered VH Valiant Ranger as it tears through heat, dust, riverbeds, & bad history. Lungfish holds Australia open, exposing storytelling itself as a contested terrain shaped by erasure & violence, all the while refusing to forget. “Dense, playful writing that boldly & unapologetically experiments with form & tone. Louis Armand’s Lungfish is a stream of conscience machine gun fever dream that feels strangely familiar, but also like no place I’ve ever been.”—Glendyn Ivin “Necromodernist travel writing from another dimension. Armand returns to his Antipodean roots in an unsettling and raucous effort which takes pot shots at settler-colonial sacred cows.”—Wayne Bradshaw For more information & ordering details please visit equuspress.wordpress.com/lun… DM us for review copies.