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Desert Tiles brings a fresh spin on the "Corraoesque" theme of text / image coming "alive", becoming a "semiotic organism," undertaken here via the twin metaphors of text as a desert and reading as necromancy. The desert here is both literal (as the ever-shifting "dune-script" of meaning) and a place "deserted", a place of the always-already absent voice, into which the reader is invited to venture out. Reading as necromancy entails summoning the voice of the absent/"dead" author, communing with the past action(s) of signification and by decoding it, yielding messages for (some kind of) the future."Read this geometry in such a way as to allow the text unit increment itself to be unbounded, allowing for fragments of itself to be discorporated in such a way as to interlock-in voxelized gradient-with vacancies identical to those fragments excised from the primary corpus of the text unit itself in such a way as to be both of itself and containing another, like a splinter of bone healing into liver tissue."-John Trefry, author of Plats"Mike Corrao's Desert Tiles takes an ekphrastic approach to our probable swallow by ocular data. The writer/reader is in a state of pixelated becoming. There is no what it/we/they become(s), nor how, nor why, even - a barely-where "textures are compressed and corrupted" and a barely-who "hums their jaw against the sand." Something is in process of being downloaded, devoured, dissolved. It's icky, because it's true. What happens when the happening is pure mechanics, an I thinking and therefore (without reason). As the body is desertified, the body-esque remains: a fine-grained graphic that "yawns and weeps" even while you (the body? Or body-esque?) "want to cry, but are incapable." In the poem "you ask yourself if this still counts as lived experience," while IRL you are wondering if you count as something R and L? Or "is its not being real really that important?" A proper noun believes in something, like the moon landing, or politics, or that 7up & saltines will cure a stomachache. "The static speaks to me." Poor robots, I think, poor tin man. A heart and blood are black and white and indexed quietly, and the index beats. Who will read all the indexes left behind, desiring their un-deserted world? One might desire the desert. Liking the gray sand. And then what."-MJ Gette, author of The Walls They Left Us"Set in a desert created by a 'borgesian deity,' a wandering 'wastrel-form' encounters a Necromancer. This isn't the Desert of the Real, but a literary simulacrum where wanderer and Mancer engage in a dance of death (or birth)? Corrao reveals a book giving birth to itself, not as a postmodernist contrivance, but as a slow-paced prose poem. Body horror collides with a kind of digital mysticism. With both words and images, we witness a sky the color of TV tuned to a dead channel and the birth of the new flesh."-Driftless Area Review

Philippe Sollers' groundbreaking 1973 novel, H, was inspired by the May 1968 Paris student/worker uprising, and, in its own right, performs a revolt against much that's been (and still is) taken for granted in the belles lettres.Described as "a music that is inscribed in language, becoming the object of its own reasoning" (Julia Kristeva) and as an "unpunctuated wall of words, an extremely active [...] mass of language" (David Hayman), H does away with plot, character and setting-and, on the typographical level, with punctuation, capitalisation, or paragraph breaks-in order to attempt what Sollers himself called "an external polylogue."The text performs an infinite fragmentation of subjectivity into a plethora of ventriloquized voices where "words turn round and come back, producing a material fullness of pleasures" and "everything is organized into a splendid series of irrelevancies" (Roland Barthes). It is this fulness of H, this "suffocation" it produces, that might be, with Barthes, termed its "beauty."Accommodating a vast range of tonalities, attitudes, modes, and ideologies, H makes a case in point of how a literary work should function according to Sollers: "A work exists by itself only potentially, and its actualization (or production) depends on its readings and on the moments at which these readings actively take place."H (translated by Veronika Stankovianska & David Vichnar) will become the first English-language translation of this influential experimental text.

Fiction. NATURAL COMPLEXIONS is a biting satire on modern life as lived online and virtually more than here and now, saturated by media idiocy and the closed circuits of celebrity status at every turn. Its masterful combination of hilarity and eeriness functions as a 21st-century upgrade of the Kafkaesque--both in its compressed epigraphic form and in its obsession with the (im)possibilities of the sacred. Is Wilson's book vying for a scandal? What would that, in 2018 America, even mean?

"A debauched, hallucinogenic noir... If Georges Simenon had smoked angel dust he might have come up with a style like this." (Prague Post) "Mickey Spillane meets Georges Bataille on speed." (Goodreads) "The sort of thing Iain Sinclair might write if he'd morphed with Chris Petit..." (Stewart Home) "Pitch-perfect." (London Student) Kafkaville. Blake is a pornographer who photographs corpses. Ten years ago, a young man becomes a fugitive when a redhead disappears on abridge in the rain. Now, at the turn of the millennium, another redhead has turned up in the morgue, and the fugitive can't get the dead girl's image out of his head. For Blake, it's all a game -- a funhouse where denial is the currency, deceit is the grand prize, and all doors lead to one destination: murder. In the psychological noir-scape of Kafkaville, the rain never stops, and redemption is just another betrayal away... Described as "Robert Pinget does Canetti (in drag in Yugoslavia)," Louis Armand's novel Clair Obscur was published by Equus in 2011. His previous novel, Menudo (Antigen), was hailed as "unrelenting, a flying wedge, an encyclopaedia of the wasteland, an uzi assault pumping desolation lead... inspiring!"

Fiction. Set in and around Jardin des Plantes, Paris, Europe, the World, the Universe, Armand's short novel is a whodunit with multiple twists. The setting of the tale against a backdrop of fossils and marvels of taxidermy gives Armand's story a macroscopic dimension. As if the evolution of an entire species could be compressed into several hours of a Sunday morning. As if a tale of a murdered schoolteacher and a vengeful mob could tell of speciation and extinction throughout the evolutionary history of life on Earth. And it can. Armand's deftly written fragmentary narrative is a point-counter-point of silent unheard voices, whose apocalyptic finale eschews euphony in favour of a cacophonous refusal of resolution. "NO END"--loose ends being preferable to final solutions...