Experimental Literature Bundle

Three of our most innovative and strange texts together with a 20% discount and free shipping!
Includes: Ansgar Allen’s The Faces of Pluto, D. Harlan Wilson’s The Psychotic Dr. Schreber, and David Ohle’s City Moon.

Books are read in an instant and by a single eye. Libraries can no longer burn, they are already in the air. There is nothing left for admirers of truth or accuracy but submission to the absolute, unalterable veracity of the word. The Faces of Pluto remembers an earlier time when truth was a casualty of transcription and errors were commonplace if not an art in themselves. It returns something to reading and to writing of the mechanics of picking up, turning over, and distorting, if not catastrophically over-looking books which were left to rot or would be remembered only in fragments. From Empedocles to Borges, from Thomas Browne to Herodotus and back again, it resurrects the fecundity of error and the compiler’s fancy. Roving freely between the works of a diverse range of dead assemblers—compilers of words, of wisdoms, and of bones—this book gathers and reinscribes their leftovers in an extended meditation on death, (re)burial, and remembrance.

Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911) came to prominence as one of history’s most famous madmen in the wake of Sigmund Freud’s “Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia” (1911). Freud’s study psychoanalyzed Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, a detailed account of the German Judge’s psychotic breakdowns in which he battled against numerous antagonists, from God and the Devil to his own body and lexicon. D. Harlan Wilson’s Schreberfiktion case study is at once about, around and beyond Memoirs as well as the many secondary texts it has engendered. As the formerly make-believe aspects of the science fiction genre continue to materialize in the real world, Schreber’s pathology becomes more and more relevant; his imagination and intellect, his anxiety and dread, his solipsism and megalomania point to the pathological unconscious that animates contemporary technological society. Thoroughly researched and transgressive, The Psychotic Dr. Schreber is part speculative (anti)fiction, part (auto)biography, part theatre-of-the-absurd, part writing tutorial, part literary nonsense and criticism. Wilson riffs on and satirizes post-everything, signaling the inevitable death of the reader and rebirth of the real. Science fiction explored the effects of the New in the Next, the Near and, in some cases, the Now. Galvanized by Schreber, this book maps the next stage: the New in the Never.

City Moon is David Ohle’s novelization of all 18 issues of his cult 1970s newspaper, heavily edited and re-processed. It is offered for the first time as a single-volume. The neutrodynes, the satire, the mystery cults, as well as Ohle’s dada-seance of Americana, are as vivid and intoxicating and seriously funny as ever.

“In Ohle’s world, people (not to mention the many related species, including trochilics neutrodynes and necronauts, as well as cross-species creatures such as the ape of golf) are all part of a continuum of life in which human and animal life forms scarcely differ from each other.” —Roger Martin