Overview

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.

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9781960451088

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Allen has distilled the speculations of Nietzsche and Freud into an impersonal meatspace whose soulless protagonist is writing its own suicide note - while time dissolves all, while the space of inscription reveals caverns measureless to man. Black Vellum is the work of an extremely subtle mind, co-opting horror to trace the integuments of a glitching futurity somehow liberated from the traditional impasses of nihilism."" -David Roden, author of Snuff Memories""The intellect was only first produced as a result of this diminishment of perception, writes Ansgar Allen in Black Vellum. This is an exquisitely written philosophical tale about human civilization as the quest for order, measurement, and automation-and perhaps, about how nihilism and despair have always fed our fantasies of humanoid machines."" - Germán Sierra, author of The Artifact""Ansgar Allen has quickly become one of my favorite authors. He takes risks and writes well-these things alone are a rarity today. Equal parts informative, entertaining, and aesthetically appealing, Plague Theatre is an excellent introduction to his evolving oeuvre."" - D. Harlan Wilson, author of The Psychotic Dr. Schreber""The Wake and the Manuscript is an involving book, a textual persistence relentless in its chapter-less, paragraph-free form, start to finish. The story is a captivating oddity, a monolithic confession or lamentation, an existential interrogation inhabited with flashbacks, foibles, sickness, death, hallucination, mental aberration, religion and belief [...] exquisitely weird."" -Eugen Bacon, AUREALIS MAGAZINE

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