Dreams of Amputation reads like the nightmares Derek Raymond might have experienced if he'd written cyberpunk. An exceptionally strange work, but a smart and thoughtful one as well. Disturbing, haunting, and inimitably weird, this is a book like no other.\n- Brian Evenson\nGary J. Shipley’s, Dreams of Amputation, is a novel overflowing not only with ideas, but a different type of speech. From the first sentence you know you are walking into a world where you will not be led by the hand, and where even the characters will not be sure exactly what or where they are: “He wakes in a container, head like a sawn circuit, throat rattling like a battery cage, Dock Code Report flashing tortured symbols from the wall screen: the amp’s back.” So begins what in essence serves as a story brought on in full barrage, equipped with mazes, tunnels, replicant people, goat heads, paranoia, riots, brain manipulation, new disease… Shipley moves fluidly between scenes of various styles, grafting Tarkovsky-like passages of exploration with damaged circuits of putridity and fear, sometimes not far from the clipped feel of Burroughs’s Nova Express. Where so many other books would get caught in one mode or another, Shipley keeps the eye inside the mind alive, spitting other eyes out of the eye itself.\n- Blake Butler in VICE

Dreams of Amputation

Literature & Fiction

Shipley, Gary J.

Literary

Erratum Press

Manchester. An hourly paid lecturer in a university art school writes fiction and poetry. He steals tea bags, screws and other useful items to get by. As he struggles with tiredness, depression and the quality of his writing output, he experiences nightmares about his past in a small town. He begins to write these down. A big moment blisters up, in which he sees the brutal cycles of life, and the catastrophic future in the present. 
Last Days of Pompeii skewers contemporary English life with a satire and a serious warning about our state of complacency.

Last Days of Pompeii: Volume 1, Augurs

Hanson, Steve

Humor & Satire

The Prodigious Earth

Blix, Eric

Lord of Chaos deconstructs reality as we know it, breaking apart our traditional perceptions, casting them into the transient void. Its influences range far and wide, from bleak nihilistic black metal to Beckett, Cotard's syndrome to Capgras delusion, Ovid's exile to the Black Sea, Cartesian questioning, and Plato's Allegory of the Cave.\nLess a novel and more a testament to the absolute veracity of the world as it exists from within the eyes of the mislabeled pariahs-society's untouchables; a hallucinogenic and terrifying journey through the world of those who see through the veiled mists of the mundane.

Lord of Chaos

Beauregard, Daniel

Genre Fiction

If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces: fragments on death After Anna de Noailles

Tudor-Sideri, Christina

Poetry

The Poets: a novella

Walsh, William

Last Days of Pompeii presents an hourly-paid lecturer trying to write fiction. His fictions process his past via nightmares of previous lives in northern small towns, where the endless cycles of rebirth and changeless vistas are one kind of hell, not an idyll to be romanticised. His fictions then begin to sweat the augurs of a rapidly oncoming brutal future, the new hell, via an attempt to write the sci-fi he loves. The present and future begin to blur, his mental health starts to crumble. But his fiction fails - it fails in quality - his work frequently fails, his colleagues fail, the students fail, the university fails, the city fails, our culture fails. The world fails. In an era when to be 'professional' is to fake it until you make it, then carry on faking it after you've made it - as the solipsistic populations of the west and beyond stroll towards the precipice - Last Days of Pompeii declares the new revanchist frontier for literature in our time to be the Literature of Failure. But this can be no grand announcement. This new literature must not be the prurient, sentimental peddling of individual struggle already on the market, but an unflinching, excoriating smash of personal with historical failure. Our hugely excessive language of positivity is a thin veneer, it reflects our narcissism back at us, but masks the inevitable era of collapse to come. The biggest tragedy of all is that tragedy gains no traction in these risible last days. Perhaps it never does, at the end of any civilisation. Maybe tragedy is always retrospectively sketched in. Last Days of Pompeii exemplifies this inversion: first as farce and only then, falsely, as tragedy.

Last Days of Pompeii: a comedy: vols 1 & 2

Today Yesterday After My Death

Alsop, Maureen

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