Books published by Equus Press

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?

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...