Two weeks before its official launch at Prague Microfestival, Equus are very proud to announce the arrival of proof copies of Phillip O'Neil's PAINTING EYES ON CHAOS, his final and most ambitious opus magnum. Set in the interzones of war & peace, O’Neil’s hauntological prose/poem of psychic doom & resurrection casts an eye beyond the mortality of authorship & its discontents, towards the unsaid & the unsayable. Painting Eyes on Chaos is a counterpart to Mental Shrapnel. Painting Eyes on Chaos is a sprawling, hallucinatory investigation into grief, memory, madness and the treacherous workings of language. Beginning with the mysterious death of Jazz, whose spectral presence haunts a fractured constellation of siblings, lovers, detectives and psychiatric patients, the novel spirals through the streets of Prague, the Arctic wilderness, war zones and the labyrinths of the unconscious. At its centre lies an encrypted microdrive, a missing truth and an investigation whose boundaries between witness and accomplice, victim and perpetrator, dream and reality become increasingly unstable. Combining detective fiction, epistolary confession, philosophical speculation, grotesque comedy and lyrical experimentation, O’Neil constructs a polyphonic narrative in which identities multiply, memories mutate and the dead refuse to stay buried. By turns savage, tender, hilarious and harrowing, Painting Eyes on Chaos brings the linguistic inventiveness and uncompromising psychological intensity of Mental Shrapnel to their fullest expression: a posthumous masterpiece of contemporary experimental fiction that asks what it means to bear witness when even the self has become a mystery. “To ‘paint eyes upon chaos’ is not to domesticate it but to allow it to return our gaze. It is to acknowledge that chaos already observes us: that memory, grief and language possess a life independent of our attempts to master them.”—@DavidVichnar “There is a melancholy aura of solitude inside each chapter’s core, punctuated by puns, pranks and irreverent O’Neilian pisstakes. Curious, colourful characters vie for pole position in a glorious, ghastly circus of frank, bucolic storytelling. Short stories, poetry, monologues, letters and dream sequences combine to produce a beautiful kaleidoscope of a tale – a ripping yarn.”—Michael Rowland For ordering details and more information, please visit equuspress.wordpress.com/pai…

FROM THE EQUUS BACKLIST: RICHARD MAKIN — MOURNING (Equus Press, 2015) “I can’t remember.” So begins one of the strangest books Equus has published. Mourning has no conventional plot to summarise, scarcely any characters to introduce, no reassuring fictional world waiting to be entered. Instead it has voices, scraps of science fiction, medical language, ritual, dictionary matter, jokes, commands, memories, quotations, invented memories, verbal debris. When the book appeared in 2015, Iain Sinclair called its pages “beautiful and delirious abstraction” and “ordered poetry”; Ken Edwards marvelled at the way its heterogeneous textual materials somehow achieve “non-narrative, never-ending coherence”. David Caddy, reviewing it for Tears in the Fence, located it somewhere between the Nouveau Roman, Burroughs, Prynne and Sinclair. A decade later, another aspect of Mourning seems increasingly striking: this is a book about what survives when context disappears. And yet the book's title gives this apparently impersonal procedure an extraordinary emotional charge. Mourning is precisely the work of living among fragments of something absent. Which may explain why the reader matters so much. The book cannot remember for us. We become the place where its fragments temporarily meet: 254 pages, without a map or as much as a handrail. equuspress.wordpress.com/mou…

COMING SOON FROM EQUUS PRESS: We’re very happy to announce this new Equus Press publication for autumn 2026, and to launch it at this year’s @praguemicrofest in late October, where İlker will join us from İzmir via a specially recorded video reading. İLKER ARTIRAN — SANDFACE & SYMNECROSIS “To anywhere. To everywhere. I’m the whole, the sum of all work, the entire show.” Beautifully designed & lavishly illustrated by the author's own photomontages are two extended blasts of posthuman writing from İzmir: flesh, sand, noise, code, industrial ruin, dead media, chemical desire, machine consciousness & the endlessly disintegrating fiction of the “I”. SANDFACE & SYMNECROSIS takes language to the point where poetry, fiction, theory & noise cease to be distinguishable: a 140-page verbal machine of cybernetic hallucination, bodily mutation, compulsive repetition & linguistic overload, accompanied throughout by Artıran’s stark industrial/anatomical collages. “All reality is noise...” More soon: book, programme, launch details & assorted machine debris.