Gary J. Shipley

"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." - Brian Evenson

Dreams of Amputation

So Beautiful and Elastic

"Absurdist horror at its best. Gary Shipley had me hooked from beginning to end." - Carlton Mellick III, author of Quicksand House Something is horribly wrong with my wife. She doesn't move anymore. When I try to lift her I can't. It's like she's glued to the floor, or impaled on something. But her body keeps randomly appearing around the house in contorted positions: facedown in the hallway, at the end of our daughter's bed, and on the ceiling of the main room, her feet, hands and backside flat to the plaster. There is a cold translucent slime coating her skin. The scent of her is intense and repugnant, and yet I am finding myself increasingly drawn to her. I have a burning desire to merge with her. The children, too, want to be near her. Sitting on top of her brings them comfort as they stare at their tablets and phones. We stop going to work or to school. We feed from her. We begin to change. And we are not the only ones... The Unyielding is a darkly surreal tale that details what happens to a family when one of its members becomes an immovable: an entity that while corpse-like is also spatially-inconstant, oddly nutritious, and excessively seductive to surrounding humans. If you've ever wondered what philosophical pessimism looks like in the flesh, it looks like this.

The Unyielding

Edia Connole

"...this edited collection brings together an internationally renowned and interdisciplinary group of scholars to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the inaugural issue of the French interwar avant-garde journal founded by Bataille, Acéphale : Religion, Sociologie, Philosophie (June 24 1936)."--Amazon.com

Acéphale & Autobiographical Philosophy in the 21st Century

William Pawlett

Dying with Baudrillard, a Study of Sickness and Simulacra

Stratagem of the Corpse

Warewolff!

In its form, tropes, tone, and intensity, Bright Stupid Confetti joins a nightray of decadent prose running from Baudelaire to José Antonio Ramos Sucre to Johannes Göransson. This volume explores the hope/fear that the body can discover more of itself, and that the voice uttered in the chasm of one's own bodily dream-terrain may pronounce an infernal logic to blot out the sun. "The sound of yourself: that storm of barbed wire." A book to curl up with. -Joyelle McSweeney, author of The Red Bird and Flet For all its formal beauty and gut-wrenching images, what I find most fascinating about Gary J Shipley's writing is its perpetual endeavor to penetrate the impenetrable, which is to me the very definition of tautology-and of obsession. There is a kind of concentrated narrativity in these pure ruminations that I relish. If there really is something beyond the language, it has to be either pointless, or bizarre. And that's all part of the game. Nonsenseness is not senselessness. Read any of Shipley's work, and you'll get it. -Róbert Gál, author of Agnomia and Naked Thoughts

Bright Stupid Confetti

When Mr. Shipley first shared with me his desire, to lock himself in a room with nothing but "Begotten" playing in a loop cycle, watching its images over and over again for two weeks, isolating himself from any outside influence, taking no interruption or break except to sleep, it seemed like a recipe from the writers of the old testament prophets manipulating and isolating all sense so they may unfettered by the noise of the everyday unearth their experience of the divine; Gary's approach to making "Begotten" his own in a ritual of creative-conscious engagement is a decision to no longer passively "watch" "Begotten" but to enact and digest within his own being a ritual which would remake the film inside his very temple of earth, his body. I always secretly hoped "Begotten" to be more than a movie, to be in fact an initiation for those willing to go that far. So I can only admire Gary for finding the necessary map to what makes this film belong only to those willing to unlock it. -E. Elias Merhige

You with Your Memory Are Dead

Jeremy Hoevenaar

Georg Trakl

Kyle Coma-Thompson

Garett Strickland

Paul Éluard

Laura Walker

Elizabeth Robinson

Vi Khi Nao

Róbert Gál

Vahé Godel

Serge Pey

Jennifer Soong

Christine Shan Shan Hou

Je Baer

E. L. Æ. Elæ

Adam Fagin

Patricia Hartland

Heikki Huotari

M. C. Hyland

Rachel Levitsky

Clarissa Macedo

Geoffrey Olsen

Branko Ve Poljanski

Lindsey Webb

Rachael Guynn Wilson

Memory As a Morgue: Lacunae

Vestiges_05

Schism [2] Press rereleases Gary J. Shipley's first novel Crypt(o)spasm is a fiendish formula for any vitalist utopia: The elimination of death or the so-called immortality is equal to life as the ceaseless permutation of a ghoulish emptiness. Rather than sensationally portraying this unfortunate utopia in frosty gray, Shipley brilliantly depicts it in a color-frenzy that corresponds with the livor mortis of the worldly flesh, detailing it with a prose that positively degenerates on an exponential decay curve. A monstrous book. I love it. - Reza Negarestani CRYPT(O)SPASM explores the idea of the novel as an impossible object. Its themes are myriad and drunken, sprawling and wretched and philosophic - and then the inescapable synonymy of the final two. It gives us death as it takes it away. And there are herds and there are individuals: zeros piled up end on end on top of zeros. Questions are asked of men living out their own thought experiments. Answers are lived in consecutive intervals sucked of death while framed in its disappearance. A coded message is hidden and then revealed. Others are buried, their insides clogged, and they are not found. The book is ill with itself. Its origins and aspirations bleed like sweat stains under its author's arms. The coast is old, feckless, and dying. The coast is falling into the sea. Its legs have varicose veins and crumbling bones. Its mouth is a grave. There are no teeth left to bite the world. Self-delusion is the only essential art. And there becomes an author - literary snide, paranoid, arsehole, xenophobe, visionary, pissant - and the book is his, and he is eaten up with the words he's borrowed. And there's a man whose wife is dead and living inside another woman. And all this to make sense of evil and literature - and literature as evil - as two philosophers squabble over a self they each made from incompatible materials, and murderers murder, and animals suffer (cats and dogs and birds coiled up inside each other like barbed wire), and children die more than once. And there is something to be done, instructions to be carried out, a hole to find and crawl into and through and out the other side, which is the same side, which is no side at all.

Crypt(o)Spasm

Fiction. "Shipley demonstrates what can and ought to be done when even the most mundane subject phrasings are charged with meaningful expression. These densely crafted aphoristic vignettes are prose specimens, like key slides to the biologist or perplexing curia to the relic-collector and alchemist. Each of these dislocated cryptozoological fragments follows its own transverse evolution, a sensuous realism that conducts its own exploration without constraining appeal to genesis or end goal."—Kane X. Faucher

Theoretical Animals

Gary J. Shipley

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