Justin Isis

A collection of obsessive and yet crystalline stories set in contemporary Japan, written with savvy that is flawlessly streetwise, literary and metaphysically profound all at once. Futuristic in outlook, up-to-the-minute in setting and sophisticated in influence, these are stories for those who feel that literature has not caught up with the 21st century.

I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like

The long-awaited second collection from Justin Isis takes us on a sharp turn away from the 'Huysmans in Tokyo' feel of his first and into a world of near- and far-future shocks. Torrents of alien language and remixed fragments of science fiction hauntology merge in the valley of the shadow of the singularity, while atomized characters scramble for self and meaning only to find themselves overwritten or revised out of reality. Churches made of meat, spaceships powered by song, simulated authors and a soul-warping artwork that may or may not exist - in these ten stories you will be confronted with a garish neon blueprint of post-humanity. Welcome to tomorrow. Welcome to the Arms Race.

Welcome to the Arms Race

Quentin S. Crisp

Dadaoism is the first anthology from Chomu Press. Editors Justin Isis and Quentin S. Crisp have selected twenty-six novellas, short stories and poems setting out an aesthetic manifesto of rich and stimulating prose style, explosively unhindered imagination and anarchic experimentation. From Reggie Oliver's 'Portrait of a Chair', in which consciousness is explored from the point of view of furniture, to John Cairns' 'Instance', a nano-second by nano-second account of a high-speed telepathic conversation, to Julie Sokolow's 'The Lobster Kaleidoscope' in which naive wordplay acts as a foundation for existentialist philosophy in a story of inter-species love; from those such as Michael Cisco, with growing followings, to unexpected new voices such as Katherine Khorey, Dadaoism sets out to present a mystery tour of the literary imagination and to demonstrate that outside of exhausted mainstream realism and uninspired genre tropes, contemporary English-language writing is thriving and creatively vital."

An Anthology

Dadaoism

Daniel Corrick

From the ashes of countless decayed Modernities comes Neo-Decadence, a profaned cathedral whose broken stained glass windows still glitter irregularly in the harsh light of a Symbolist sun. Behind this marvellously vandalised edifice, a motley band of revellers picnic in the graveyard of the Real, leaving behind all manner of rotting delicacies and toxic baubles in their wake. During the last eighty years, world culture has seen an explosion of popular aesthetics, art-forms and the movements associated with them: clothing, trends in fashion, tattoos, recreational drugs, musical sub-cultures, cosmetics, photography--all of which can be the subject of obsessions, damnations and salvations. Devices and formats, initially vulgar, are worshipped, only to be forgotten by all but the few initiates who, through their maniacal fixations, manage to uncover their hidden allure. These twelve stories and their preceding manifestos, then, arise from a shift in aesthetic consciousness: synaesthesia, ecstasy in extremes, the Divine and Infernal alike seen through a neurasthenic lens of supreme focus.

Justin Isis

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