Michael Cisco

A living form of money results in the unraveling of the world. ""The bank is there to save and lend."" ""-Workers work and customers spend.""

Animal Money

ANTISOCIETIES is a collection of ten stories about isolation - what it does to people, and what isolated people do to each other and themselves. An ominously quiet town. A haunting young adult novel from the turn of the century. Two starving captives frozen in agony. A young boy from a doting family. A man in a cheap Halloween mask. A succession of portraits of people trapped in their own identities, some of whom insist on their own ideas because they would have nothing at all without them. People for whom being seen by another is terrifying. And, like any collection of portraits, ANTISOCIETIES is also a collection of speculative mirrors ...

Antisocieties

From Michael Cisco, one of the most innovative and subversive writers working today, comes the long-awaited, ground-breaking novel of a suicide survivor trying in vain to write himself back into existence. Unlanguage is the story of a man transformed by death and by language change. The language, once understood, transforms him, and transforms learning itself. One day, he looks down at the hand resting on his thigh and sees that it's just an ordinary hand. What had been composed of colored light made solid goes back to being meat and blood. His body reverts to the ordinary sloshing heaviness of a regular body. The exalted vision of his eyes becomes the filmy, blurred vision of the usual kind. He slumps back into his former self. Whirlwinds of shame close on him. With a violent, monkey-like energy he wracks his brains for a way back. Then it occurs to him, he can still write that language. He must write his way back. Told as a structural guide to impossible grammar, Michael Cisco's Unlanguage is a brilliant, thought-provoking novel that not only pushes the boundaries of literature but of language itself.

Unlanguage

The Divinity Student (Buzzcity Press First Editions)

The Narrator-the new novel by Michael Cisco, author of The Traitor and The Divinity Student-is also his most sophisticated. Cisco's prose, by turns phantasmagorical and exhilarating (reminiscent one moment of Robbe-Grillet, the next of Artaud, with a tinge of Thomas Ligotti, the imaginative virtuosity of Gene Wolfe or M. John Harrison), is like a stark sequence of strong iron bars, brimming with dark ambiance. Combining unmatched craft with masterful storytelling, this is literate fantasy unlike any other, intricate as the most elaborate dream, in which the narrator himself is the most ambiguous thing of all.

The Narrator

A new novel from Michael Cisco, the International Horror Writer's Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999. "Michael Cisco's works immerse the reader in worlds that are not simply dreamlike in the quality of their imagination but somehow manage to capture and convey the power of the dream itself. The Tyrant is his masterpiece." -- Thomas Ligotti

The Tyrant

The Traitor

The Divinity Student

Member is the account of how Thanks (the narrator) "accidentally recruited" himself into "the cosmic game of Chorncendantra." On a night stroll he comes into possession of a mysteriuous bag. Investigating, he discovers that it contains a dimensional hole to another world. By accident or design, as bearer of the bag, he is now a courier, carrying messages in a cosmos-wide game he does not understand. Its prose precise and energetic, Member creates a literary virtual reality of strangeness both fantastical and Kafkaesque. Rather than a fever-dream, Cisco offers us a breathing here-and-now set within cosmic vastness.

Member

Struck by lightening, resurrected, cut open, and stuffed full of arcane documents, the Divinity Student is sent to the desert city of San Veneficio to reconstruct the Lost Catalog of Unknown Words. He learns to pick the brains of corpses and gradually sacrifices his sanity on the altar of a dubious mission of espionage. Without ever understanding his own reasons, he moves toward destruction with steely determination. Eventually he find himself reduced to a walker between worlds - a creature neither of flesh nor spirit, stuffed with paper and preserved with formaldehyde - a zombie of his own devising. The line twixt clairvoyance and madness is thinner than a razor blade. In 1999, The Divinity Student captured the attention of fans of dark fantasy everywhere, eventually winning the International Horror Guild Award for best first novel. Now, The Divinity Student has been paired with its sequel, The Golem, for a must-have book - The San Veneficio Canon. Michael Cisco has created a city and a character that will live in the reader's imagination long after this book has been read...

The San Veneficio Canon

An undead man, who values libido and life, lives in the sewers and pines for Vera, a blind woman, while he helps a disgraced academic and serves as the mascot of a subway cult.

The Great Lover

Paul Tremblay

The Golem

Weird Fiction: A Genre Study presents a comprehensive, contemporary analysis of the genre of weird fiction by identifying the concepts that influence and produce it. Focusing on the sources of narrative content—how the content is produced and what makes something weird—Michael Cisco engages with theories from Deleuze and Guattari to explain how genres work and to understand the relationship between identity and the ordinary. Cisco also uses these theories to examine the supernatural not merely as a horde of tropes, but as a recognition of the infinity of experience in defiance of limiting norms. The book also traces the sociopolitical implications of weird fiction, studying the differentiation of major and minor literatures. Through an articulated theoretical model and close textual analysis, readers will learn not only what weird fiction is, but how and why it is produced.

A Genre Study

Weird Fiction

Four novels and one short story collection from Michael Cisco all in a signed and limited boxed edition.

Novels and Stories of Michael Cisco

The Divinity Student and Others

SECRET HOURS is a collection of short stories by the International Horror Guild Award-winning author Michael Cisco. This edition collects various horror and dark fantasy short stories, as well as several Lovecraftian and Cthulhu Mythos style stories inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. The book features a gorgeous cover and interior artwork by Harry O. Morris, and additional interior artwork by Jason C. Eckhardt and Thomas Brown. The introduction is by noted author and Lovecraftian scholar Robert M. Price.

Secret Hours

A man lying in a bed of pain flees from physical torment into his own memories, and into speculations about life and reality. He was, once, employed by the Temporary Institute for the Study of Holes, a think tank pursuing research that ranges from occult studies to advanced physics, including black holes—or, as they are known in string theory, black branes.

Black Brane

Thomas Day

Richard Parker

Ian Heames

Sam Ladkin

Glossator 8 (2013)Kafka's Zurau Aphorisms -- Michael CiscoSensuous and Scholarly Reading in Keats's 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' -- Thomas DayNotes to Stephen Rodefer's Four Lectures (1982) -- Ian HeamesOrnate and Explosive Grief: A Comparative Commentary on Frank O'Hara's "In Memory of My Feelings" and "To Hell With It", Incorporating a Substantial Gloss on the Serpent in the Poetry of Paul Val�ry, and a Theoretical Excursus on Ornate Poetics -- Sam LadkinOn In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions -- Richard Parker

Practice and Theory of the Commentary

Glossator 8

Pest

Stephen Graham Jones

Lavie Tidhar

Nick Mamatas

Carrie Laben

Steve Rasnic Tem

Steve Berman

F. Brett Cox

Steve Eller

No ax murderers hunting sexy teens. No brutal torture for torture's sake. Phantom goes beyond the scare! From paranoid gold prospectors to lonely curators, Satan-worshipping Long Island teens, metaphysics-obsessed television reporters, and to Peter and Olivia and their devastating final choices detailed in the last pages of this anthology, the fourteen stories of Phantom present their horrors differently, but they all ask: How does anyone live through this? Paul Tremblay and Sean Wallace have collected fourteen stories by today's most thoughtful writers of horror, each asking the questions beyond "what is frightening"? This is just the beginning, however, with stories from Steve Rasnic Tem, Lavie Tidhar, F. Brett Cox, Stephen Graham Jones, Steve Berman, Nick Mamatas, Michael Cisco, among other fresh voices in horror.

Michael Cisco

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