Ansgar Allen's Blog
December 30, 2023
Book giveaway
2 days left to enter the Instagram book giveaway for my novel THE WAKE AND THE MANUSCRIPT. 3 free paperbacks available.
https://www.instagram.com/antioedipuspress/
https://www.instagram.com/antioedipuspress/
December 28, 2023
Each Valley its Own Idea, a short film
Each Valley its Own Idea
A short film with text from a book forthcoming in 2024 with Stalking Horse Press
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0uq0vvAcMQ
A short film with text from a book forthcoming in 2024 with Stalking Horse Press
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0uq0vvAcMQ
March 23, 2023
Plague Theatre - book signing
I'll be taking Plague Theatre back to the scene of its destructions for a book signing on Saturday 25 March, 2.30pm at Mrs Lofthouse's Book Emporium in Scarborough.
February 27, 2023
Black Vellum
Now out at Schism Press!
https://ansgarallen.com/black-vellum/
Here's the book description:
A priest remakes himself from animal flesh. A land surveyor travels into the earth’s crust in search of a boulder. Hauled for centuries it forms a rut, the longest sentence in recorded history.
Black Vellum is a Nietzschean experiment. The priest symptomizes Nietzsche’s analysis and serves as an embodiment, a deviant incarnation, of the philosopher himself. Other figures are encountered in the content of their thought; Schopenhauer, Cioran, Freud, and Bataille enter as minor actors. None are named as such, and their intuitions are allowed to interanimate. Most readings and re-readings of established figures appear bound to the task of moderation, this book attends to their derangements.
And some kind blurbs:
"The intellect was only first produced as a result of this diminishment of perception, writes Ansgar Allen in Black Vellum. This is an exquisitely written philosophical tale about human civilization as the quest for order, measurement, and automation—and perhaps, about how nihilism and despair have always fed our fantasies of humanoid machines." Germán Sierra, author of The Artifact
"A notepad wrapped in black vellum records a descent into a rift valley where an oddly abridged humanity hunkers, replicating its codes through geological time. A story within that story details the Frankenstein-like creation of a meat automaton, designed to render the consolatory function of religion obsolete. Transecting all of this, is a brilliant reflection on the machinic immiseration of the organism and its stalled dreams of transcendence. Allen has distilled the speculations of Nietzsche and Freud into an impersonal meatspace whose soulless protagonist is writing its own suicide note - while time dissolves all, while the space of inscription reveals caverns measureless to man. Black Vellum is the work of an extremely subtle mind, co-opting horror to trace the integuments of a glitching futurity somehow liberated from the traditional impasses of nihilism." David Roden, author of Snuff Memories
"Black Vellum unspools before the reader like a memory thread with which to weave one’s forgetting of the world, a darkness to navigate the blinding light, a testimony of corporeality that grows and grows and becomes the home of the mind exiled by the body. Within its pages, there are ways of seeing, mechanisms of being, of carrying both oneself and the burdens of the landscape before one’s eyes—the fibers of the world enslaved to its own image and those of what we must weave in its place. Through a rich prose, evocative of the mythological void state in which everything necessary existed all at once, Ansgar Allen creates a mirror-like journal, in the pages of which one can find, beyond a reflection of the self, a recollection of how paths are traveled, and worlds undone." -- Christina Tudor-Sideri, author of Disembodied and Under the Sign of the Labyrinth
https://ansgarallen.com/black-vellum/
Here's the book description:
A priest remakes himself from animal flesh. A land surveyor travels into the earth’s crust in search of a boulder. Hauled for centuries it forms a rut, the longest sentence in recorded history.
Black Vellum is a Nietzschean experiment. The priest symptomizes Nietzsche’s analysis and serves as an embodiment, a deviant incarnation, of the philosopher himself. Other figures are encountered in the content of their thought; Schopenhauer, Cioran, Freud, and Bataille enter as minor actors. None are named as such, and their intuitions are allowed to interanimate. Most readings and re-readings of established figures appear bound to the task of moderation, this book attends to their derangements.
And some kind blurbs:
"The intellect was only first produced as a result of this diminishment of perception, writes Ansgar Allen in Black Vellum. This is an exquisitely written philosophical tale about human civilization as the quest for order, measurement, and automation—and perhaps, about how nihilism and despair have always fed our fantasies of humanoid machines." Germán Sierra, author of The Artifact
"A notepad wrapped in black vellum records a descent into a rift valley where an oddly abridged humanity hunkers, replicating its codes through geological time. A story within that story details the Frankenstein-like creation of a meat automaton, designed to render the consolatory function of religion obsolete. Transecting all of this, is a brilliant reflection on the machinic immiseration of the organism and its stalled dreams of transcendence. Allen has distilled the speculations of Nietzsche and Freud into an impersonal meatspace whose soulless protagonist is writing its own suicide note - while time dissolves all, while the space of inscription reveals caverns measureless to man. Black Vellum is the work of an extremely subtle mind, co-opting horror to trace the integuments of a glitching futurity somehow liberated from the traditional impasses of nihilism." David Roden, author of Snuff Memories
"Black Vellum unspools before the reader like a memory thread with which to weave one’s forgetting of the world, a darkness to navigate the blinding light, a testimony of corporeality that grows and grows and becomes the home of the mind exiled by the body. Within its pages, there are ways of seeing, mechanisms of being, of carrying both oneself and the burdens of the landscape before one’s eyes—the fibers of the world enslaved to its own image and those of what we must weave in its place. Through a rich prose, evocative of the mythological void state in which everything necessary existed all at once, Ansgar Allen creates a mirror-like journal, in the pages of which one can find, beyond a reflection of the self, a recollection of how paths are traveled, and worlds undone." -- Christina Tudor-Sideri, author of Disembodied and Under the Sign of the Labyrinth
July 1, 2022
Plague Theatre - new cover
Plague Theatre
is now up on Kindle and available as a paperback from Amazon via POD.
It's been given a makeover for the online version, with a new cover design by Narmin Ismiyeva.
It's available here in paperback: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/199969645X and here on Kindle https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B09WRJS5BN...
Copies of the deluxe edition still available direct from the publisher, Equus Press, at https://equuspress.wordpress.com/plag...
Plague Theatre
It's been given a makeover for the online version, with a new cover design by Narmin Ismiyeva.
It's available here in paperback: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/199969645X and here on Kindle https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B09WRJS5BN...
Copies of the deluxe edition still available direct from the publisher, Equus Press, at https://equuspress.wordpress.com/plag...
Plague Theatre
