The Garden [Director's Cut] by Louis Armand

//Profits & author royalties from 1st printing will support LGBT+ activists in Marrakech against Article 489 of the Moroccan legal code criminalizing homosexuality//

In 1994, in the company of Italian anarchist & photographer “Dekaro,” the author traveled across Morocco & the disputed Western Sahara. The notebooks from that journey furnished the basis for The Garden which, after appearing piecemeal in magazines, was published as the inaugural title in the Salt Modern Fiction Series (Cambridge, 2001). Long out-of-print, this complete, unexpurgated edition restores to its full scope a work that more than twenty years after it was written remains confronting. Hashish-infused, amphetamine-driven & ranging in bold thematic cross-cuts from the seminal “garden” of the Book of Genesis to Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights & The Perfumed Garden of Shaykh Nefzawi to Pierre Guyotat’s Eden Eden Eden & Derek Jarman’s film of the same name, Armand’s The Garden is by turns excoriating & lyrical, political & pornographic, a blasphemous ransacking of literary & theological pieties – “a practice, an ascetic aesthetic,” as McKenzie Wark wrote in one early review, “for moving toward feeling in the pure form of its impurity.”

COMING SOON // SEPTEMBER 22, 2020

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Louis Armand is the author of the novels Glasshouse (Equus Press, 2018), The Combinations (Equus Press, 2016) & Cairo (Equus Press, 2014). In addition, he has published collections of poetry, including East Broadway Rundown (2015), The Rube Goldberg Variations (Vlak Records, 2015), & Synopticon (with John Kinsella; Litteraria Pragensia, 2012). He is the author of Videology (Litteraria Pragensia, 2015) & The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey: Culture after the Avantgarde (Litteraria Pragensia, 2013) & is formerly an editor of VLAK magazine. He lives in Prague. www.louis-armand.com