Drowning in Beauty

The Neo-Decadent Anthology

Edited by Daniel Corrick and Justin Isis

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.

Authors include: Avalon Brantley, James Champagne, Brendan Connell, Quentin S. Crisp, Colin Insole, Damian Murphy, Yarrow Paisley, Ursula Pflug, Colby Smith, and D.P. Watt.

About the Editors
Daniel Corrick is a writer and philosopher living in London. For several years he ran Hieroglyphic Press and, with Mark Samuels, co-edited the journal Sacrum Regnum. He is interested in literature dealing with themes of transcendence and the connection between beauty and the supernatural. Since an early childhood encounter with dogmatic short-furred weasels, he stands for the nullity of politics, black glittery things and the absolute triumph of the modal perfection argument.

Justin Isis has lived in Tokyo for close to ten years. His collections include I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like (2011) and Welcome to the Arms Race (2016) from Chômu Press, and the forthcoming Pleasant Tales II from Snuggly Books, as well as the poetry collection Divorce Procedures For the Hairdressers of a Metallic and Inconstant Goddess (2016). He has previously edited Chômu Press’s Dadaoism anthology (2012), and Marked to Die: A Tribute to Mark Samuels (Snuggly Books). His stories have appeared in Postscripts and a number of anthologies.

Paperback, 256 pages
Release date: April 30, 2018
ISBN-13: 978-1-943813-59-9
Price: US$18.50