David Vichnar

Translator / překladatel, publisher / vydavatel, academic / akademik, critic / kritik: @EquusPress, @Litteraria, @praguemicrofest, Hypermedia Joyce Studies

[David Vichnar @DavidVichnar]

"A spectre is haunting contemporary literary writing, the spectre of necromodernism… a type of modernism in its posthumous state, a necromodernist condition in which writing persists in the ruins of literature’s once-modern ambitions.

Necromodernism neither celebrates the new nor nostalgically mourns the old, inhabiting instead a space where cultural memory, media saturation, and infrastructural collapse converge into textual practice. It is neither an elegy for modernism nor a prophecy of what comes next, but rather a practice of endurance." From my notes towards "Necromodernist Architectures in Contemporary Writing", a propos of some of the most exciting 21st-century fiction to date...

@LouisArmxnd, @1111Press, @incastellated, @CoronaSamizdat, @rickharsch1

[David Vichnar @DavidVichnar]

What the postman brought in today: a signed copy of Damien Ober’s brand-new book Voidverse (Saga Press, 2026), second after his Dr Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America, which I was lucky to publish at @EquusPress back in 2014…

[Ansgar Allen @AnsgarAllen]

a peek inside JONATHAN MARTIN @EquusPress a novel about a man of the same name who set fire to York Minster in 1829 and was committed to Bedlam that same year

[Ansgar Allen @AnsgarAllen]

review copies still available (pdf/pbk)

[Louis Armand @LouisArmxnd]

From R.G. Vašíček's COMPUTER PEOPLE (2026)...

[David Vichnar @DavidVichnar]

"Poetry that defiantly wriggles away from being apprehended or at least reduced to singular resonance or meaning..."
Angela Meyer reviews @LouisArmxnd's INFANTILISMS (Puncher & Wattmann, 2024)
https://t.co/556MP2JNij

[David Vichnar @DavidVichnar]

Shared from @LouisArmxnd's FB:

The "BARTZ, et al. v ANTHROPIC" class action has brought to light a highly obnoxious limitation on how such US companies can be held to account for copyright theft in the training of their AI platforms. Of the 7 million books Anthropic harvested from LibGen as training data for "Claude," some 1.5 million have been discarded from the class action because they were not registered with the US Copyright Office.

Yes, *1.5 million* books -- & I'm referring only to English-language works -- have been excluded from any potential settlement on these grounds.

Despite the existence of the Berne Convention (which automatically protects works published internationally from piracy in the US), in order to defend that copyright in a US court a work is required to be directly registering with the US Copyright Office. The issuance of an ISBN (& corresponding legal deposit) in the EU or UK or Australia or Canada does not mean that a work is automatically registered in the US. That means, any work published outside the US, but which was illegally exploited by Anthropic, is excluded from the class action unless it was separately registered with the US Copyright Office.

And this despite the fact that sale & use of Anthropic's product are not limited or regulated across international jurisdictional boundaries (because the terms of use, or end-user agreements, are enforced in the jurisdiction wherein Anthropic is incorporated, i.e. Delaware.)

This is the same Anthropic which is presently headed for an IPO with a valuation of around 350 billion USD.

As the non-American author of over 30 titles exploited by Anthropic, it's hardly a surprise that I find this kind of American exceptionalism obnoxious in the extreme -- yet it is also, of course, entirely retrograde with regard to the contemporary reality of global technocapitalism (of which the US had been the principal architect).
https://t.co/njDwUBBkmw

[Ansgar Allen @AnsgarAllen]

this now up at @CounterText // came out during a 3 week period of no pay, a punitive lockout by my university for taking part in legal strike action last Nov-Dec // anyone who wants the redacted version is welcome to get in touch https://t.co/Fcp1Djjyrg

[David Vichnar @DavidVichnar]

"Louis Armand’s work insists that writing itself is necrotic: literature is not about the undead, it IS undead. Across the “Golemgrad Pentalogy”, this necromodernism takes on multiple forms: the golem as artificial life, the vampyr as cultural parasite, the glitch as systemic seizure, the tomb as textual infrastructure. Narrative itself becomes a necromantic process, telling stories animated by ghosts, characters stitched together from dead body parts, plots built from textual scraps."
Many thanks to Joseph Schreiber (@roughghosts) at @MinorLits for publishing my piece on @LouisArmxnd's monumentally complex GOLEMGRAD PENTALOGY as necromodernist megatext, a recursive framework in which characters, motifs, and structures return as revenants, with some new critical vocabulary developed, composed of concepts such as golemic ontology, thanatotechnics, ruinality, metastatic narrativity, and posthumous subjectivity.
https://t.co/umkEGYTeAv

[David Vichnar @DavidVichnar]

"Necromodernism names the condition of literature after the death of its modernist and postmodernist projects. If modernism imagined the text as a monument to cultural renewal, and postmodernism played among its ruins with irony and bricolage, necromodernism arises when both gestures have collapsed. Literature no longer renews or even parodies, but persists parasitically, feeding off its own cadaver. Its temporality is recursive: the future is accessible only through the remains of the past, the archive reconfigured as necropolis."
This was great fun to think and write through....
Many thanks to Jason Teal at Heavy Feather Review for bringing this out.
All of @LouisArmxnd' monumental Golemgrad Pentalogy project available from @EquusPress & @AlienManifest.
https://t.co/Yr8VNbP8NS

[David Vichnar @DavidVichnar]

One of the seven photomontages by John Heartfield (1891-1968), to be included in the "Cook your Grampas: Prague Dada Anthology" I have edited, forthcoming soon via International Arts Centre Prague.

DER ALTE WAHLSPRUCH IM „NEUEN“ REICH: BLUT UND EISEN (“The Old Slogan in the ‘New’ Reich: Blood and Iron,” Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung, 8 March 1934, produced in Prague)

One of Heartfield’s most concentrated Prague works, this image reduces Prussian ideology to four bloody axes tied into a swastika. The circular pencilled outline around the axes suggests a tar-get or a grinding wheel, while the dripping blood literalises Bismarck’s slogan “blood and iron” as the true substance of the “new” Reich. There are no human faces here, only tools turned into instruments of murder; power is depersonalised, systemic. Technically, it exemplifies Heartfield’s Prague period: a meticulously retouched silver-gelatin montage, printed as a high-quality gravure in AIZ, where photomontage and typographic slogan fuse into a single, legible sign. For a Prague audience already alert to German revanchism, the image would have read as both warning and diagnosis, linking classic Prussian militarism to contemporary Nazism. The work can be read as an extreme, almost minimalist abstraction of Berlin Dada montage: the chaos and clutter of early 1920s photomontages compressed into a single, brutally clear emblem of state violence.

[Ansgar Allen @AnsgarAllen]

'At once historical fiction, philosophical meditation, and radical experiment, Jonathan Martin is a novel of fire and prophecy, of derangement and divine vengeance, that confronts the reader with the instability of reason and the dangerous allure of belief.'—David Vichnar

[David Vichnar @DavidVichnar]

Annonce du vendredi noir:

@LouisArmxnd’s A TOMB IN H-SECTION now (again) available from Shakespeare & Sons in the comic book section downstairs, snuggled in-between Batman and Joker.

[David Vichnar @DavidVichnar]

@themichaelogist A Tomb in H-Section (2025)

[David Vichnar @DavidVichnar]

“Necromodernism neither celebrates the new nor nostalgically mourns the old, inhabiting instead a space where cultural memory, media saturation, and infrastructural collapse converge into textual practice. It is neither an elegy for modernism nor a prophecy of what comes next, but rather a practice of endurance.”

My essay on Necromodernist architectures in contemporary writing, incl. the work of @LouisArmxnd, John Trefry (@incastellated), @ShmikeShmorrao, @AnsgarAllen, Richard Makin, Rick Harsch, Vi Khi Nao, Elizabeth Aldrich et al., now out with @3ammagazine, courtesy @andrewgallix.

https://t.co/DbtlSUtFbN

[David Vichnar @DavidVichnar]

@dogofthesun The Assassination of Olof Palme, by Rick Harsch

[David Vichnar @DavidVichnar]

Jonathan Martin, always close to the fire, keeping (us) warm…
Courtesy @AnsgarAllen & @EquusPress

[David Vichnar @DavidVichnar]

Come one come all!
Přijďte pobejt!

[Equus Press @EquusPress]

Come in we are open!
When & where: For the next three days, from 10 am till 5:30 pm, as part of the Humanities Week, we’ll be running a bookstand at the Main Bldg of the Faculty of Arts.
On offer: titles from Equus Press, @Litteraria Pragensia Books, Alienist Magazine, VLAK Magazine & @praguemicrofest, all at major discounts…

Pojďte dál, máme otevřeno!
Kde a kdy: Po další tři dny vždy od 10:00 do 17:30 budeme mít v provozu knižní stánek jako součást týdne humanitních věd na hlavní budově FF UK.
Nabídka: tituly z nakladatelství Equus Press, Litteraria Pragensia Books, Alienist Magazine, VLAK Magazine a PMF Prague Microfestival, všechny ve výrazné slevě.

[Louis Armand @LouisArmxnd]

PMF set-up with Robert Carrithers, Jo Blin, Michael Rowland...

[Louis Armand @LouisArmxnd]

Setting up for this year's PMF @praguemicrofest at Kampus Hybernská