American Fictions

American life in the aftermath of the Second World War—a transformation, a World-of-Tomorrow future reaching for the moon and beyond. Collected for the first time in a single volume, two novellas by C. P. Serret bracket the post-futurist fin de siècle; the American shibboleth of progress from the living past to the near future: the immigrants’ progress.

Grendel Wept

‘A relentlessly haunting tale that overflows with mood and style.’
—Kirkus Reviews‘The ultimate impact is nothing short of sensational’.
—D. Donovan, Sr Reviewer, Midwest Book ReviewDefrocked archæologist Dr Julian Corbin seeks amid dead things for signs of the unspeakable Other. Alien dreams and waking visions of lost civilisations haunt him, his steps dogged by a serial killer, leaving grisly murals in their wake. But as the death toll grows, Julian doesn't know if he is hunted or led, dreaming or awake, innocent or stained with blood...Grendel Wept leaps forth from a literary tradition started by the surreal Hermeticsim of Poe and Machen; the ill-starred Gothic of Byron, the Shelleys; and the twilit fin de siècle of Wilde and Maldoror. It is the struggle of Man and the cosmic Other, juxtaposed with Man’s struggle against himself, first spelled out in the earliest oral myths of Titanian cosmology, now given novel form.

The Large Print edition of Grendel Wept features a unique oversized design in a custom Golden Ratio trim size of 6.8 by 11-inches, featuring a wraparound of the Stoclet frieze by Gustav Klimt on the front and bacover.

More metal than metal, concert-style Grendel Wept shirts in heavyweight, garment-dyed 100% ringspun cotton are available worldwide.

• Etsy

Die the Villain

2011. Two years before Snowden.Hiding in plain sight as a consultant in the gig economy, Finn trades in information. He returned from Japan last year, a 23-year-old Darknet impresario with Yakuza ties, ink, and an MBA from a prominent university.alias: APHID GRINFinn hooks up with Chloë, a fashionable grad-school dropout, uptown. She draws him into a social scene he's only glimpsed from the college-bar sidelines, rubbing elbows with the City's élite; but when a foiled heist leaves him scrambling for cover, he loses himself within his rising celebrity as ‘Gigi’, young society's latest It-girl, unsure of the way back... or a way out.C. P. Serret presents a roman noir, post-postmodernité, of an individual struggle with alienation, anomie, and authenticity; of cybercrime gone wrong and a roller-coaster crash with the rich kids of Instagram—an off-the-rails carnivalised plunge ‘ablaze with... sinister lies, syndicates, and traumatic upheavals’ (Willow Greymoor, San Francisco Book Review).

Le projet Serret

‘This he had proposed in secret to himself, that if he labored without ceasing, without tiring, he might produce something which would at all events be art, which would stand wholly apart from the objects shaped like books, printed with printers’ ink, and called by the name of books that he had read.’
—A. Machen, The Hill of DreamsFounded in 2019, l’lart pour l’art is the uncompromised literary mission of Tempest & Gayle. Erudites are invited to partake, here at the farthest shore from mass-market constraints.« Cet été les roses sont bleues; le bois c’est du verre. La terre drapée dans sa verdure me fait aussi peu d’effet qu’un revenant. C’est vivre et cesser de vivre qui sont des solutions imaginaires. L’existence est ailleurs. »
—A. Breton, Manifestes du Surréalisme

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