The Garden (Director's Cut)

In 1994, in the company of Italian anarchist & photographer “Dekaro,” the author travelled 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.”