Ansgar Allen‘s fantastic and erudite The Faces of Pluto is one of the titles we are looking forward to publishing in 2024! As publication approaches, The Faces of Pluto is accompanied by a series of short films featuring Ansgar reading from the text, the first of which – Each Valley its Own Idea – is included below.
Books are read in an instant and by a single eye. Libraries can no longer burn, they are already in the air. There is nothing left for admirers of truth or accuracy but submission to the absolute, unalterable veracity of the word.
The Faces of Pluto remembers an earlier time when truth was a casualty of transcription and errors were commonplace if not an art in themselves. It returns something to reading and to writing of the mechanics of picking up, turning over, and distorting, if not catastrophically over-looking books which were left to rot, or would be remembered only in fragments. From Empedocles to Borges, from Thomas Browne to Herodotus and back again, it resurrects the fecundity of error and the compiler’s fancy.
Roving freely between the works of a diverse range of dead assemblers—compilers of words, of wisdoms, and of bones—this book gathers and reinscribes their leftovers in an extended meditation on death, (re)burial, and remembrance.