Autofiction. Emily Segal, artist and trend forecaster in her 20s, tries to tell the future by reading the present. Literature finds commercial form in the shape of eXe, a mysterious and well-funded Internet start-up that offers her a job. A conceptual take-over is deployed; gendered power play ensues; queerness incubates; memes converge. Set in New York City, post-Occupy and pre-Trump. First person / mixed media / pulp. Not actually about astrology. Published in 2020.

 

*A New York Times New and Noteworthy Book*

“Original, funny, and sharp.” The Times Literary Supplement

“Emily Segal is almost mystically attuned to the cultural logic of our era. She lives its pangs and contradictions intellectually, emotionally and somatically – late capitalism’s Simone Weil.”
Tom McCarthy

“I really liked reading this book. It’s the longest reply to 'where have you been?' you’ll ever get from someone you first met in a skype chat which Emily Segal is to me. It’s a brilliantly written novel of a moment in search of a shimmer, half ‘here’, half digital, an everywhere post branding work place place where few have dared to live and this writer, explorer, critic, philosopher of nonbusiness has done it deep. Segal's style is widely smart, different than deep (always). I mean her Mercury Retrograde is, it truly is.”
Eileen Myles

“‘Mercury Retrograde’ to me feels like fiction's next historical leap. It's smart and engaging (and bingeable) and yet it also feels necessary in a way that almost all books don't. It's a signpost that points to where the culture is headed, which is heady stuff, yet there you have it.”
Douglas Coupland

“Mercury Retrograde is funny, piercingly smart, and incisive. It feels like it swallowed the Internet without making the Internet its subject or problem, and reads as if a young Bret Easton Ellis were an incredibly smart, feminist contemporary woman with the intellectual powers of Don DeLillo. There’s a velocity to Emily’s thinking and an incredible collision of high art and pop art which I find absolutely thrilling. It feels disciplined, yet there’s an unprocessed quality which makes the book feel immediate and alive. Bingeable, pulpy, and fun, all at the same time.” Matthew Specktor, LARB Radio Hour

“I had so much fun reading it. It’s so fucking smart. It’s like a love story between a girl and her intellect. And it’s so cool to be all up in there with her.”
Michelle Tea

“A thought-provoking and often extremely funny first novel looking back at the 2010s, which I couldn't put down. I should also say this book offered some very cathartic food-for-thought on the strange ways capital, cultural capital, and the Internet interacted in the 10s, for those of you who are still haunted by trying to make sense of it all.”
Emilie Friedlander, VICE

“Segal provides a wickedly sharp and sardonic depiction of the socioeconomic and cultural conditions of a particular cross-section of...the city. ... Through autofiction, she depicts and reinforces the semantic slipperiness of art, of advertising, of technology — of meaning itself. ... What’s at stake [in Mercury Retrograde] is not what can be known, but the disorienting, all-too-human experience of not knowing.”
Kate Silzer, Hyperallergic

“Part lookbook of the era’s anxieties and attitudes, part memoir, part satire, Segal’s novel navigates these scenes as one should: with humor, irony, and style.”
Daniel Rathburn, Harvard Review

“Her novel [is] a tale deviating from the autofiction roman à clef trend of her peers…. It’s… a novel that brandishes and parodies self-aggrandizing behavior, one of the animating passions of literature and art in a decade haunted by the recursive nature of the internet…. Unlike the selfie-styled novels of her peers, stuffed with self- aggrandizement and drunk on idle success, Segal’s novel debases form, replacing the dead author with a living artist.”
John Belknap, Flash Art

Emily Segal (b. 1988, New York, NY) is an artist, writer, and trend forecaster based in Los Angeles. Mercury Retrograde is her first novel. emilysegal.net

ISBN: 978-1-7362104-0-6
6.00" x 9.00"
Distributed by Ingram

Featuring: the first drop that started the great flood –

Rosie wears a size Large Logo Blob Heavyweight Tee in Los Angeles, California

• 100% cotton
• Fabric weight: 5.0–5.3 oz/yd² (170-180 g/m²)
• Open-end yarn
• Tubular fabric
• Taped neck and shoulders'
• Double seam at sleeves and bottom hem

Size Guide

Ultra-limited Deluge Logo Blob hoodie in baby blue is back :)

• 50% pre-shrunk cotton, 50% polyester
• Fabric weight: 8.0 oz/yd² (271.25 g/m²)
• Air-jet spun yarn with a soft feel and reduced pilling
• Double-lined hood with matching drawcord
• Quarter-turned body to avoid crease down the middle
• 1 × 1 athletic rib-knit cuffs and waistband with spandex
• Double-needle stitched collar, shoulders, armholes, cuffs, and hem
• Small is 27" x 20"; Medium is 28" x 22"; Large is 29" x 24"; XL is 30" x 26"; 2XL is 31" x 28"

Featuring: the first drop that started the great flood

The image here is a 17th-century camel skeleton rendered by Bass in oil on linen, from their 2021 exhibition “Desert Veins” at Vielmetter, Los Angeles. 

Marking the artist’s first body of work composed of oil paint — the exhibition introduced a significant shift in medium, technique, mannerism, and possibility. Continuing to utilize their signature visual lexicon of symbols and shapes, Bass challenges and softens the notably graphic composition(s) found throughout their previous bodies of work. Along with the appearance of hand-painted gestures and an enhanced sensuality amongst the artist’s personal semiotics, Bass allows for a wider range of symbolism, as well as an intentionally spiritual angle to come through their already ambitious and cosmological practice. Within these additional levels of engagement, Bass creates a visceral sense of forgiveness towards the rigor of maintaining a hard-edge universe, conveying a more 'irreplaceable moment’ within their expressive powers.

50% cotton, 50% polyester
Pre-shrunk
Classic fit
1x1 athletic rib knit collar with spandex
Air-jet spun yarn with a soft feel and reduced pilling
Double-needle stitched collar, shoulders, armholes, cuffs, and hem

SMALL = 27" L x 20 W

MEDIUM = 28" L x 22" W

LARGE = 29" L x 24" W

X-LARGE = 30" L x 26" W

XXL = 31" L x 28" W

The image here is a 17th-century camel skeleton rendered by Math Bass in oil on linen, from their 2021 exhibition “Desert Veins” at Vielmetter, Los Angeles.

Marking the artist’s first body of work composed of oil paint — the exhibition introduced a significant shift in medium, technique, mannerism, and possibility. Continuing to utilize their signature visual lexicon of symbols and shapes, Bass challenges and softens the notably graphic composition(s) found throughout their previous bodies of work. Along with the appearance of hand-painted gestures and an enhanced sensuality amongst the artist’s personal semiotics, Bass allows for a wider range of symbolism, as well as an intentionally spiritual angle to come through their already ambitious and cosmological practice. Within these additional levels of engagement, Bass creates a visceral sense of forgiveness towards the rigor of maintaining a hard-edge universe, conveying a more 'irreplaceable moment’ within their expressive powers.

• 50% cotton, 50% polyester
• Pre-shrunk
• Classic fit
• 1x1 athletic rib knit collar with spandex
• Air-jet spun yarn with a soft feel and reduced pilling
• Double-needle stitched collar, shoulders, armholes, cuffs, and hem

Size Guide

Form is emptiness
Emptiness is form

• 100% chino cotton twill
• Green Camo color is 35% chino cotton twill, 65% polyester
• Unstructured, 6-panel, low-profile
• 6 embroidered eyelets
• 3 ⅛” (7.6 cm) crown
• Adjustable strap with antique buckle
• Head circumference: 20 ½″–21 ⅝″ (50.8 cm–53.3 cm)

A shocking debut poetry collection that invites readers to grapple with the origins of a world that both hates and needs Black women. A disruptive hagiography of the Black Venus & Sapphire, mammy bulldaggers, and welfare queens, Rich’s collection splendidly desecrates poetic elitism. Black Venus Fly Trap is an eldritch account of Black femininity simultaneously born from the chorus of refusal and unlike anything written before.

“That frisson of realness, the unsayable that can be lost when we ask language to convey the infinite interiority of the black woman—Black Venus Fly Trap rescues it.”
– Doreen St. Felix

“Jeanetta Rich’s writing doesn’t sit on the page, it oozes over your psyche. Fearless and complex, defiant and radiant! I love it.”
– Kim Gordon

“Jeanetta Rich once told me that as a child she used to spend hours staring at a painting of the beheading of Saint John the Baptist. Black Venus Flytrap is like that painting: splendid and profane and entirely just. Jeanetta’s writing turns each page into a museum of art and we are lucky to admire it. It’s exquisite and it stings—which is how you know it’s working.”
– Elaine Kahn

Jeanetta Rich is a mother and poet based in Los Angeles. Her work focuses on the emotional lives of voiceless women, those who have been silenced through poverty and/or lack of education. Her work was recently featured in Texte zur Kunst’s 30th Anniversary issue, "The Feminist." Black Venus Fly Trap is her debut poetry collection.

ISBN: 978-1-7362104-2-0

4.25" x 7.00"
Distributed by Ingram

Heavyweight bleeding heart tee to accompany the "deepfake autofiction" instaclassic by K Allado-McDowell.

• 100% combed ring-spun cotton
• Charcoal Heather and Carbon Grey is 60% cotton and 40% polyester
• Fabric weight: 6.5 oz/yd² (220 g/m²)
• Relaxed fit
  
• Side-seamed construction
• 1″ × 1″ (2.5 cm × 2.5 cm) ribbed lycra collar 
• Single-needle edgestitch ⅞″ (2 ⅖ cm)

With drawings by Lydia Maria Pfeffer

Amor Cringe explores the dually base and beautiful aspects of self-obsessed media culture. In a perennial bohemian style, an unnamed, ungendered protagonist travels from coast to coast and affair to affair, stumbling upon various moments of failure, absurd insight, and flashes of transcendence.

Half traditionally-written and half AI-generated, Amor Cringe is a "deepfake autofiction" novelette about a TikTok influencer that seeks God, created with the intention to be "as cringe as possible.” The result is a painfully self-aware series of encounters that exfoliate the repulsive and fascinating aesthetics of romantic life under social media.

“Allado-McDowell deftly shepherds the machine through a series of fractional subjectivities, producing prose that careens between sacred and vulgar, colloquial and arresting. Amor Cringe is a Bretonesque, bawdy necromancy that will enthrall you and make you laugh.”
– Allison Parrish, Assistant Arts Professor, NYU ITP/IMA

“Hallucinogenic, scary, sexy, and strange, Amor Cringe is a magnificent shock to the system. It reads like a prayer, a song, a voice from the beyond.”
– Elvia Wilk

“Writing is always writing-with. In K Allado-McDowell’s Amor Cringe, it’s a writing with all that’s fallen in language, about culture, the material so exquisitely worn (and worn down) that you see where the folds and joins are. Sentences that are genius or dumb as a box of hammers, or both, or neither. Delightful like dime-store candy, or a lighter you found on the ground that works.”
– McKenzie Wark

144 pages

ISBN: 978-1-7362104-3-7

Distributed by Ingram

Precise, astute, and uncompromising in its nuance, My Pleasure lives in the poetic entanglements of pleasure, disgust, and agency. From the bed to the club, the coal mine, the power plant, and the jail cell, Silt asks: Where do we extract pleasure, and what pleasure do we find in extraction? Is there sex without work, or only before, during, and after? Unfurling the binary distinctions between freedom and control, language and pause, and mind and body, My Pleasure does not imagine a different world so much as it embodies the possibility of another order within this one.

“Irene Silt’s My Pleasure tops from the underworld, where ‘the inverse of pain / is in no way pleasure, it is acceptance.’ Silt’s poems wander straight into the throat of capital, purging loss in order to touch what we all must ‘thrust aside / in order to live.’ Desire spills out of Silt's mouth: jaw locked in exhaustion, where the trick and the lover blur in the direct address. Destroying time, rotting money, and leading us into the trenches of wanting, these poems are odes to the power of finding yourself flat on your back. Like the glow of a primal wound, Silt’s poems teach us how to suffer—and how to love—more exquisitely.” Rosie Stockton

“Irene asks, ‘What if I am against boundaries?’ and we are left with our limits. These poems bring us into the ecstatic tremors and absolute terror of self knowledge, all touch a violent mirror to the world and a flight line from the inflexible motions of capital. My Pleasure throws every possible angle of light upon desire so that we may see its shadow, honestly. What do we lose when wanting becomes having, when work becomes pleasure, when we are forced into the waning existence of escape? What do we win when we lose ourselves?” Nora Treatbaby

“We were being filmed as the twink rammed into me and my head hit the cheap tile wall of the fleabag motel’s shower stall. There was something like an occlusion then, I worshiped his skin for the camera, and then my head hit the cheap tile wall again and again and so. I think of that sound as an evidence of what Catherine Clément would term syncope, an absence of self, and in Irene Silt’s My Pleasure, the syncopic moment of rupture is ever-present. Silt’s indelible book forms an argument that there is no stable subject—‘the mulch fell away / in my arms was a large black snake’—but instead a porosity of subjectivity that is made most apparent in moments of fluidity, in fucking both as a means of survival and a means of battling hegemonic systems that attempt to master or explain every fissure, every tear. It also asks the questions, ‘What might we want, when the wanting is finally able to dig in? What is deeper in life than just wanting to live?’ And then the book answers itself: ‘There is nothing in the world / to move a body but another body.’ But do not be mistaken—Silt’s is not a book about love, but instead a moving lyric treatise on the desire for liberation, a question about the boundaries of flesh and subject, and a positing that our desires are undefinable, as indefinite as ourselves, and as dynamic, like water. The book is sopping wet, dive in.” Ted Rees

"I cannot fully describe the ways this incredible book moves me. Each time I read Irene Silt’s My Pleasure it continues to pull me deeper into an understanding of my own body and its daily navigation of trauma, work, loss, sex, and the family. For the whores, 'the destroyers of time,' the family is the psychosocial unit, which measures everything defined and excluded by it, along with all the forms of pleasurable relation made possible outside of it. It is this outside that allows Silt to ask, 'What is deeper in life than just wanting to live?' What would it mean to harness the power of our perceptual modes beyond reason or knowing, beyond executing every act with the cautionary skill of only being 'a woman out of convenience'? It’s almost as if this book moves in me. It rests inside of me, languidly—like a fist, or rage, or self-loathing—until it can be released through the fluidity of desire, a liberatory lubrication that recognizes, 'Sex will be something we do together to do everything else we need to do in the world.'" Cassandra Troyan

Irene Silt writes about power, anti-work feeling, joy, and deviance. Their essays and poems have been published in Mask Magazine, ANTIGRAVITY, Spoil, LESTE, Trou Noir, Poiesis Journal and in the Tripwire pamphlet series. They live in New York.

Publication Date: October 2, 2022

ISBN: 9781736210475

What is a world in which work disappears? 

“Time has never made any sense to me. Or rather, I am told the way I describe my experience of time does not add up. I am so disconnected from any common meter that I remain in disbelief of that sort of containment. I think this is what makes me a good whore”: so begins Irene Silt’s The Tricking Hour.

Part anti-work polemic, part sex worker’s confession, the luminous essays in The Tricking Hour envision a world organized around collective autonomy, survival, and care, instead of the compulsory exploitation of the body. Silt’s dispatches—largely composed between June 2018 and October 2019 and first published as a monthly column in New Orleans’ ANTIGRAVITY magazine—are already a cult classic in the movement for sex workers against work. Now collected in book form for the first time, with an additional essay written in 2022, The Tricking Hour is a vital account of sex, labor, and criminality in the twenty-first century.

“More than a polemic against work (though it is a very good one) The Tricking Hour is a meditation on what it means to process the world through your body; to feel life—love, loss, pain, ecstasy—to the fullest extent possible, all while knowing that your body is not (only) yours to control, that people with immense power get to dictate how you use your body, and thus how you experience the world. Silt writes compellingly about the issues facing sex workers, but their lessons about autonomy and pleasure under capitalism apply to all of us.” P.E. Moskowitz

“These essays constitute a carefully and beautifully formed nebula of revolutionary thought and praxis. Silt’s gorgeous synthesis is led by both righteous anger and gestures of deep care, born and fostered in spaces, booths, and backrooms both inconspicuous and flatly public. To encounter this missive is to encounter one of the truest manifestations of learning and living life past capital, past work’s totaling reach, and into a life centered around love.” Ryan Skrabalak

“Irene Silt’s rare and piercing voice illuminates the path towards a world without obligatory work and exploitation, a world made richer by the collective knowledge and expertise of sex workers, a world of more pleasure and care for all. We are so fortunate their work lights the way.” Tourmaline

"Meditating on topics as varied as the relationship between sex work and emotional labor, the self-annihilating power of desire, surveillance, the cooptation of abolition, death, and ju-jitsu’s philosophy of embodiment, Irene Silt’s The Tricking Hour is a compendium of the whore’s clandestine body of knowledge: a destituent call from the shadows that beckons us all to go to the place where we are undone. (By fucking. By unruly emotions.) Analytically sharp and exhilarating to read, Silt deftly theorizes capitalism, work, and the body from the lived experience of tricking." Jackie Wang

Irene Silt writes about power, anti-work feeling, joy, and deviance. Their essays and poems have been published in Mask Magazine, ANTIGRAVITY, Spoil, LESTE, Trou Noir, Poiesis Journal and in the Tripwire pamphlet series. They live in New York.

Publication Date: October 2, 2022

ISBN: 9781736210451

Sipping on it.

• Regular ceramic mug with Deluge drop logo
• Standard size: 3.85″ x 3.35"
• Dishwasher and microwave safe

At last, an excellent deal on the entire Deluge catalogue in paperback form, for new readers or those gifting Deluge books to others.

This bundle includes five paperback books:

MERCURY RETROGRADE by Emily Segal

BLACK VENUS FLY TRAP by Jeanetta Rich

AMOR CRINGE by K Allado-McDowell

THE TRICKING HOUR by Irene Silt

MY PLEASURE by Irene Silt