This nineteenth-century chateau set in the Swiss countryside within convenient range of the Gstaad slopes also boasts one of the largest private collections of sadomasochistic pornography in the entire canton of Bern. Most of the items I have been invited to view consist of image after image and scene after scene of young women being completely objectified (in terms of their appearance and anatomy), verbally abused, psychologically manipulated and cruelly degraded by older men (and sometimes women) before ultimately being beaten, raped, decapitated and dismembered (although not necessarily in that order).
With photographs by Karolina Urbaniak
Wiro-bound, 48 pages, 148x210mm
978-1-8382803-8-3
Audrey Szasz (aka Zutka) is a London-based writer. Infinity Land Press published her debut in print, Plan for theAbduction of J.G. Ballard (a collaboration with Jeremy Reed) in 2019, followed by her first novel Tears of a Komsomol Girl in 2020. Szasz is also the author of the novella Invisibility: A Manifesto (2020) and a second novel, Zealous Immaculate (2022) via Amphetamine Sulphate.
Karolina Urbaniak is a multimedia artist and co-founder of Infinity Land Press. Urbaniak’s published works include To Putrefaction, Altered Balance – A Tribute to Coil, The Void Ratio, Death Mort Tod – A European Book of the Dead, The Torture of the 100 Pieces and On The New Revelations of Being, an audio/visual installation inspired by the work of Antonin Artaud. She lives and works in London.
A major novel of perversity and pleasure from a richly exciting new literary talent. Apparently orphaned in a foreign land engulfed by civil war, Tamara finds herself in an isolated and notoriously mismanaged home for abandoned children.
Initially unable to comprehend the local language, she attempts to communicate nonverbally, having seemingly lost the faculty of speech. Unaware of her parents’ true whereabouts – or whether in fact they are even alive – Tamara struggles to make herself understood and to survive in this alien environment where chaos reigns and brutality – or sheer indifference – unfortunately appears to be the norm.
A sinister cast of characters duly appears, including the glamorous but corrupt Director, her overbearingly sadistic partner the Doctor, not to mention the Father – a perverse cleric with a penchant for cruelty – amongst other unsavoury and remorseless individuals, all enforcing a strict hierarchy between the adults and the children (and thus the perpetrators and the victims of institutionalised violence).
Meanwhile, a number of different voices or alters jostle for psychic dominance over Tamara’s internal narrative; through various temporal shifts, rotations and leaps in chronological perspective our heroine’s journey – both geographical and psychological – is described in a disintegrating arc of obscure recollections, fragmented diary entries and increasingly obscene erotic fantasies.
Conversely, these kaleidoscopic projections, delirious daydreams and compulsive diatribes gradually accumulate to articulate a traumatised inner topography that mirrors the devasted and desolate external landscape of a perpetual war zone….
Zealous Immaculate (USA edition)
LIFE DURING WARTIME
The second novel from a major new literary talent
“Basking like a reptile in your reflected glories. I just respond. Sometimes I don’t even do that. I just do whatever I end up doing. No thought. No plan. No real motive. No overarching theories or philosophies. I can’t even stick to a routine. I lack discipline. Can you give it to me? Can you tell me what to do? Can you force me to do whatever is necessary to survive? From one day to the next, until the very end? Will you give me the beating I deserve? “
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“I wish the nurse would tie me up so tightly my blood circulation is cut off and then smash a vase over my head and suffocate me with duct tape and a pillow filled with Canadian goose feathers. I wish a mortar shell would land on this building. I wish for air force drones to bomb this town repeatedly for days on end until there is nothing left except a vast lifeless wasteland. A cratered moonscape. I wish for walls of fire to consume this yokel country. I wish a phalanx of marauding cyborgs would stroll through the towns and villages executing any living creature their sensors detect. I hate everyone but I hate myself most of all. I vouch for no one.”
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“They told me that my name is Tamara. But maybe it’s not my real name. I can’t remember anything anyway. I don’t even know where my parents are. The Director told me that my parents are dead. She told me that they were shot in the square. In the city. There was a big shooting there. The people were all lined up in the square, and the soldiers who were standing up on the balconies or lying on the roofs of the buildings fired their guns. They shot everyone in the square. Nobody could escape because the army put tanks at either end of the square so nobody could run away. They all got shot. The Director says my parents are dead but I don’t believe her. One day my parents will come and get me. The Director tells me not to worry. She says I am safe now. She says nobody will ever find me.”
Due to Global Supply Chain issues we have LIMITED NUMBERS of this title. Order now to avoid disappointment.
My latest book is OUT NOW via Infinity Land Press. It’s my first full-length novel, beautifully illustrated with photographs and collages of the author 😉 by the extremely talented Karolina Urbaniak and with an incisive interview conducted by the one and only Martin Bladh. To all my readers and followers I hope you enjoy reading this one as much as I enjoyed writing it. Love from Zutka ❤ x x x
Tears of a Komsomol Girl by Audrey Szasz
Tears of a Komsomol Girlis an experimental concept novel based on the real-life crimes of Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, who was finally executed in 1994 having been convicted of murdering 52 people between 1978 and 1990.
USSR, Rostov, 1980s. Arina, a young girl — insolent, obnoxious, but most importantly musically gifted, poses as the ideal student — upstanding, hardworking, and a member of Komsomol — the Soviet Union’s Communist Youth League. Fantasising unrealistically about becoming an internationally famous classical violinist, and yet simultaneously behaving as cynically and hypocritically as she can, Arina uses her Komsomol duties as a pretext for strutting unsupervised around town of an evening, fraternising with soldiers and Party bureaucrats alike, compulsively lying to cover her tracks. And yet her sleep is punctuated by obsessive and oppressive dreams concerning a certain killer who’s been on the loose for years — a ruthless, sadistic and thoroughly vicious opportunist referred to in rumours as Citizen X, the Rostov Ripper, or simply Satan — a monster who brutally slays children and adolescents having assaulted them at knifepoint. As the killings become ever more tortuous and frenzied, and the number of innocent victims tragically swells, it’s only a matter of time before Arina finally crosses paths with Satan, and her nightmares turn into a reality.
Hardbound, 212 pages, 148 x206mm
ISBN 978-1-9160091-9-6
First edition limited to 200 copies including 28 Collector’s edition sets.
My story, Crash Triptych, complete with my collages is included in the 2020 edition of the Ballardian anthology, DEEP ENDS, edited by Rick McGrath and published by The Terminal Press, Canada, BC.
Zutka
Deep Ends 2020 features 16 contributions of art, fiction, and analysis about or influenced by the work of JG Ballard. This oversized, full color anthology includes a JG Ballard Chronology, 1976-1982, by David Pringle, who also interviews Ballard’s friend, Bill Spencer; poet Jeremy Reed writes about Ballard in the 1970s; Martin Bladh writes an experimental prose piece, artfully designed by Karolina Urbaniak; Maxim Jakubowski, Audrey Szasz, Steve Finbow, and Paul A. Green offer up some outrageous fiction; Chris Beckett writes a song; Rob Latham and Rick McGrath do some fun analysis; Paul H. Williams interviews filmmaker Zoe Beloff; Sam Scoggins and Yoshi Yubai contribute some amazing Ballardian photography; Tom Frick reveals how he did his famous Paris Review interview with Ballard; and Alison Carter interviews Ballard about his time at Cambridge.
This title is also available to order as as part of a bundle including The Magician, a novel by Chris Zeischegg. (Perfect bound book. 408 pages. 8.5 x 6 in.)
A seamless, exhilarating collaboration with the torched hydrogen plume of a rocket launch, the synchronistic bonding of Jeremy Reed and Audrey Szasz, sharing a mutual Ballardian gene to expand and reinvent Ballard through what reads like a posthumous extension of his work, feeds directly into Ballard’s vision of visitors from the near future occupying a sensational hyperreal space in the displaced present. Propulsively working off each other’s themed exchanges, the two have succeeded in creating an interactive fiction that rehabilitates both Ballard and his anti-hero Vaughan to a searing junction with post-apocalypse. Illustrated by Martin Bladh.
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