Details
Status in production
Release Date 2025
Limitation 24 copies
Size 16 × 24 cm
ISBN 978-3-949341-93-9
Edition lettered edition
Workmanship Thread-stitched hardcover bound in black linen with an embedded piece of real birch bark, featuring hand-marbled endpapers by the wonderful Renato Crepaldi (Brazil), head- and tailbands, and a silk ribbon marker. It is housed in a black clamshell box with a circular die-cut front, a marbled paper-lined inner spine, and warm-grey linen-covered edges.
Content
Titled The Unclean Force, the book takes its name from a term in Slavic paganism referring to mythological dark spirits and creatures, such as werewolves.
The first part, Wolf’s Son, tells the haunting tale of a young man imprisoned in a Russian gulag.
Avy dedicated this book to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), “who honoured his oath to the voiceless” and Alexei Remizov (1877–1957), “a born sorcerer, who has spoken in dreams in me”.
Brantley was deeply fascinated by Russian symbolists like Andrei Bely, and authored brilliant – until now unpublished – essays on Bely, Somov, and Remizov, which I plan to publish soon.
I am convinced The Unclean Force would have become Brantley’s magnum opus, if …!