Three Psychedelic Novellas

When Eckhard Gerdes’s first published book, a chapbook of the novella Projections, was published in 1986 in a limited edition of 200 copies, the legendary review magazine Factsheet Five stated, “This work lies somewhere on the borderland between poetry and dream, in an area that I seldom enter without chemical aid (indeed, I was tempted to reread this at once while under the influence of some suitable substance, but the pressures of writing other reviews dissuaded me). Gerdes’s writing is not linear and direct, but at the same time it is not as dense and difficult as that of, say, James Joyce. There is even a plot here, of sorts.” Now this gem of a collector’s item (copies sell at prices upwards of a thousand dollars) is finally reissued in a beautiful new edition accompanied by two other novellas from Eckhard Gerdes’s psychedelic period, Systems of Flux, which has recently been serialized in Liebamour, a popular magazine of psychedelic art, and the never-before-published Aspic Interregencies.