Psychedelic Press Blog — literature

From Psychedelic Press Volume XV: One step forwards, and it appears we’ve taken two steps back. Perhaps then a side-shuffle to avoid the oncoming carnival of an ever-transforming everyday world, only to find that it doesn’t actually look a great deal different from our new vantage point. Indeed, the chains of identity appear to have been tightened. Have we not just spent decades loosening them? Morphing the metal links into fairy chains? For the psychedelic enthusiast living in society’s liminal spaces, this is no benevolent acid trip. It is the law. Or, more specifically, an additional drug law.    ...

This article first appeared in the bi-monthly Psychedelic Press UK print journal, August 2015 (Volume IV). You can pick up a copy of the journal here, or subscribe and have original, innovative and select psychedelic literature delivered straight to your door every couple of months. —– Some thirty years ago, in May 1983, Terence McKenna’s contact lenses failed him during a critical moment of his speech at the psychedelic conference in Santa Barbara. Unable to read from the page, McKenna had to resort to improvising. Listening to the recording after the event, he couldn’t help but notice the crowd’s reaction to a certain bit in his improvised...

We are delighted to announce the publication of new book Noumenautics: Metaphysics, Meta-ethics, Psychedelics by Peter Sjöstedt-H – Available now for £9.99 from the Psychedelic Press shop and Amazon.co.uk Title: Noumenautics Author: Peter Sjöstedt-H ISBN: 978-0992808853 Price: £9.99 Philosopher Peter Sjöstedt-H’s Noumenautics traverses the mindscape of metaphysics, nihilism and psychedelic phenomenology. It navigates through subjects such as the sentience of cells, the constrictions of consciousness, the metaphysics of might, the magic of mushrooms, the narcotics of Nietzsche, and the neologism of neo-nihilism – the last of which may itself cause flashbacks. Tracing the fall of western morality through Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the book descends deeper still into a metaphysics...

Author Ben Sessa is a psychiatrist, and his novel starts with a psychiatrist character, Dr Robert Austell, having a violent fantasy where he cuts a patient’s throat with a scalpel and nonchalantly watches her bleed to death. The reader can be forgiven for momentarily wandering just how autobiographical the work is, and indeed whether such things are the norm within the psychiatric profession! But of course this slasher opening is a piece of black comedy in order to set up the jaded, disillusioned Austell as someone who – like the majority of the working population – is bored with his job and...

This is an extract from the novel Erin – featured in our latest journal – the book is available from both the Psychedelic Press UK bookshop and Amazon. Have I slept? I thought so, though I couldn’t be sure. My dreams had been so real; my reality seemingly but dreams. I didn’t dare open my eyes for fear of seeing Charlie; the grotesque stranded in mud. Why did I leave him in the mud? I tried to wrestle back my reasons but they eluded me. Fear, came a whisper from outside my thoughts. Fear of what? I replied. Fear of what we can turn into. I remembered an air of paranoia, waves...