By Antonio Moresco
Translated by Max Lawton
The second novel of Antonio Moresco’s Games of Eternity trilogy, a Sadean Odyssey through the worlds of publishing and pornography, culminating in an apocalypse worthy of William Blake.
Publication Date: August 17th, 2027
Paperback ISBN: 9781646054794
eBook ISBN: 9781646054800
Description
Like all great epics, Songs of Chaos begins in medias res. Our narrator has failed to write a great (or even a publishable) book. The Beginnings, a Baroque autofiction dealing with his time as a monk and a revolutionary, has been deemed unreadable. He needs a new method—one congruent with the brave new world he inhabits.
Over the 1,000 pages that follow, we are led through a global network of blind alleys and subterranean passages, all of which double as Dantean cantos. The writer and his publisher listen in on perverse monologues from characters like the Man Who Steps in Shit, the Sperm Donor, and the Muse (an escort who moonlights as a consultant for blocked writers)—then are themselves made to descend into this realm where pornography meets metaphysics. Nearly one thousand pages of Sadean debauchery culminate in a vision of a world being sold by God, written in a grammatical tense that does not exist…
Biographical Note
Antonio Moresco was born in Mantua and lives in Milan. Considered one of the founders of modern Italian literature, The Beginnings is his second book to be published by Deep Vellum, after Clandestinity, a collection of short stories. He has gone on to publish several more books, among them the short novel La cipolla (The Onion), the autobiographical Lettere a nessuno (Letters to No One), and Distant Light, which was published by Archipelago in 2013.
Max Lawton is a writer, musician, and translator. He is currently working in close collaboration with Vladimir Sorokin to publish all of his untranslated works in English. His translation of Michael Lentz's Schattenfroh was one of the most anticipated English-language titles of 2025. Max is also currently working on or has plans to translate works by Antonio Moresco, Stefano D’Arrigo, Alberto Laiseca, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Eduard Limonov, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Hans Henny Jahnn, and Miquel de Palol. His first novel, Progress, is coming out with Verso in 2027. His translations have appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, Harper’s, The Baffler, The White Review, and Joyland. He lives in Los Angeles, where, when he isn’t writing, he plays heavy metal and noise music.