LUNGFISH

docufiction by Louis Armand
full-colour, 388pp
ISBN 978-1-7394310-8-2
Equus Press (London/Prague): paperback
publication date: 26 January 2026

“Dense, playful writing that boldly & unapologetically experiments with form & tone.  Louis Armand’s Lungfish is a stream of conscience machine-gun fever dream that feels strangely familiar, but also like no place I’ve ever been.” Glendyn Ivin

LUNGFISH is a late-80s phantasmagoria around a rural Australian town & a bunch of whacked-out kidz in a 1971 VH Valiant Ranger…

From Terra Nullius to Pine Gap & beyond, Armand’s novel questions how stories are told & who owns them. At once intimate & epic, it is a novel about love & survival, lament & reclamation, & the ways in which the forces of history brutalise the present.

Inspired by the work of Gary Foley, Bob Maza & the National Black Theatre, LUNGFISH stands in the tradition of Australian anti-colonial & experimental writing that interrogates history, myth, & national identity through hybrid form. Like Bernard Cohen’s The Antibiography of Robert F. Menzies, it reworks the documentary & archival record into a satirical & unsettling collage. Echoing David Foster’s sprawling, metafictional narratives & Gerald Murnane’s meditations on memory & place, it unsettles the boundary between inner life & national history. At the same time, it shares with Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe & Patrick White’s late novels a willingness to let myth, sexuality & violence bleed into the everyday. Yet LUNGFISH is distinct in its fusion of mythic creation story, kabuki theatre, Cold War paranoia, true crime, land-rights, sci-fi filmology, MTV, gamer manifesto & intimate “coming-of-age” … mirroring the distressed & unresolved histories of the country itself.

LOUIS ARMAND’s poetry collections include Infantilisms (2024), Vitus (2022), Descartes’ Dog (2021), A House for Hanne Darboven (2021), Monument (w/ John Kinsella, 2020), East Broadway Rundown (2015), The Rube Goldberg Variations (2015), Indirect Objects (2014), Synopticon (w/ John Kinsella, 2012), Letters from Ausland (2011), Picture Primitive (2006), Malice in Underland (2003), Strange Attractors (2003), Land Partition (2001) & Inexorable Weather (2001). He’s the author of such novels as A Tomb in H-Section (2025), Anizar (2024), Glitchhead (2021), Vampyr (2020), The Garden (2020), The Martian LSD Experiments (2019), Deathmask Sutra (2018), Glasshouse (2018), The Combinations (2016), Abacus (2015), Cairo (2014), Breakfast at Midnight (2012) & Clair Obscur (2011). His critical works include Erasurism (with Michel Delville, 2026), Homo Catastrophicus (2024), Feasts of Unrule (2023), Entropology (2023), Videology (2015), The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey (2013), Event States (2007), Literate Technologies (2006), Techne (1997) & Incendiary Devices (1993). www.louis-armand.com