The Tongue Machine
2026, Schism Neuronics.
Available in Paperback via retailers including Barnes & Noble, Blackwells & Amazon (US UK DE FR ES IT NL PL SE JP CA AU IE BE), and as a pdf via Schism. Excerpt on Substack (featured on Radio Panik, L’Etranger #520 & #521).
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Recalling years of careful study into the phenomenon of glossolalia or speaking in tongues, an anthropologist acquires the ability to transubstantiate and travel from one glossolalist to another, hundreds of miles apart. He sees the world from the vantage of the mouth and takes possession of the world as the tongue would have it. Employing a mechanism that can be made from almost any scraps and remainders of human industry, the tongue-traveller repeatedly de-materialises and materialises around the world, a victim to his invention, and a conduit for the last remnants of a disturbed and pinched quest for understanding.
REVIEW
Eric Blix, The New Monuments, 21 Aug 2026.
[In Rabelais] “Every sentence is its own ironic analog… the terms of language are the terms of language’s self-parody. Same goes for Allen, especially when it comes to the modern university system, this tongue traveler/academic who seeks to leave academia by way of comprehensively exploiting its linguistic resources: “He could still avail himself of academic speech, so he said, or technical language, but only in such a way that the words he availed himself of did not ever escape the ambit of its ridicule. These studies had been diminished to near insignificance, placed at one remove and then at one remove again, by his repeated materialisation from the tongue surface.” A scathing/hilarious enactment of the very problem of learned utterances, the quite real actuality of being nothing more than the words we speak.” — Eric Blix
GALLERY OF TONGUES
LAUNCH VIDEO
Ansgar Allen 