Booksaredeadly's favourite books of 2024

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Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is one of Booksaredeadly's favourite books of 2024.


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Jacob Wren reads from his books

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Videos of me reading from and talking about my recent books:

Polyamorous Love Song Launch Reading
Polyamorous Love Song Interview
Rich and Poor Launch Reading
Rich and Poor Interview
Authenticity is a Feeling Launch Reading
Jacob Wren Introduces Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim


I recently posted on Instagram: "For the past few years I’ve been trying to figure out if there are ways for me to increase the readership of my books..." And one of the replies was: "I get it! What about videos? Your face talking to the camera? I can’t say what it would do for book sales, but you have a lot of followers already so reels could get good traction. When I go to your profile, I can see what kind of books you *read* but I don’t get a sense of what your books would be like or why I might need to get one. I think about this all the time for myself, so I’m just brainstorming out loud! Or pinning posts about your own books to the top row?" This is probably good advice regarding my use of Instagram. However, I would likely require technical assistance so instead I'm doing this. All of these videos, and much else, can also be found at: Jacob Wren Links



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Twenty years of A Radical Cut

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Today is the twentieth anniversary – to the day – of A Radical Cut in the Texture of Reality. The very first post here was on August 8, 2005. The title came from a Slavoj Žižek quote (this was a long time ago, I would never quote Žižek now.) You can find the quote in this Twenty-eight quotations on failure post, if you scroll down to the middle, which was the first in a series of posts collecting quotes around a theme including: pessimism, fame, individualism, loneliness, sex, suicide and of course failure. Other ongoing series include Some passages from and Some favourite things from my year. I've told this story before, but the main reason I started A Radical Cut was because I had written a book called Families Are Formed Through Copulation and was having great difficulty getting it published. Every publisher I sent it to said no, and more than a few genuinely seemed to hate it. So I was wondering if there was some way I could just write and have at least a few people read what I was writing, not have to wait so long (and receive so many rejection letters) before someone got to see it. Families Are Formed Through Copulation did eventually get published in 2007 by Pedlar Press (though it's now out of print.) And starting in 2014 my work began to have a little bit more of a positive readership and therefore it became a bit easier for me to get my books out there. Now I feel like I'm having almost the opposite problem, in that it seems to me I'm writing too many books too quickly (which is probably a problem many writers would like to have, assuming the books are any good.) (It now occurs to me that perhaps I would have written more books if, back when I was starting out, I'd had an easier time getting them published.) Earlier this year I started a Patreon and I suppose, at the time, I was planning to slowly phase out A Radical Cut and eventually just do the Patreon. But so far I haven't had the heart to make even small steps in that direction. Doing something for twenty years really makes it feel like it's a part of you. So we'll have to see what happens. Not quite sure how to end this, so perhaps I'll simply repeat myself (at least if you've read previous posts) by saying, if you don't already know, my last book got some really nice reviews. I wonder if I'll manage to do this thing for another twenty years.



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Monday August 11th / Erin Brubacher and Jacob Wren at Perfect Books in Ottawa

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Erin Brubacher and Jacob Wren, hosted by Rachel Weldon
Perfect Books
Monday August 11th
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
258A Elgin St, Ottawa

In writing that speaks to the here and now, two protagonists, in very different ways, seek connection as an antidote for hopelessness.

Erin Brubacher and Jacob Wren read from their recent novels: These Songs I Know By Heart and Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, and converse on the intersections between literature and performance making, and the personal and political. Hosted by Debaser's Rachel Weldon.

-Erin Brubacher, These Songs I Know By Heart (Book*hug Press): Seeking and searching; making art; making new friends; getting divorced; falling in love; becoming a stepparent; surviving miscarriage; enduring the pandemic; valuing lakes, lilies, and mosses; and celebrating the quiet moments between people. A novel about living inside the unknowing: surrendering control and finding joy in the free fall of it all... It’s about love.

“This book left me feeling less alone.”
— Aimee Wall, author of We, Jane

-Jacob Wren, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (Book*hug Press): In these pages, real-world politics mingle with profoundly inventive fabulations. This is an anti-war novel unlike any other, an intricate study of our complicity in violent global systems and a celebration of the hope that underpins the resistance against them.

“A knowing knot of courage and its opposite, and a defiant work of desperate grace.”
— Eugene Lim, author of Search History

start over again

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I'm in some sort of madness where I can't seem to stop writing books. It's like the last push of madness before I die, which I have decided to call a trilogy. The performances we made are so ephemeral. It feels to me like they never even happened. Some of the books are now out of print and those also now feel like they barely exist. It's actually only the book I'm writing at this moment that feels alive to me. But, also, it's like my writing practice restarted in 2014. Starting with the book I published in 2014, all my books are still in print. I've been a writer for thirty-eight years, but in my current trajectory I've only been a writer for eleven years. It's like I found a way to start over. And I am searching for a way to now start over again. (And, of course, all this writing must also have something to do with wanting to have something to do other than doomscrolling the current state of the world.)



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changing around (and unchanging) the various titles

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Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (2024)
Desire Without Expectation (2027)
Faithful Unbeliever* (2030)

I now seem to spend a significant amount of time changing around (and unchanging) the various titles of the books I’m working on. I mostly do so here. (It also might be worth mentioning that I now think of these three books as some sort of strange trilogy based loosely around questions concerning the desire for utopia.)

*Other possible titles for the book I'm currently working on:
Know Me Better Than I Know Myself
Undoing Failure
Kind Sadness
Precious Compromise



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"Other than capitalism, what qualifies conceptual art?”

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"A fantastical text concerning transformation, Jacob Wren’s novel Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim follows a narrator to an unidentified liberated zone, where noncapitalist, collective practices are formed, reworked, and communalized. The zone is unidyllic as it continues to be bombed and fired upon by nearby and faraway imperialists. Amidst the daily raids, the narrator is allowed to sit in on town meetings, where economics and trade become reinvented. In one such meeting, the narrator hears a woman discussing how concerns over goods being “too expensive” must also be applied to items being “too cheap.” She says, “Just as you mustn’t accept a price that is too high, you also must not fight, nor constantly search, for a price that is too low … You need to understand that those who sell you these things also need to live.”

This gallows humor highlights the disparities between life and death and locates a price so low that some are explicitly not allowed to live. Tellingly, Cattelan, the supposed prankster who will sell and hire others to do everything and treats all matter as dispensable, predictably imposes a boundary on engagement with his own critique. In response to Mr. Alam’s critiques of his exploitation, Cattelan stated that “art, by its nature, does not solve problems—if it did, it would be politics.” Evading criticism through a well-worn notion of aesthetic isolationism, Cattelan offers art that ideologically affirms the status quo, upholding supply-chain repression and enforcing and extending class domination. (He offers, in other words, enmeshed and predictable capitalism-as-art.)

Regarding that which is purposefully degraded and denied in the supply chain: when Daniel Druet, the artist who made Untitled (Stephanie), sued Cattelan’s gallery over authorship and payment, contemporary artists such as Sophie Calle signed an open letter in support of Cattelan. It stated: “Daniel Druet’s quest for recognition as the exclusive author of the works imagined by Maurizio Cattelan opens the door to the disqualification of conceptual art.” Does the qualification of conceptual art hinge on the erasure of laborers and the repression of its making? The artists who signed the letter seem to think so. Other than capitalism, what qualifies conceptual art?”

- Eunsong Kim, No Aesthetic Autonomy Without Labor Autonomy



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"Because there is only room for one empire at a time."

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"I start to think about all the stated reasons for this war and other wars like it. For humanitarian reasons (every time an expensive humanitarian bomb landed on civilians, it was enough to turn even the most optimistic Pollyanna into a hardened cynic). To fight communists. To fight terrorists. To stop the spread of communism or terrorism or extremism or something else. To help people. To improve the lot of women. Because we’re right and they’re wrong. Because: Why do they hate us and why do they hate our way of life? Because war has always existed and will always exist. To increase the quantity of democracy in the world. Because we have a responsibility to the world and to freedom. For freedom. For strategic reasons. To stop a domino from setting off all the other dominoes.

And then I move on to what I think the reasons are for this war and so many others. Because our leaders need therapy. Because a bully needs a victim. Because so-called powerful men are deeply insecure. So politicians in favour of war can get elected or re-elected by voters in favour of war. To make money. To placate the arms industry and their high-priced lobbyists. To justify never-ending increases in the military budget. To distract from rampant domestic problems. To bring certain natural resources and labour into the jurisdiction of the global marketplace. To ensure these resources most benefit the capitalists doing the bombing and least benefit the people being bombed. Because it’s easier to kill people who look or sound different than you. Because hatred takes on a life of its own. To explain to the world that you do it our way or suffer the consequences. Because a protection racket needs to constantly ensure no one steps out of line or seeks protection elsewhere. So they can set up permanent military bases to keep the surrounding countries in line. Because there is no alternative. Because there is only room for one empire at a time."

- Jacob Wren, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim




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The first page...

The first page of Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim.

Finalists for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Fiction

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Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a Finalist for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Fiction (along with many other amazing books.)

possible titles

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I've been keeping this ongoing list of possible titles since 2016.

(As well, in case you don't already know, my last book, which has a really nice title, also got some really nice reviews.)

(Finally, if you're feeling extra generous and would like to help me continue writing books, you can find my Patreon here.)

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Jacob Wren on Patreon

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I have been thinking of doing this for a while. I don't know to what extent it will work, but I've started a Patreon:

https://patreon.com/jacob_wren_writer

I've set it to the lowest monthly amount: $3 U.S. / $5 Canadian. I was trying to think of what kind of amount I could afford. I know money is tight for everyone.

I'm currently writing some kind trilogy based loosely around the desire for utopia:

Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (2024)
Desire Without Expectation (2027)
Faithful Unbeliever (2030)

This makes me realize I need more writing time then I've needed in the past.

If people were to sign up it would really help give me the extra time necessary to finish writing these books. For those who do so, they can read excerpts as I am writing them.

As well, as everyone knows, I'm very addicted to social media. So I'm wondering if this particular kind of addiction can help bring in any funds. (Also, a lot of people seem to be leaving social media at this moment. So Patreon could be a place for me to post things.)

In the long run I'm hoping to sign up 1,000 people. So far I'm at 8.

I know a lot of people like my books. I'm just wondering if any people like them enough to help out a bit. (My last book got some really nice reviews.)

Let's see what happens.

Jacob


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"I think it needs activism and it needs people who are really able to get out there and fight."

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“In some deep way, I feel I need to be an artist. But I don’t actually think what the world needs right now is art. I think it needs activism and it needs people who are really able to get out there and fight. I think art is probably more a reflection of the world than a driver of change.”
- Jacob Wren, from this interview with Sruti Islam in Cult Mtl



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Dry Your Tears Quote

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“And once again it makes me realize how never in my life as a writer have I genuinely tried to get anything “right,” if getting it right means an accurate portrayal of reality, or even if it means providing access to something we might call truth or wisdom. In fact, it now seems to me, I have attempted to do almost the opposite, a search for how to “get it wrong” as evocatively as possible. Or to fully engage in the struggle between getting it right and getting it wrong. Of course, I’m always considering ethics, so I would never want to be ethically wrong, or to harm anyone with my words, but nonetheless there is the desire to be artistically off-kilter in ways that create the possibility of seeing things anew. To fully admit that I don’t know. But now I’m not so sure. Rethinking all such assumptions might be one of the many ways I find myself trying to change.”
- Jacob Wren, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim



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Le génie des autres and remembering 1998

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At the bottom of this post is a picture of the French translation of my very first book Unrehearsed Beauty (from 1998, translated into French as Le génie des autres.) Thinking back to 1998 (the year I moved to Montreal and began working with PME-ART) is really something else. I was so focused on the desire to make a new kind of theatre. And then we did. (Our performance Unrehearsed Beauty/Le Génie des autres was perhaps the best example of this.)

As you might already know, Christophe Bernard is in the process of translating all of my books for Le Quartanier. They’ve already done four:

Le génie des autres
La famille se crée en copulant
La joie criminelle des pirates
Riches et pauvres

https://lequartanier.com/auteur/95-jacob-wren

[In the original English these books are Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, If our wealth is criminal then let’s live with the criminal joy of pirates and Rich and Poor.]

Today I’ll be signing books at the Le Quartanier table at the Salon du livre de Montréal from 6pm-7pm. A moment when I go back in time, instead of promoting my current book Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim.


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Here’s a short excerpt from Unrehearsed Beauty:


“The corpse must properly digest its food.


The food must be grown in pastures where just the briefest hint of ideology remains.


Ideology pertains to time.


Time is a character in a morality play with the following title.


The title of the morality play is “Actions Against Reason.”


In the play a corpse is featured prominently.


The corpse neither eats nor digests but is somehow made aware of the presence of food.


Food is laid out on the table in such a way that it spells out the defeat of those who understand only what they were born to someday understand.


When you are born you admit defeat.


Admitting defeat is the same as committing a crime.


And there is only one crime: to vomit when you know from the bottom of your heart that it is unproductive to do so.


Productive vomiting is tolerated but not encouraged.


Criminals require encouragement. Corpses do not.”

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Some press quotes and mentions for Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

Some press quotes and mentions for Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim:

“In Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, Jacob Wren has written a courageous, alarming and utterly original work of fiction. The ethical conundrums it addresses are myriad and relevant, and while it offers no solutions, it is relentless in its exposure of unflattering human truths that many of us, given a choice, would prefer to avoid.”
– Ian Colford, The Seaboard Review

“This is a deeply moving, challenging novel, and certainly very prescient. What is our obligation to others, particularly those in war-torn countries? How are we implicated through the tangled threads of history? Wren has written an anti-war novel, but it’s far more nuanced and unclear than I think we’d like to believe that the position of anti-war is. … A perfectly positioned novel for the current historical moment.”
– Alison Manley, The Miramichi Reader

“A Jacob Wren novel is known for several things: narrators undergoing neurotic self-interrogation, a consideration of the gap between theory and practice, and a certain metafictional flair when it comes to signalling the work’s own existence as a radical text. All of these authorial trademarks are sent into overdrive in Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, Wren’s introspective protest novel about the role that doubt plays in any political awakening.”
– Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Quill & Quire

“Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is an anti-war novel that reminds us of our complicity in global conflicts, while offering a glimpse of the hope that drives resistance.”
– Ariane Fournier, Maisonneuve

“Jacob Wren’s latest scintillating work of literary fiction, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, is a book in revolt. Wren crafts a bold and unsettling narrative with the kind of clarity to explore ethical dilemmas that are both numerous and timely.”
– Samuel Wise, Montreal Guardian

"Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a book full of discomfort, despair, and uncertainty, as collective organizing can be; but, like collective organizing, it also brims with the energy of argument, exchange, and a staunch belief in alternative ways of living..."
- H Felix Chau Bradley, Montreal Review of Books

"In Jacob Wren’s Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, published in September, an unnamed narrator navigates an unnamed war zone, internally monologuing on morality and pain. These slightly blurrier, vaguer worlds suggest a search for a human universal. While reference-heavy writing is stuffed, like a meme’s compaction of complex emotion and history into a single low-res image, there’s an alternative roominess: space to take ideas past previous or logical bounds, or to articulate opinions that a mutual follower hasn’t posted already. Those ideas are probably harder to sell, and to write."
- Greta Rainbow, The Walrus

"So is it a satire of western activists’ mentality around the suffering of faraway others, or is it a case of it? Does it offer a utopianism we need, or a fantasy couched in sophistry? Yes and no, and guilty on all counts. But in risking annoying/offending everyone, like an inverted Houellebecq, its currents of maximal yearning and doubt still agitate the nervous system weeks after reading."
- Carl Wilson, 'Crritic!'

"Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim is a swan song to fiction where the "Utopia" it imagines is NOT the utopia where a single person, through sheer tyranny of will, can change the world. It is instead a "Utopia" where "fiction" is once again useful in creating an immediate, urgent, revolutionary and libidinal mythos."
- Khashayar Mohammadi, Called To Fiction

"Wren’s protagonist is not the first visitor from safer, more privileged parts of the world to visit revolutions in progress, and to wrestle, with varying degrees of success, with the ethical puzzles that permeate this strange, somewhat difficult but in the end important work of fiction."
- Tom Sandborn, Rabble

"Wren underscores how Western individualism can foster inaction. Although the author wants to help, he chooses “to daydream, to consider, while moment after moment passed me by.” The most compelling chapters de-centre the writer—his language, culture, and perspective—and emphasize the community and its efforts to build a sustainable future."
- Caroline Noël, Literary Review of Canada

"As this book unfolded, I felt increasingly yes, this is an anti-war novel in the truest sense of the word, but it also explores the war of the self against the self. The protagonist feels unworthy of being a protagonist, unworthy of his own protest and yet, it is only with writings such as these, that we can pitch our imperfect tents on the grounds of protest."
- Lisa de Nikolits, A Turn of Phrase

"A fantastical text concerning transformation, Jacob Wren’s novel Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim follows a narrator to an unidentified liberated zone, where noncapitalist, collective practices are formed, reworked, and communalized. The zone is unidyllic as it continues to be bombed and fired upon by nearby and faraway imperialists. Amidst the daily raids, the narrator is allowed to sit in on town meetings, where economics and trade become reinvented. In one such meeting, the narrator hears a woman discussing how concerns over goods being 'too expensive' must also be applied to items being 'too cheap.' She says, 'Just as you mustn’t accept a price that is too high, you also must not fight, nor constantly search, for a price that is too low … You need to understand that those who sell you these things also need to live.'”
- Eunsong Kim, No Aesthetic Autonomy Without Labor Autonomy

“If the personal is political, then isn't the political personal? This was a question that I had throughout reading this reflective and well-written book. No matter where your political beliefs fall, Jacob Wren's new novel demands to be read for its poignant and propulsive nature. And I will double down on Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim on being one of the best pieces of Canadian Literature this year. Just don't let the prize lists fool you. You're smarter than that.”
– Adam Ferris on Goodreads

"Still, Wren is one of the few “political” writers of quality working in the Canadian small press. If you are able to accept that Dry Your Tears is more a work about the paralysis of western do-gooders than the lives of active revolutionaries, it has considerable insight to offer—particularly on the centrality of faith to radical political activism. In its final third, the protagonist and a character from “the thin strip of land” struggle with the grey lassitude of living in Canada after experiencing revolutionary life. Faith is a phenomenon fed by privation, sparked by opportunity, and sustained by fellowship—to maintain a faith in revolution in the face of the comfortable, mannered aloneness of Canadian culture requires uncommon conviction. Having thus diagnosed the challenge, Wren uses his final act of authorial sleight of hand to move himself out of the way, implying that a younger generation shaped by eroding material conditions, grounded in collectivist principles, and raised without a reflexive shame at its own being will be the locus of a change to come. It’s a notion based on faith as much as evidence, but belief is what is called for now."
- Mulgrave on Goodreads

“Subversive and experimental in approach, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim brings forward questions, as urgent as they are conflicted, around issues of personal responsibility in times of political turmoil. The book asks readers to confront the ethical, moral, and practical considerations of becoming involved in political struggles – especially when they are not the struggles of your own people. Who has the right to bear witness? Who has the right to tell the stories of others? Does Wren’s narrator act out of courage and compassion? Or the curiosity of a tourist? Original in its form and passionate in its prose, Wren has offered an important anti-war novel that poses big questions and dares the world to answer.”
- Jury comments from 2024 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction

Plus:
Writer’s Block at All Lit Up
Possible Politics: A recommended reading list at 49th Shelf
Interview with Open Book
Interview with Cult MTL

Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim was #3 on the October edition of the Hamilton Review of Books' Independently Published Bestsellers List and a bestseller at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly.

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Read an excerpt at Send My Love To Anyone.

Order it here.

Also, if you're feeling extra generous and would like to help me continue writing books, you can find my Patreon here.






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Reviews, Press & Events

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Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is in stores now.


Reviews so far:
Ian Colford in The Seaboard Review
Jean Marc Ah-Sen in Quill & Quire
Alison Manley in The Miramichi Reader
Ariane Fournier in Maisonneuve
Samuel Wise in the Montreal Guardian
H Felix Chau Bradley in the Montreal Review of Books
Greta Rainbow in The Walrus
Carl Wilson in 'Crritic!'
Khashayar Mohammadi Called to Fiction
Tom Sandborn in Rabble
Caroline Noël in Literary Review of Canada
Lisa de Nikolits in A Turn of Phrase

Press so far:
Writer’s Block at All Lit Up
Possible Politics: A recommended reading list at 49th Shelf
Interview with Open Book
Sruti Islam in Cult Mtl
Read an Excerpt at: Send My Love To Anyone
Order: Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

Instagram so far:
anotheramyfung
booksaredeadly
Adam Ferris
whatithinkaboutthisbook
niknak.tbr.stack
tinamayreads
lindsay_wincherauk
readandbookmarked
leafbyleaf_official
valerier6671
thattmum
graceisbookedandbusy
kelleydoesbooks
lindsay_wincherauk
junctionreads
rhonda__waterfall
niknak.tbr.stack

Read an excerpt at Send My Love To Anyone.

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Events and Parallel Events

Thurs Sept 19 at 7pm:
MONTREAL LAUNCH with Alexei Perry Cox
at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly

Sun Sept 22 at 1pm:
Frontline Fiction: War and Humanity / Saad T. Farooqi & Jacob Wren
at the Toronto International Festival of Authors

Tues Oct 1 at 7pm:
TORONTO LAUNCH with Malcolm Sutton
at Another Story Bookshop / Eventbrite link

Sat Oct 5 at 11am:
Weaving the Self into Story: An Exploration of Auto-fiction
with Erin Brubacher, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Jacob Wren & Ann Yu-Kyung Choi (Moderator)
at The & Festival, Mississauga

Tues Oct 8 at 7pm:
Sofia Ajram launches COUP DE GRÂCE
in conversation with Jacob Wren
at De Stiil Books

Thurs Oct 10 at 8pm:
Aaron Kreuter's Montreal Launch for Rubble Children
with Jacob Wren and Anita Anand
at Bar NDQ

Sat Oct 19th at 4pm
An afternoon of book launches
Jacob Wren launches Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim
Knut Ove Arntzen launches TEATER I BEVEGELSE
Hordaland Kunstsenter
Bergen, Norway

Wed Oct 23 at 8:30pm:
The Power of Political Prose
with Conor Kerr, Kirsten McDougall, Jacob Wren & Michelle Cyca (Moderator)
at the Vancouver Writers Fest / Waterfront Theatre

Sun Oct 27 at 3:30pm:
The Afternoon Tea
with Myriam J. A. Chancy, Anne Fleming, Conor Kerr, Kirsten McDougall, Claire Messud & Jacob Wren, hosted by Bill Richardson
at the Vancouver Writers Fest / Performance Works

Wed October 30th
Montreal Review of Books Fall Launch
with Amal Elsana Al’hjooj, Arjun Basu & Jacob Wren
at P'tit Ours (formerly Ursa)
Doors at 6:30, readings at 7:00pm

Ask for Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim as your favourite local bookshop or order it directly from the publisher here.

Three Trilogies

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Unrehearsed Beauty (1998)
Families Are Formed Through Copulation (2007)
Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed (2010)

Polyamorous Love Song (2014)
Rich and Poor (2016)
Authenticity Is A Feeling (2018)

Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (2024)
Desire Without Expectation (2027)
Faithful Unbeliever (2030)




(Man makes plans, God laughs.)

(I am gradually realizing that in the current still-in-progress trilogy - Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, Desire Without Expectation, Faithful Unbeliever - all three books are based loosely around questions concerning the desire for utopia.)

(Also, all of the published books have been, or are in the process of, being translated into French by Le Quartanier and Éditions Triptyque.)

(If you're feeling extra generous and would like to help me continue writing books, you can find my Patreon here.)





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Recently cut passage from the work-in-progress Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim

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He started with my very first book. He said he admired the youthful energy, the punk spirit, how I saw literature as a war and my book was like a one-man army fighting off all contenders. I certainly wasn’t fond of the military metaphor but it was clear this wasn’t a discussion, rather it was a critical monologue on his part and my job was to sit there, cowering in fear, and simply listen. About my second book, he spoke about how encouraging it was to watch me, step by careful step, marching toward something that resembled a more conventional novel. I realized he was telling me all this to get inside my head, or to show that he was already inside my head, that he already understood me. I tried to remember what it was actually like for me to write my second book, thinking that if I could reground my thoughts back toward my own lived experience it would help me resist his misguided analysis of my work. Did it feel like marching toward a more conventional novel. For a moment, under the potential threat of further pain, I thought that maybe it did, but he was already onto my third book, which he said was like a concise summation of the history of leftist defeatism. This was a topic that clearly interested him a great deal. He carefully explained to me how the root of winning any battle was believing in the strong possibility you might win. Of course this principle could be taken too far: as had frequently been proven, over-confidence could also easily lead to defeat. But he would always prefer over-confidence to under-confidence, for the simple reason that winning a battle required a certain effortless arrogance, or at least that was how it had always seemed to him. It was starting to amaze me just how much he loved to talk, loved the sound of his own voice, felt emboldened by the sight of me strapped to this chair, an absolutely captive and terrorized audience. About my fourth book, which he also seemed to know was by far my most successful, he said that it was fascinating the degree to which my take, my approach, to the topics of sex and violence were so completely opposite from his own. He wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that for him sex and violence were for all intents and purposes one and the same, but his thinking was clearly more along those lines. What is the libido without the urge to dominate, what is desire if not the thrill of the chase. Fucking might also be love but, then again, love might also be terror. By this point I was no longer quite following him, losing interest, all my concentration spent in an effort to stay awake, in the fear that if I fell asleep I would be awakened by a jolt of pure pain. I couldn’t even begin to understand what he thought my take on sex and violence was. I think maybe he just assumed they were two things I was afraid of, which in retrospect might not be so far from the truth. About my sixth book he felt he had to admit that he didn’t understand why so many people wasted so much energy criticizing capitalism. Capitalism was just another part of life, no better or worse than anything else. Why so much obsession with the evils of capitalism? He was sure he would never completely understand it. What would our world look like if you took away all the products and comforts created by capitalism? He was sure no one knew, and if no one knew why even bother thinking about it. He told me that I must agree with him so I agreed with him. I barely had the energy to hold my head up. At that moment the evils of capitalism did not seem like such a pressing matter. He then admitted he hadn’t actually read all my books because he hadn’t read my most recent outing, book number six, yet. He had ordered it but for some reason it hadn’t arrived with the others. So he would have to get back to me on that one. And we could stop there for today. I was really glad I hadn’t written any more books. He did not comment on my seventh book for the simple reason that I had not yet written it. My seventh book is the book you’re currently holding in your hands.



[Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is in stores now.]



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