An English Campus Novel Written By Kafka

Lars Iyer's Spurious is, hands down, one of my favourite books of the year. Its two protagonists are a couple of woodlice à la Bouvard and Pécuchet (or Vladimir and Estragon) whose very failure to live up to the Continental thinkers/writers they so admire, turns out, paradoxically, to be a successful way of living up to them (and even living out their works). Time and time again, they fail successfully. Hilarious, erudite and often moving, Spurious manages to combine high-minded Modernism with a very English instinct to mock intellectual pretension. The constant oscillation between the two — this fundamental ambiguity — enables Iyer to have his cake and eat it, which is the very definition of literature in my book.

Andrew Gallix, Not the Booker review

Philosophy as Comedy

Lars Iyers’ Spurious is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time. It manages to pull off a unique achievement: presenting the characters’ struggle with philosophy in a charming and funny way, without for all that making fun of the philosophical enterprise as a whole. In that way, the ficionalized Lars and his overbearing friend W. may be the modern inheritors of the early Socratic dialogues—not the ones that lay out Plato’s elaborate theories, but the ones where everyone ends up more confused than before. I was among the readers of the original blog posts that Iyer used as raw materials for this book, and I am impressed by the way he has transmuted what could sometimes be morose or melancholic materials into an extremely humorous whole. A big part of this comes from the forceful presence of W., who seems to be a force of nature that strangely parallels the damp that threatens to destroy Lars’s apartment. The novel’s approach reminded me of Thomas Bernhard’s Correction, but Iyer manages to transform Bernhard’s sometimes grim claustrophobia into comedy.

Adam Kosko, Not the Booker review

If you’ve followed Lars’ Spurious blog, this book is a treat and a surprise — while many of the themes and passages seem familiar, you don’t get the sense of a blog having been chopped up and made into a book. It truly stands alone, and it is a wonderful thing to hold in your hands, open, and feel the texture of the pages. carry it around with you, mark pages with scraps of paper, pencil little stars in the margins. Too much of what’s published nowadays might as well be in blog form: easily digested, skimmed over, forgettable.

While much of the book is taken up with the near-constant verbal sparring of Lars and W., and though many reviewers make a great deal of the humour here (and it IS a very funny book), this seems to do the work some disservice, as if to say “yes, it’s kind of brainy and deals with ideas and philosophy and it raises some real questions about friendship, the place of writing, thinking, etc. in today’s world — but no, it’s FUNNY.” No need for apologies or using its capacity to amuse an excuse. Humour, in Spurious, acts as leavening — it lightens the book, but also gives it complexity and deeper form.

It’s a rather quick and breezy read. It also is worth spending some time savouring. A general rule of thumb for any book or film for me is “would I see it again?” (And/or “would I recommend it?”) In the case of Spurious a) yes, I have reread it, and b) I’m recommending it to you now. Easily one of the best books of the past couple of years, and definitely an object that will become more dog-eared with time and re-reading; other books will come and leave my shelves, but Spurious is a keeper.

Marzek, Not the Booker review

Not Spurious At All

Forget crime-lit., or chick-lit., this is wit-lit. For Spurious is one of those rare little (quasi-) novels that is truly witty, not just funny or amusing. There is virtually no plot – simply a meandering account of two academic philosophers in search of truth, meaning and friendship, by way of gin and man-bags. But there is dialogue a-plenty, and shed-loads of wistful reflection, all of it expressed in the same kind of sparse but quirky humour that marked out Joseph Heller's Catch 22. In Spurious, the central character – Lars – is constantly and mercilessly lampooned by the imperious 'W', who claims that he, Lars, by his very existence has 'subtracted something from the world.' Indeed, Lars is so useless that a reflection in the waters around Plymouth is akin to 'the kraken of (his) idiocy', and he is so endearingly pathetic that 'W' likens him to a whining, 'sad ape locked up with its faeces'. Like two stage characters in a Beckett play, waiting for an end that may or may not come, they face life with stoicism and forlorn hope, whilst avoiding mould spores and dull conference speakers. Buy it, read it, and love it, for in these miserable times the laughter and the insights will sustain you for quite a while.

Paul Grosch, Not the Booker review

Laurel and Hardy, Bert and Ernie, Withnail and Marwood… double acts have long delighted us. Couples, it seems, are intrinsically funny. Lars and W., the heroes of Lars Iyer's novel Spurious – and, in their own way, fighting damp, fighting their stupidity, squabbling with each other, they are heroic – easily join the ranks of the best of them. Two intellectuals – and not ‘would-be intellectuals’ either, our heroes are clever and well-read, but know, because of this, how little they know, how huge is their ignorance – who battle and bond, who gossip, grumble and gripe. W. castigates, Lars reports back. Their squabbles are incessant and repetitive, but there is no enmity here: “W. tests me on Spinoza: What is a mode? What’s a substance? What’s an atttibute? … W. tells me … ‘get The Idiot’s Guide to Spinoza, then. But that’ll be too hard, too. Start with these letters on a piece of paper: S-P-I-N-O-Z-A. Ponder that in your stupidity’.” Clever about how being clever is never that far from being daft as a brush, rarely ennobling, and mostly just beside the point, this is one of funniest books about friendship I’ve ever read.

ReadySteadyMark, Not the Booker review

The Sport of Self

Opening the pages of Spurious one finds oneself eavesdropping on two rather self-obsessed characters, obsessed in fact to the point of acknowledging their own self-obsession and mocking it; quite cruelly mocking their own pretensions not only about literature, philosophy and the world at large, not only about each other's own pretensions and profuse failings, but most importantly and above all that most abhorrent of pretensions, that most abysmal of failings: holding to the very notion of a self. As the pages fly by–after all, for all its gravitas and references to"big ideas" (only to shoot them down) reading Spurious is humorous breeze–one starts to suspect that this is not a dialogue between an overly-serious protagonist and his curmudgeonly companion, but rather the groans and rattling of the very infrastructure propping up the Cartesian ego, emitted by the strains of bearing its own load together with the ever-burgeoning substructures required by the weaknesses arising from its own existence and the absurd effort to prevent or at least prolong its inevitable collapse. Spurious indeed, and if ever a work of literature was worthy of an anti-prize then surely none could be more deserving.

Pensum, Not the Booker review

Sehrsucht

Let me agree with the other viewers, there's no question this is a very funny book. Spurious can actually make you laugh. I don't say that lightly. Only two other books in my life have made me laugh out loud in the way Spurious did, Confederacy of Dunces and Catch 22. Even so,, Spurious should not be filed as a mere comedy. There something quite serious to this novel. For me, it was the awakening of a sense of yearning and urgency. Yearning for what? I'm not sure, and maybe I am too stupid to articulate what this novel-machine does. Spurious sparks an "intense longing for that unnamable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves. . .

Digital Alice, Not the Booker review

Spurious – the last laugh of a dying thought

Lars Iyer’s Spurious is probably the most profound contribution to post modern literature that these islands have produced since Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Acerbically witty, reveling in the banality of the daily disintegration of thought in Britain, it manages to transgress our everyday delineations of truth, reality, fiction and authenticity with a wanton hilarity which is breathtaking in its audacity. Spurious is based on the true story of a friendship surviving on the dregs of metaphysics – two professional philosophers clinging onto a discipline that has been systematically undermined in Britain since the eighties, the callousness of their relationship reflecting the dire nature of not only their personal positions, but the fate of thought itself. W’s much harked upon great Essex University Philosophy postgraduate scene was real, but it did not herald the renaissance we thought was coming, but rather the last wet flop of the dying fish called Continental Philosophy. It is worth noting that the most consummate of thinkers from that group left Britain immediately and became a successful cars salesman in France, whereas the worst became well known. To my knowledge, W is both charmed and incensed at the book – it is a typical Larsian product, brilliant in its ignorance, but condemning W to a life on the sidelines, immortalized not in the thought he loves, but in the pork scratching of a beleaguered friend. Lars has shown himself to be a true artist, risking probably his only true friendship for the sake of his work and I hope he will be adequately rewarded for his courage.

Coffee Percolator, Not the Booker review

Spurious may well be the only way left to write about the end times. Who better to truly accept the coming of the apocalypse than those who are acutely aware of their own stupidity and who are dumbfounded by their ultimate inability to even attempt thought? Endowed with a quasi-religious lucidity and insight into the wonders of their own – very poor – limitation, W. and Lars are left with no choice but to make pathetic attempt after pathetic attempt at some semblance of spirituality through drink and a strongly-held belief in conversation, which inevitably always spirals into an inane species of self-deprecation so full of resigned joy that it doesn't even have the power to be redemptive.

These men are true idiots of a very dangerous kind, and they deserve to have their idiocy exposed to the world, if only so that it may serve as a warning to the rest of us.

Yaron Golan, Not the Booker review

An Academic Satire for All Seasons

Lars Iyer's Spurious is a creation of idiosyncratic genius. Part academic satire, part Beckettian meditation on the absurdity of waiting, and part Jewish mysticism Spurious is a work that is at once hilarious, tragic and strangely redemptive. The two protagonist's W. and Lars are cast in the same predicament as Beckett's Godot. Two people cast in a situation who irritate the hell out of each other within a situation which imposes a warmly constrained friendship on themselves. The characters exude an extra air of the pathetic given that their banter only ever reaches the machine gun prattle of academic rivalry. They wait in state of constant disappointment, matched by the ever rising damp in Lars’ flat. The incessant hopeless vigilance for the coming apocalypse demonstrates the passive quietism of the contemporary intellectual. Iyer’s Spurious takes the academic satire to the existential level. Academic satire is no longer devoted to the unworldliness of the academic and their petty jealousies, but begins to own up to the static paralysis of the academy in general. In Spurious we begin to see the depths from thinkers must arouse themselves.

Deomni, Not the Booker review

Very Now

Two lecturers mourn the passing into history of an integrity they can only stupidly comment on. In an age of self-help, their dialogues are out of their time, offering no ‘how-to’ that fits into the culture of ‘excellence’ that has replaced integrity, nor any alternatives neither. The idea that there is only one story – overcoming the odds – seems to be on trial by its opposite – impossibility.

Yet the relentless self-flagellation amounts to more than just another double-act of irresistibly dark humour. It recalls Kafka’s assertion in his diaries about how writing about his unhappiness surpasses it. Similarly, the undynamic duo bewails an absent future, confronting us with our own unthinkable helplessness and alibis, while clinging from within this wailing to the hope that someone or something will lead the world away from disaster. Uncomfortable, very now, and getting more so by the day.

Jeff Lee, Not the Booker review

Antiheros of Our Time

A familiar cliché holds that philosophy deals with thinking about thinking, a metacognition that appears to be signally lacking in L, the provincial English university philosopher who narrates Spurious. The irony of course is that a man paid to teach self-reflexive thought is shown to be incapable of even rudimentary self-reflection (a bit like Jack Gladney, the Hitler scholar who can’t speak a word of German).

L’s blindness to self-experience seems to pervade every aspect of his life. In the book’s opening pages we meet W, the man condemned to serve as L’s eternal interlocutor, reproaching him for his inability to experience shame in the appropriate fashion: L feels shame, W complains, but is not ashamed of this shame.

W doesn’t so much correct L as help narrate his experience of the world. L plays the ape, W jokes about it, though the joke seems to be on him; ‘what do I get out of it’, he asks himself constantly. W dreams of seriousness, but his life appears to consist in endlessly escaping the pretentions of seriousness to find the nearest pub, where he sits and amuses himself with L’s apishness. He is an admirer of Continental Europe, a fetishised place of gentle manners and civility, but most of his trips there seem to end in the gutters with L, drunk. He once heard something about a stupid messiah, but he can’t remember exactly what it was he heard, or where he heard it. He is sure it was at an academic event though, which means that, even if it’s not true, the messiah is invested with the type of seriousness he clings to.

If W resembles the superfluous man of Lermontov then L resembles bicameral man of Jaynes, operating through right brained whisperings in which he fails to recognise his own voice. Troubled by their shortcomings, W and L set out in search of a leader who might dictate the great project of their lives. Unfortunately the leaders they find offer only trite sound bites (‘I’m not interesting’ one of them says, ‘but my thoughts are interesting’, the kind of thing a stock character in a Woody Allen film might say).

At one point W laments that their fates matter to no one, not even to themselves, confirmation that the apocalyptic visions and the desperate search for a leader belong to the same void; the phalanx is formed, it just needs to be told where to march. W’s superfluous man is a token representing an age where even the relative comforts of university lecturer can’t prevent the onset of despair.

When L pays a visit W ‘opens a bottle of Chablis . . unwraps a block of Emmenthal and brings out his sliced meats’ along with olives and home-made bread. A more solidly middle-class existence could not be conceived (L is less comfortable and seems to be plagued by a mysterious damp that welcomes him home, a perverse contrast with the friendly dog W has invents for his own book.) Yet as their evenings together unfold both are plagued by a lack of purpose.

Conversations swing wildly from the opiate to the amphetamine, from indulging a self-consciously stupid lassitude to a panicked febricity. L plans to become a scholar of Sanskrit one week, of music the next, a frantic search for the final score that will consume his life. At the same time however he can’t be bothered to read W’s book properly, and generally his ambitions collapse into yet more wasted time.

W is less desultory in this respect, and is able to remain focused on Talmudic philosophy, though things don’t seem to work out any better for him; his volumes of Rosenweig are annotated with question marks, he ploughs through Cohen but admits he may as well be reading it in Dutch.

This then is the paradox of their lives: they are able to sit at ease, wasting whole stretches of the night staring at ceilings or TVs, yet they do so in the grip of a mania that tells them they are trapped. But if their apocalyptic premonitions are true, wouldn’t the academic leader’s stuffy seriousness be the height of stupidity? And if that’s true then wouldn’t L’s ethereal persona bear the mark of Messianic genius? And wouldn’t their conspicuous incongruity with this world means they themselves are the very leaders they seek?

Their second false-dawn messiah tells them pompously of ‘the interlacing of his life and thought’, an interlacing L & W seem to pull off later in the book when, in contrast to the off-the-peg existentialism of sleek black conference wear, they sit ‘fat and blousy’ at the bar. Mercifully their leaders abandon them. Mercifully W never finds serious conversation and L never tries to think about why he is interesting. Mercifully they do manage to find a pub, and we get to hear about it.

James Wood, Not the Booker review

Bleak, Hopeless, Thought-provoking, Funny

Philosophers can find honesty and modesty a tricky subject, the temptation to add validity to awkward and chaotic intellectualism by simply taking themselves very, very seriously often proves to be unavoidably seductive.

Lars Iyer's 'Spurious' doesn't suffer in this way, much of the enjoyment in reading the book is in the access you are granted to the shortcomings of its characters. Sneer, snipe and scoff along with W. and Lars at their pretentions and vanity, their silliness and pointlessness, their drunkenness and restlessness. Lars self-deprecates. W. verbally defecates on Lars. We enjoy this, it is funny and delivered with wit and spite but mostly it's the pie in face, pants down clownishness contrasted with real intelligence that makes this book worth owning, because despite all of their foolishness they are also worthwhile thinkers. The humour overall plays a lesser role than the weighty, articulate and stylish observations. The mild paralysis in the characters' lives is largely the result of the challenges of philosophical pursuits but it is also the origins of this book's humour.

'Spurious' is an unkempt journal of philosophers behaving uncannily like people; keep it with you for spontaneous thirty minute trips to the pub. Pick passages at random and enjoy their humour, modesty, Englishness and depth.

JKemmetmuller, Not the Booker review

Laurel and Hardy and Kafka and Blanchot

This is a novel that is deeply in love with philosophy, but acutely conscious of the inanities of human thinking and the bottomless pit of the aphorism. Iyer's protagonists – provincial academic philosophers who aspire to Nietzschean heights – are exemplars of Pessoa's definition of decadence: "total loss of unconsciousness". Relentlessly self-aware, they differ from each other only in the strategies they have adopted to cope with their perceived failures. 'Lars' anaesthetises himself with food, alcohol, and 'chav mags': W., his inseparable friend and foil, swinging between rage and despair, jabs and dodges and consoles himself with the thought that however inadequate he may be, his friend offers a horrible example of the further depths to which it is still possible to sink.

Meanwhile, in Lars's flat, the damp extends its empire, as though the whole world were beginning its return to a primal condition of wateriness. The disaster has already taken place…

In 'Spurious' Lars Iyer has managed a difficult trick: he has written a book that is intelligent and unconventional in form but eminently readable, serious yet funny, and not a sentence too long. Laurel and Hardy butt heads with Levinas and Blanchot, Kafka and Rosenzweig in a way that should seem arch but gives birth to a strange poignancy. I highly recommend the experience.

Paul Bowles, Not the Booker review

"What we lack in intellectual ability and real knowledge, we make up for in pathos, W. says."

As someone who has devoted an inordinate amount of my life worrying about literature and philosophy and aesthetics, but who often suspects that I've learned next to nothing for all those hours spent reading, and who knows for a fact that I'm certainly less wealthy for all those hours, and who often wonders, as W. wonders, if I'll every have a halfway decent thought in my entire life, Spurious was an epiphany for me. Because the novel makes it painfully, poignantly clear that a passion for thought, for philosophy, and for literature is a foolish pursuit, a laughable pursuit, but that, for people of a certain temperament, it is also an unavoidable pursuit. Lars and W. have no choice. They will bicker and stumble and read and theorize until the day they die. But they will not be judged, in the end, by success or by failure. They need not be Kafkas, or leaders, or thinkers. They will be judged by the pathos of their character. By their idiotic joys, their nightlong revels, their endless friendship.

For me, this thin, devilish book reframed the rules of my days, and erased a longterm source of doubt and sometimes shame. Because I see now that intellectual pursuits need not have purpose nor consequence. It is not a practical endeavor. It is merely a way of living. A foolish way of living, or perhaps I should say, another foolish way of living. But there's charm and pleasure to be had along the way. And this small revelation has been quite a relief to me. For which I'm grateful.

"How can we breathe?" Lars and W. ask. "But an encounter with a real thinker is precisely that breath."

That's how I felt upon finishing Spurious: that I had been given a much needed breath of air after years and years of suffocating pages.

HenryL, Not the Booker review

Finally the online adventures of Lars and W have been brought to print. For years I have followed the stories of these two friends, brought together by mutual failure, scathing insults, copious amounts of alcohol and conversations ending in blowholes. And now, I can enjoy these stories in succession, turning page after page to find new insults and more insights into these two hilarious minds.

Spurious, named after the author’s long running blog of the same name, is a stuttering narrative of friendship and idiocy. Through a hazy remembrance and nostalgia, Lars and W find their failure in one another, like a mirror into one singular disappointment.

W continually asks where it all went wrong for him. He can see Lars’s failure clearly, having bared witness to his idiocy for years. Lars never tried, not like W did. W had ambition; he was going to be somebody of note. He read for entire days, with nothing in his life but books and a bed. He taught himself German and meticulously worked translating dense philosophy from its native tongue. But somewhere along the line his failure began, a failure cemented when he met Lars. In Lars he sees the details of his failure, the lack of ambition and the utter meaninglessness of it all. Lars on the other hand, faces his failure each time he sees W, as the two settle into a quasi- doctor/patient relationship, in which W meticulously and brutally dissects Lars’s failures but without any resolve.

Whether they are drinking, at a conference, meeting people or travelling, they never escape their failure. Like a Blanchotian death, it hangs over them like an ominous cloud. But while driven by a sense failure and death, Spurious is a darkly hilarious book, self deprecating and brutally honest. It is an effortless read, written with great poise and confidence tht it leaves you wondering how this could be the work of such an idiot.

Ibitsu, Not the Booker Review

Spurious is many things: an attempt to place philosophy into (almost) everyday conversation; an account of a classic existential double act (think Laurel and Hardy, Vladimir and Estragon, Withnail and I, or the psychogeographers of the "Robinson" films); a tale of menace and despair; and an opportunity to see how the narrative logic of the blog can be fitted (or not) to the more traditional framework of the book. Which of these (or other) aspects we wish to dwell on will lead to multiple different readings, different reasons to like or dislike the novel. Personally, I like to read Spurious as an assertion of the importance of friendship in the face of loss and despair. The loss in question seems to be connected to an inability to make connections, to make sense of the world. The world here is like that described by Beckett in ‘The Lost Ones’, an ‘Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one. Vast enough for search to be in vain. Narrow enough for flight to be in vain.’ There is no escaping the search, in Beckett’s formulation, but neither is there any hope for closure. Are Lars and W., the protagonists of this novel, each other's lost one? Is the promise of Spurious that friendship, in all its tender brutality, all its wretched neediness, is still the quality that we search for above all others? It seems telling that this novel, which some reviewers have found plotless, meandering, should finish with the lucid observation that "the plain is the friendship between us on which we are both lost".

Richard Elliott, Not the Booker review

Well, yes, I get horribly depressed. Books come along, and I open them in bookstores, and you see something sort of respectably done, it’s not like it’s badly done, but it makes me want to cut my throat.

Helen DeWitt, interviewed

Blows

He's tried to put me out of my misery, W. says. God knows, he's tried. Hasn't everyone? No one had tried hard enough, that's what W. discerned when we first met. And it became his task, to try hard enough. And what a task! How many times has he tried? How many emails has he sent?

But it won't get through, W. says. I won't hear him. He's resorted to blows, W. says, but it’s like beating a big, dumb animal. It seems pointless and cruel. How can I understand why I am being beaten? I bellow, that’s all. It’s perfectly senseless to me.

He’s drawn pictures, W. says. He’s scrawled red lines across my work, but I have never understood; I’ve carried on regardless.

No!. he writes in the margin. Rubbish!, he writes, underscoring the word several times, his biro piercing the paper. But still I continue. Still I go on, one page after another.

The Argumentum Ad Misericordiam

The argumentum ad misericordiam, that's the name for it, W. says, my basic scholarly move. It's the fallacy of appealing to pity or sympathy, which in my case is implied in the state of the speaker: my bloodshot eyes, my general decay. Don't I always give my presentations as though on my knees?, W. says.

It's as though I'm praying for mercy, W. says, although it's also, no doubt, a plea to put me out of my misery. Kill me now, that's what my presentations say. Don't spare me. Which is why, inevitably, I am spared. It would be too easy to destroy me, W. says. And who would clean up afterwards?

I am not a woman trapped in a man’s body. This body is no man’s; it is mine, it is me, and there is no man in that equation. And I am not trapped in it. There are a million and one ways out of this body, and I have clung to it, tooth and claw, despite an endless line of people and institutions who would rather I vacate the premises, and have sometimes been willing to make me bleed to convince me they’re right.

This body is mine, and I claim it and its bruises, and it is not a man’s, and I am not trapped here. I have looked leaving my body in the eye and I have said, in the end, hell no. There is too much to do, too much to love, too many who need one more of us to say hell no and help them say the same.

little light, the seam of skin and scales (Taking Steps), via Standing in the Shower

Oblivion

He knows what will happen, W. says. Gradually, he'll be forgotten. Gradually, his presence will fade from everyone's life. – 'Where's W.?', they'll ask at first. But later, they will only have a sense of absence, with no knowledge of its cause. And later still, there will be no absence either. Life will be complete again, without tear. – ‘Even you’, W. says. ‘Even you will forget me'. And then, 'especially you'. 

Making A Run For It

He had been waiting for the end, W. says, and still the end surprised him. That’s the lesson, he says: the end will always come too soon. The end will be there, tapping on the window …

They'll put a sack on your head. They'll lead you through the forest. They'll make you kneel … Will you cry out for mercy? Will you accept your fate solemnly, with dignity? Or will you piss and shit yourself in fear? Will you make a run for it before braining yourself on a tree?

For what cause are you dying? You don't know. You'll never understand. It's beyond you, your role in all this. What is certain is that you must die. Your time has come. You thought you had years – decades – but your time has passed, you've outlived your time, this is it …

W. is making a run for it, he says, sack on head. Any moment now, he’ll brain himself on a tree …

Murmurs

Where's it all going? Where's it all leading? Is there a pattern? Is the pattern falling apart? W.'s in the dark, and it's not a propitious darkness. It is not a resting place. There are terrible stirrings out there. Murmurs.

Something is awakening. Something is turning in its sleep. And as it turns, we turn too. Will our lives make sense one day, when it wakes? Will it all become clear on the day another part of us stands and stretches in the sun? 

Poseidon became bored with his sea. He let fall his trident. Silently he sat on the rocky coast and a gull, dazed by his presence, described wavering circles around his head.

Kafka, from 'Poseidon'

The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.

Franz Kafka, from 'The Coming of the Messiah'

I will be speaking in London on the 10th November alongside Michael Stewart, Julian Gough, Mark Thwaite and Sam Jordison at a Not the Booker celebration and online criticism event on 10th November.

It will run from 7.00-8.30 PM at the Book Club at 100 Leonard Street, Shoreditch, EC2A 4RH, and is hosted by Melville House publishing house. For more details, see here.