Price: £8
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The Week You Weren’t Here by Charles Blackstone
A mid-20s American writer, college graduate (almost), and occasional philosopher. Well, that´s at least how his Internet dating profile reads. Hunter Flanagan in reality, or more accurately inside, is obsessive, disturbing, and ambiguous.
The Week You Weren´t Here is a highly original and experimental story that takes you into the mind of Hunter on his journey from living inside his head into the outside world. Through postmodern prose that unravels jaggedly like a spool of live wire, the narrative seeks to make sense out of his landscape, as it reveals it to be a fragmented, overlapping, entangled juggernaut of a young life. We recognise and sympathise, laugh and loathe, at the mass of contradictions that are his thoughts, his actions and reactions. Hunter is as well versed in literary theory as he is in 1980s pop culture but still can´t find the love that relentlessly eludes him despite his best intentions. You´ll fall in love with Hunter Flanagan, but at the same time, you´ll be relieved that your own confessions, t-shirts, and e-mails will never be analyzed by him. You will also find it hard not to admire the brilliance of this entertaining and poignant debut by author Charles Blackstone.
´The Week You Weren´t Here´ is a witty and inventive deconstruction of a young man-as-artist´s pursuit of love among a confusion of choices. It´s as if Kafka´s Joseph K had been commissioned to write a Dating for Dummies (The How Not To version) in the form of a postmodern novel. This is an auspicious debut.´ Jonathan Baumbach
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