Testimonals! What THEY saying about the LEAST READ NOVEL OF THE YEAR!
When reading [HoW], I felt like getting lost in the old Foyles bookstore on Charing Cross Rd. I think your book is much a literary reference book as a novel, writers can use it, navigate through the darkness to come and in this sense it works in a similar vein to Edmond Caldwell’s Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant. — Peter Blundell
A big part of the persistent humor is the craven, compulsory, driven, addictive need to write & finish writing books by the inmates. Reminds me of Gene Kelly singing & dancing ‘Gotta Dance!’ in one of his musicals. In the bleak, deadly deathly end-of-the-world dystopia of some years from now, surrounded by starvation, disease, death, universal dysfunctionality, communication breakdowns, & malhumanity, the writers in that house are seriously driven not to “publish or be damned,” but to publish despite being well enough damned. Nor are their writings & publications rewarded by public adoration — indeed, far from it: closer to condemnation & humiliation. In fact, that broken-down end-of-the-world seems the last place on earth to nurture “writers' satisfaction.” However unrewarding, “it’s dirty work, but somebody gotta do it.” This miserable end of the world is amply populated by writers & non-writers all dying out all over the place. The future is so uniformly bleak that you can’t say “fame is the spur” as far as writing incentives go. Posterity itself is on the verge of collapse. The very prospect of a “future” is so ridiculous that the former traditional “3 tenses” are virtually about to be narrowed down to a miserable, threadbare 2, like a scarecrow in a buzzard-infected field. Both the left & right sides of my mouth, near their respective cheeks, suffered from rictus-ache, & it was impossible for me to turn the other cheek. — Marvin Cohen, author of How to Outthink a Wall: An Anthology, and Others, Including Morstive Sternbump
The author photo in the back of the book depicts the
human host environment for M.J. Nicholls the author, who looks more
like the mid-1500s painting The Librarian
by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, more like a construction of books. For nearly
a decade, I’ve known the author as a young Scottish reader of
Dalkey Archive titles, primarily, who posts perfectly phrased,
amusing reviews on a popular book-reviewing site. His novel is a
loyal representation of the spirit of this omni-admired/liked online
manifestation. Perfectly sculpted sentences, awareness of every
reaction a reader might make to the author’s every action, and a
general willingness to err on the side of exaggerated good spirit, to
coax way more amusement than tears, and to eschew the conventional
formula of fiction (conflict, rising drama, poignancy) in favor of
carrying on in a canonical manner from Tristram
Shandy and Quixote
on down to Borges and Christine Brooke-Rose’s Textermination
and the like. Like Perec’s Life: A User’s
Manual more than House
of Leaves, M.J. Nicholls concocts a funhouse
for readers wiling and able to live in an Escherian library stocked
with mirror-bound books. But the parts this reader loved best were
the first thirds of the sections titled ‘This’, those bits where
there’s a sense of a melancholy human slouched in bed with laptop,
addicted to the internet, needing to fill blank pages with text in
the tradition of all those books that make the silent solitary
reading life seem meaningful. — Lee Klein, author of The Shimmering Go-Between
I could be wrong, but I believe this novel was
transmitted into the author’s mind by the illegitimate love child of
Bill Hicks and David Foster Wallace. Like a proverbial middle finger
to the middlebrow, M.J. Nicholls has given himself the Herculean task
of making fiction matter. Usurped by hacks and the hyperactivity of
hyperlinks, meaningful stories have become exceedingly rare. Or, even
worse, are rarely read because who got time for dat? Enter this rare
novel that wages war on corporate mediocrity in a fantastical future
where books are reduced to ego strokes commissioned by rich fucks.
Fiction to match your sofa. Fortunately, Nicholls shreds the
commoditization of our existence like a literary Tasmanian devil with
razor sharp wit. Fierce, original and delirious, The House of Writers
is a comedic masterwork that defies convention. — David David
Katzman, author of A Greater Monster
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