Tunnelling my way into a new book through the predictable rubble of notes, journal entries, epistemological cave-ins and losses of nerve, under the working title What For God’s Sake Is This Even.
Meanwhile, publication of The End of Everything will make 2026 a lifetime lifestyle benchmark for me, so here’s the cover in case you haven’t seen it yet–
Pre-order, obviously, at your outlet of choice.
Ribbons of dead people wind across the vast floor of Processing, each ending at a terminal. Everyone has their assigned queue. It’s a long wait, and the queues are sometimes mischieviously organised, so that victims wait next to their rapists and exploiters; while the celebrities, politicos, tech CEOs and aristos-turned-pimp of Earth, used to special treatment, find themselves sharing space with the very people who had no idea what they were up to. Now, before they can be judged, they have to face their delusory image of themselves, as the victims look on. Edi, who died of cancer years ago, sits at her terminal, and subjects them to a wake up call of managed humiliation.
The quality of the dead arriving at Edi’s terminal has been poor for some time. She blames–among other things–social media and consequent performative living, in which fantasy determinedly replaces the reality of being alive. Processing the Dead in these numbers would be “an adminstrative nightmare of universal proportions”, even without the mysterious event happening down there on Earth… The Delusions is a satire in the manner of Self, Pelevin or Welsh. Also a big novel compressed into a small space, as if Jenni Fagan had decided to pack Sachaverel Sitwell”s Journey to the Ends of Time; Wyndham Lewis’s Childermass; and Powell & Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death into a 300 page overnight bag. It’s livelier than the first two, and neatly reverses the implied hierarchies of the third.
Click the pic & you might able to make out, on the far right, The End of Everything—
I’ve been waiting to be able to promote this for some time: Lara Pawson’s savage and superb Spent Life, with an introduction by Teju Cole, joins the McNally Editions list this Autumn. Every book on that list has something to it, something that will get under your skin. & their presentation is just beautiful.
Delighted to be joining Lara there soon with Climbers, more news on that as soon as I get it.
From an interview with Alejandro Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 2000) in today’s Guardian—
“It’s when you are liberated from the narratives that we are so addicted to – plot twists and all that – when you liberate the images from that, the images have to say something,” he said. “Not by serving any narrative, but by just being what I found. The way you remember a film is never complete, you always remember flickers, images, moments. That’s the way our memory works. So, this is kind of a representation of how our memory works when we remember a film – it’s fragments of light and memory that are not related, but in a way they mean something, they hopefully make you feel something.”
Calculated return. Articulate theories of memory & the real. His process then & now. Why–it turns out–Amores Perros is one of my top ten films. Ever.
the m john harrison blog 