Thursday 6 August
6:30-9pm
Galia Admoni and Luke Kennard read from and discuss their new books, each preoccupied, in different forms, with performance, invention and the unstable boundary between inner life and the world as it is lived.
Admoni’s Somebody Should Have Pressed Record is an experimental narrative poem tracing a relationship with an imagined version of Joseph Gilgun. Drawing on auto-destructive art and existentialist fiction, it locates romance at the edge of unreality, where loneliness becomes animate and the figures we conjure begin to make demands of their own.
Kennard’s Black Bag reimagines the campus novel as a study in concealment and estrangement: a penniless actor accepts a job that requires him to sit, unseen, inside a black bag at the back of a lecture hall. At once comic and disorienting, the novel attends to masculinity, usefulness and the odd theatricality of contemporary existence.
Moving between the absurd and the intimate, both books are concerned with the pressure that fantasy exerts on ordinary life: the roles we construct, the presences we sustain, and the cost of maintaining them. The authors will read from their work and be in conversation, followed by audience questions.