Preorder ‡ SJ Fowler, BARABUS
£17.50 - £27.50
Tenement #23 / ISBN: 978-1-917304-08-5
150pp [Approx.] / 140 x 216mm
Edited by Dominic Jaeckle
Designed and typeset by Traven T. Croves
Forthcoming, 17.10.25
•
Following the 2022 Tenement publication of Fowler’s MUEUM, shortlisted for the 2022/23 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, a second novella in his percolating trilogy of fictions on the lore and estrangements of work and violence.
•
What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job.
I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg.
Luke 16:3
•
A medic roams an English city, going from call to call. As our protagonist roves from station to station they encounter accident, amusement, injury and error—minor ailment and major catastrophe alike—as they mis/adventure in the functionary detachment of applied temporary medicine. Whilst one tragedy seeds, another never materialises; whilst fear germinates and unease blooms, the plod and pace of a more pedestrian iteration of life prevails.
In a thread of instances laced with blood and banality, gore and gratuity—horrors both benign and ballooning—the medic is Fowler’s working witness to the body’s frailties. In their encounters, they see the structures and strictures and hierarchies of lived experience. How life can be boiled down to the ‘job,’ how a crisis can be crystallised in a single conversation, how calamity can overwhelm the senses, how hope hides in small rooms.
In riverine prose cooked down to concrete, this is a book about long, hard and strange work. The weird of exhaustion, the colour of tarmac, and the breadline of spirit. About the people that attend to the possibility of our continuity. About moral honesty, and what it costs to live in service of the needs of others. BARABUS is a novella about pragmatism in practice and the principled contradiction compounded in the idea of assistance and help. In our witness, we’ve the inversion of a god complex. A take on the idea of salvation lampooned in the function of a worker ‘on call,’ and the prospect of salvation sitting just a phone call away.
If a body is our ‘soft machine,’ as William S. Burroughs would put it, BARABUS is a book keen to picture the hard-edged horizon line of morbidity. A midnight-dark comedy with the bite and temerity of Chris Morris, the acerbity of Peter Weiss, Fowler’s second novella is a paean to the disarming directness of such authors as Yoram Kaniuk and, with the crunch of Anthony Burgess, is a book about our unnamed maladies and all our efforts to overlook them, override them, and correct them.
•
See here for a further word on this title.
•
Order SJ Fowler’s MUEUM alongside BARABUS, the first and second volumes in this trilogy on the make, for a discounted price. MUEUM will dispatch immediately, BARABUS on its October publication.
•
Stickered editions will carry a cover adornment; a clipped excerpt from a photograph by Alexander Kell, © 2024.
•
SJ Fowler is a writer, poet and performer living in London. His collections include I will show you the life of the mind (on prescription drugs) (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020), The Great Apes (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and The Parts of the Body that Stink (Hesterglock, 2024). His work has become known for its exploration of the potential of poetry, alongside collaboration, curation, asemic writing, sound poetry, concrete poetry, and improvised talking performances. He has been commissioned by institutions such as the The National Gallery, Tate Modern, Wellcome Collection and Southbank Centre, and he has presented his work at over fifty international festivals, including Hay Xalapa, Mexico; Dhaka Lit Fest; Hay Arequipa, Peru; and the Niniti Festival, Iraq. Fowler was nominated for the White Review Short Story Prize, 2014, and his short stories have appeared in anthologies, such as Isabel Waidner’s edited collection, Liberating the Canon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018). In 2022, Tenement Press published MUEUM, Fowler’s debut novella, which was shortlisted for the 2022/2023 edition of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses.