169 pages
182 mm x 128 mm
90 mm cover flaps
Format: Paperback
Each book comes with one of three specially created bookmarks.
ISBN 978-1-7384394-2-3
£14 (£3 p&p UK)
Good Work, Paul Becker
The space around it echoed, deflecting or reflecting sound, she wasn’t sure which. Sometimes at dawn, it was as though the birds were holding a private chorus inside. It had grown so large that as soon as the sun rose the wood around it was instantly permeated with the aroma of sawdust and pine resin.
Good Work is set within and around the ending, and the making of the ending of Claire Denis’ 1999 film Beau Travail, while in another strand a girl observes a mysterious wooden fortress being assembled in a forest. This, like Becker’s previous book, is concerned with the madness, beauty, and impossibility of making artwork from thin air.
‘What compels about Good Work is the mix of intimacy and unashamed density. It is truly a many-layered text, filled with encounters, names and shadows both unexpected and pleasing - Klaus Nomi - and others more disquieting. What I enjoyed most was the textual risk-taking. A reclamation of the neo-modernist, post-everything sensibility that has been rare in recent literature, and is most satisfying to find here. Good work indeed.’
- Michael Bracewell
‘Captivating and incantatory, Paul Becker’s novel is a thrilling meditation on the tension of creation. Just as we can never know the dancer from the dance, it would be hard to fully separate the gifted author of this book-- its imaginative reach, its dreamlike atmospheres anchored by a very particular conceptual precision, and the ways in which whole worlds spiral out of small observations-- from the splendid artist he is too.’
- Chloe Aridjis
‘Fluid, nocturnal and sensational text. It layers like a skin over the frame of singular. Almost too obscene and not exactly.’
- Misha Honcharenko
The space around it echoed, deflecting or reflecting sound, she wasn’t sure which. Sometimes at dawn, it was as though the birds were holding a private chorus inside. It had grown so large that as soon as the sun rose the wood around it was instantly permeated with the aroma of sawdust and pine resin.
Good Work is set within and around the ending, and the making of the ending of Claire Denis’ 1999 film Beau Travail, while in another strand a girl observes a mysterious wooden fortress being assembled in a forest. This, like Becker’s previous book, is concerned with the madness, beauty, and impossibility of making artwork from thin air.
‘What compels about Good Work is the mix of intimacy and unashamed density. It is truly a many-layered text, filled with encounters, names and shadows both unexpected and pleasing - Klaus Nomi - and others more disquieting. What I enjoyed most was the textual risk-taking. A reclamation of the neo-modernist, post-everything sensibility that has been rare in recent literature, and is most satisfying to find here. Good work indeed.’
- Michael Bracewell
‘Captivating and incantatory, Paul Becker’s novel is a thrilling meditation on the tension of creation. Just as we can never know the dancer from the dance, it would be hard to fully separate the gifted author of this book-- its imaginative reach, its dreamlike atmospheres anchored by a very particular conceptual precision, and the ways in which whole worlds spiral out of small observations-- from the splendid artist he is too.’
- Chloe Aridjis
‘Fluid, nocturnal and sensational text. It layers like a skin over the frame of singular. Almost too obscene and not exactly.’
- Misha Honcharenko
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