'A distant love marks the end of the world for a man who has little else. He drives to find the end of the world with a view to confronting the feeling that has taken over his life. He finds no comfort in God or company.' -- Ben Brooks
'I think, in terms of capturing real suffering, Brooks writes best about heartbreak. In many ways, the narrator of Fences seems to be evacuating all the thought in the book to overcome the loss of his lover, even the things he writes about that are unrelated to it. It all comes back to the distance apart from her and the slow breaking-down of their hypothetical future. And even if the narrator is determined to give up on that, his mind can’t help from bubbling up with thoughts of her or sudden primitive exclamations of “I fucking miss you.”
'Fences is definitely a dope book. It’s described as an “emotional montage” and no matter how many words I put in this I don’t think I could sum it up better than that. A full-throated reconsideration of the world and a photograph of the mind when stuck in the clamps of loss and depression.' -- Forrest Armstrong
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Ana C. 'Please Buy Fences' (0:38)
Mel Bosworth reads from the works of Ben Brooks (1:16)
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JA Tyler: I read recently that you relate the format of your fonts in their variable sizes as something akin to language as volume – talk to us about how you structure writing and when in the process that happens for you:Ben Brooks: The font sizes thing is pretty strange I guess. It was never intended, like I didn’t set out to write something deliberately “wacky.” I think someone once said that I hid a lack of content behind those font sizes. For me its just another tool to be used. Its like someone giving you a whole new box of punctuation marks and telling you not to worry about paragraphing. The sizing and breaks tend to happen during writing, occasionally I go back and alter things but I pretty much know how I want the words to feel as I write them. I don’t really structure plots either. There will maybe be a few bullet points about some scenes I have in my mind, but mostly I just sit and go with things.
JAT: Let’s talk briefly about that notion of content too – how some may wrongly assume the formatting means the content is thin – for those who have not yet read FENCES, what is it about, what is its content, how does it mean?
BB: FSP called FENCES “a private apocalypse.” I think that sums it up well. Its about a man on a road trip, meeting God, watching people grow and die around him, always heading for one person. One person he doesn’t reach. He’s shooting for a hypothetical future with that person but in the process he abandons everything else and that search takes everything over. The book is told in whispered thoughts and screamed phrases. There is no flat-lining. His thoughts are never ordered or confined.
(read the rest)
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Ben Brooks Fences
Fugue State Press
'Deeply Russian in its sense of life, bitter, very funny, and shattered in its love of beauty, Fences by Ben Brooks shows what happens when the art of poetry and the art of the novel get in a head-on collision. Told in flashes and fragments of compressed emotion, this novel tells its story through glimmers of an intense personal narration: about a Russian girl, a librarian and an Italian man's mysterious wife, a hopeless car trip across Europe, judgement, inadequacy, God in his drunkenness, death at the end of time, and the fury of an apocalyptic search for meaning.
'Ben Brooks has invented an involving new form for the novel - emotional montage like experimental film only wishes it could be - but more importantly has cut human desperation into pure form and made it go 180 miles an hour.' -- Fugue State Press
Excerpt:
-------The Italian mans wife will be smoking a cigar and wearing a yellow macintosh. She will say "I still love him" and then cry and try to hug us. Put her into the backseat and give her a blanket. Cartoon animals. Paedophile in the car.
-------Damn. Damn. Damn.
Jesus is in the car behind and he is laughing and nudging our bumper.
-----Jesus drives a Chrysler and does not give a fuck.
-------Liberal parents breeding idiot children in cement tanks on the east side.
Damn.
-------I want to be taller. I wish I was taller.
"Father, could I sit on your shoulders?"
----Cant see nothing down here.
---------"Fireworks are shit anyway son"
And that's it?
-------The end of the world keeps drawing close and then the world does morning or night or something so we have to wait because if we don't wait we wont see it; the scheduled time will pass and we will be dead. But we cant die. Not with you still there Dasha. This hypothetical perfect future still lingering over the North Sea.
-------Dear Dasha,
-----I am sure that you still exist.
--Sometimes I imagine you doing mundane things:
I picture you making tea
-----And smoking;
------Reading and kissing your dog;
-----Smiling and crying at the same time–
---I know that you still exist,
Because you are doing mundane things
----And if you didn't exist anymore
---You would be stealing cars with french artists
-----Or pissing into the North Sea.
"I want to stop here for the night"
"Last night was the last night"
"Last night I left my husband"
"God is an animal"
"Bastard"
"I want to sleep in your skin"
"I want to sit behind your eyes"
(continued)
Read a second, more substantial excerpt
Ben Brooks is a young author of fiction, poetry, and plays from the southwest of England. His first novel is Fences (Fugue State Press, 2009). His second novel An Island of Fifty will be published by ML Press this June. He has had work in Succour, Willows Wept Review, Dogzplot, and many other places.
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Fugue State Press
'Deeply Russian in its sense of life, bitter, very funny, and shattered in its love of beauty, Fences by Ben Brooks shows what happens when the art of poetry and the art of the novel get in a head-on collision. Told in flashes and fragments of compressed emotion, this novel tells its story through glimmers of an intense personal narration: about a Russian girl, a librarian and an Italian man's mysterious wife, a hopeless car trip across Europe, judgement, inadequacy, God in his drunkenness, death at the end of time, and the fury of an apocalyptic search for meaning.
'Ben Brooks has invented an involving new form for the novel - emotional montage like experimental film only wishes it could be - but more importantly has cut human desperation into pure form and made it go 180 miles an hour.' -- Fugue State Press
Excerpt:
-------The Italian mans wife will be smoking a cigar and wearing a yellow macintosh. She will say "I still love him" and then cry and try to hug us. Put her into the backseat and give her a blanket. Cartoon animals. Paedophile in the car.
-------Damn. Damn. Damn.
Jesus is in the car behind and he is laughing and nudging our bumper.
-----Jesus drives a Chrysler and does not give a fuck.
-------Liberal parents breeding idiot children in cement tanks on the east side.
Damn.
-------I want to be taller. I wish I was taller.
"Father, could I sit on your shoulders?"
----Cant see nothing down here.
---------"Fireworks are shit anyway son"
And that's it?
-------The end of the world keeps drawing close and then the world does morning or night or something so we have to wait because if we don't wait we wont see it; the scheduled time will pass and we will be dead. But we cant die. Not with you still there Dasha. This hypothetical perfect future still lingering over the North Sea.
-------Dear Dasha,
-----I am sure that you still exist.
--Sometimes I imagine you doing mundane things:
I picture you making tea
-----And smoking;
------Reading and kissing your dog;
-----Smiling and crying at the same time–
---I know that you still exist,
Because you are doing mundane things
----And if you didn't exist anymore
---You would be stealing cars with french artists
-----Or pissing into the North Sea.
"I want to stop here for the night"
"Last night was the last night"
"Last night I left my husband"
"God is an animal"
"Bastard"
"I want to sleep in your skin"
"I want to sit behind your eyes"
(continued)
Read a second, more substantial excerpt
Ben Brooks is a young author of fiction, poetry, and plays from the southwest of England. His first novel is Fences (Fugue State Press, 2009). His second novel An Island of Fifty will be published by ML Press this June. He has had work in Succour, Willows Wept Review, Dogzplot, and many other places.
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