Needing an income as he recovered, Mol saw a job advertised for a train guard. “The money you could earn – at least to me – was astonishing,” he enthuses. (Salaries can assume that hallucinatory quality for self-employed authors.) Unlike writing, it required no experience. I think anyone who struggled with ill health or chronic pain will be able to relate to Oliver’s story. The impact that ill health can have on you mentally is something that is different for everyone and not always understood but this book will have you feeling seen in some way or another.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/56677/how-not-to-write-a-novel-by-sandra-newman-howard-mittelmark/9780141038544 I now know what it’s like to be a pinball, bouncing around in different directions, heading off who knows where, having impact and being impacted upon…..and then there’s the pain. AD - PR Product] Huge thank you to Michael Joseph Books for my proof copy of Train Lord which will be published on 21st July! Sometimes you manage to find a book that truly speaks to your soul. The kind of book that you can’t imagine having lived without reading. This was that book for me.

Oliver is not your typical author, no, Oliver is raw and shoots from the hip and appears to be unaware of his affect upon others. The only person who gets to control how you feel is you. Most people spend their entire lives hurting, or being hurt, but that hurting only brings more hurt until your whole world becomes pain.” the scene, like all scenes, like all people, was not good or bad. It was toxic and supportive and elitist and welcoming. It was full of hate and love. The scene was an experiment. We were depressed and excited and scared and motivated. We were anxious.

That invitation extends to you too, listeners! We want your submissions for our Traditional Ghost Story Christmas Special later in the year. Esse Es Percipicrafts a mood of conspiracy in which some aspect of authenticity has been mislaid. If you reroute the story along the lines of a different cultural figure you’ll find that it still rings true. Here’s one I prepared earlier: From that exact moment, fiction, along with the whole gamut of literature, belongs to the genre of drama, performed by a single man in a Paris Review interview or by actors before a Writers’ Festival Panel. In other words, the mannerisms, lifestyle choices, political opinions, daily routines and career trajectories of the Writer are the grist on one side of a publicity machine which expels, on the other, artefacts of public consumption for a digitally connected feedlot of aspiring writers. He tells me about the men who’d come to see his one-man show – these grizzled old blokes in their 50s and 60s – and how they’d wait for him afterwards so they could quietly share stories they’d never felt they could tell anyone else. And of his own father, and how it took the mighty wrench of the migraine – the forced vulnerability of it – for them to find a language through which to communicate. For ten months, the pain was constant, exacerbated by writing, reading, using computers, looking at phones or anything with a screen. Slowly he became a writer who no longer wrote, and a person who could no longer could communicate with the modern world. In literature, and life, Oliver began to disappear. For the first generation of writers to have grown-up online, alt-lit was characterised by the employment of chat-forums and tweet formats as formal constraints and by references to chronic internet use. At their most successful — as in the work of Scott McClanahan or Blake Butler — alt-lit writers can paint a portrait of millennial alienation by toggling unexpectedly between compulsive earnestness and absurdistdetachment.Mol describes his early schooling in the Alt Lit movement, whose writers trade in relentless millennial sincerity. His ongoing project, his compulsion, is to relate every single crying jag, every romantic agony, every session with patient parents who assure him yet again that everything will be OK in the end (which, after a relapse, it will). He even feels like sobbing in the midst of a throbbing orgy.

The impact of the more sensitive anecdotes and descriptions is sometimes weakened by adding music which can sometimes drown out the speech and only detracts from the emotional weight of the story. Tender, vital and quietly hopeful: a tale of remaking … As much about the art, craft and alchemy of storytelling as it is about healing. A beautiful book’ The Guardian In 1967, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares co-authored a piece of short fiction called Esse Es Percipi.In it, the protagonist discovers that the River Plate stadium in Buenos Aires has mysteriously disappeared. He is led to the office of a high-ranking executive who admits that the last soccer match in Buenos Aires took place on 24 June, 1937:And so he and I swap stories in the dark. We talk about Mol’s literary heroes and mentors – Roberto Bolaño, Alejandro Zambra, Scott McClanahan, Amanda Lohrey – and the wild necessity of hope (“My book wouldn’t have worked if it wasn’t a book of hope”). We talk about the fine line that exists between romanticising, patronising and honouring working-class Australia, and the democratising linearity of train travel. We talk about the cringing shame Mol feels about his first book (“I was extremely young and terribly ambitious”), and the humility he feels about his second. And we talk about love.