Ebooks & Substack Recommendations

Stuff you can read from me, and stuff I have been reading.

Ebooks.

For those of you who have enjoyed Volume I of Surrender Now, here is a link to the .epub version which you can download, share with friends, or even pass off as your own. The ebook is also available for free download through these online services.

As a bonus, back in 2012 I published a cracked-out little masterpiece called Spectacle City: An Allegory. Now that I am writing and publishing again it seems relevant to revive Spectacle City in ebook form. Here's the blurb:

Until quite recently, twenty-three year old Alexander Smokescreen - named and raised by his mother to do great things - was renowned for his affability and intelligence, and was widely considered a good bloke. But Alexander has lately become a completely different person. He doesn’t talk much to other people, has acquired a habit of muttering to himself as he walks along, and engages in lengthy discourse with his own mirror image. What’s more, his teeth have turned all gnarly from drinking port. Even his friends -- privileged, obnoxious Huw Drop; alchemist, sneak and speedcook Smithton Smith -- are struck by the feeling of something not being quite right.

It is Melbourne Cup Weekend, two thousand and five. In a certain important place a certain phenomenon will occur — i.e., it actually will happen. Awake on a speed bender for the entire four-day weekend, Alexander traverses Spectacle City in pursuit of true meaning in his life, or at least to find a place in the world where he can sit and drink continuously without being interrupted. But he feels curiously as though the universe is a superstructure bent on thwarting his existence: the city is overrun with Punters, taking up space in the traffic jams, taking up airtime on the telly and packing out the trains as they partake, in one lurid, synthetic, besequinned spectacle, of the spirit of unmitigated celebration that attends the Cup. As the famous race approaches, Alexander’s life is rapidly ravelling out from the spool of the city, soon to be chopped like a length of thread once it is sufficiently drawn out.

A critical and satirical rendering of cultural identity in the city of Melbourne, Themistes' literary debut proffers an unflinching analogical inquiry into the twin salves of social malaise: gambling and drug use. Spectacle City is at once comically absurd and deeply moving, invoking the magic and horror of contemporary life; the novel is a rich and tender exposition of grief, alienation and the tragic consequences of being bent on speed and utterly alone in the universe.

And here's a truly mortifying video of me talking about it from ages ago:

And, without further ado, a link to the .epub version and the online book services. I must warn you, however, that due to my technical incompetency on such matters that the formatting for Spectacle City is… suboptimal. If you desire a copy of the print edition with illustrations by Oliver Hunter, there are some in stock here.

Substack Recommendations

The best thing about coming on to this platform has been discovering other writers who enrich my life on a weekly basis through sharing their work in newsletter form. Whenever a new post comes into my inbox from the three writers below, I get tremendously excited and drop whatever I am doing to read, enjoy, and deliberate over the words and ideas they have to share. Substack has connected me to a culture of practice such as is lacking on social media, through which we make meaning of the world through sharing stories about life with each other.

Storyteller Swarnali Mukherjee writes the exquisite Berkana, a mesmerizing series of obscure, overlooked and uncomfortable reflections on culture, power and identity. Mukherjee is well-attuned to the hidden social and political constructs that frame our reading habits: her approach, with wit and penetrating insight, is to propel her readers into a space of discomfort, and thereby release us from our complacency in and complicity with discourses of violence.

Nonetheless, her style is sublime and her offerings are addictive: her Manic Pixie Dream Girl essay eviscerated the clichés of my adolescent idolatry; her exploration of the Yakuza women chilled my blood to ice; and yet, I was moved to great tenderness by her exploration of Bhakti as a quality of the self-realized feminine in remembrance of her late Grandmother. Here is a writer whose scope of interests and fascinations will draw you into a glitteringly obscure vortex of the voices glossed over by history.

The world of Shifra Steinberg’s Absurdus is inhabited by macabre, grotesque, and utterly relatable personages that evoke deep recognition and belly-laughs of bathos. Her prose is exquisite; her craft, I would say, honed to perfection through rigorous self-study and deep understanding of the living power that animates great literature. A self-affirmed student of Jung and Nietzsche, I nonetheless associate Steinberg’s literary cosmos with the notion of the carnivalesque expressed by Mikhail Bakhtin: her writing embodies that will to disturb or transgress ordered reality through revealing the absurd pantomime of our human behaviours.

Steinberg is a force not to be reckoned with when it comes to short stories that showcase hubris and human folly at its utmost; and yet her articles speak to the deeply relatable experiences of anxiety, nostalgia, morbid attachment to zones of comfort, and living with distractions. Did I mention, though, that everything she writes is brilliantly funny? ‘Home For Senile Women’ started me off with a snicker, increased to a chuckle, and ended in a roar of laughter. On top of her literary precocity, Steinberg is also a talented visual artist; I am deeply impressed by Absurdus and the hall of carnival mirrors it invites us into.

The Sample is like Russian Roulette for newsletters: you sign up, then twice a week (or more) the magical algorithm fairies drop something into your inbox which tends to range somewhere between brilliance and insanity. I enjoy the diversity of writing on offer through this service, and have found myself teetering on the cusp of worlds that I didn’t know existed until they plopped into my email. If you are adventurous (and able to take the occasional disappointment into your stride) then I’d highly recommend The Sample.

Last of all, we arrive at Deep Fix: Alex Olshonsky’s weekly meditation on addiction recovery, mental health, and what it means to be in touch with our essential humanity in the era of high-functioning neurosis, workaholism, and social disconnect. The topics of his weekly essays are very near to my heart and closely aligned with my personal experience of healing and recovery from addiction through awakening to higher states of consciousness. Actually, everything he puts forward is deeply relatable and unswervingly relevant, and the appeal of this newsletter is just how near his writing is to the zone of our collective trauma: Olshonsky knows how to invite you into the state of mind that is at once seeking its fix and begging to be healed.

What’s more, Deep Fix has been sufficiently developed to the point that it is no longer simply a newsletter but a point of entry into a healing space: it offers resources, invites community dialogue, and provides much-needed solace from the struggle of going through it alone. Olshonsky is on the pulse when it comes to harnessing the potential of his medium to convey a message of connectivity and wholeness; I see Deep Fix as a template for a way to use storytelling as a modality of healing available to anyone in their time of need.

Olshonsky’s confessional post ‘Beast, Angel, Madman’ achieves precisely this. Offering a concise account of the epic drama of a recovered addict’s life — from childhood trauma all the way through to the rock-bottom experience and the awakening that ensues from it — the skill of this writing its emotive capsulation of each stage of the journey. Therein lies the power of sharing personal stories in the recovery community: we resonate with others’ stories through the lens of our own experience. Our process of recovery is interdependent, to the same extent that addiction is deeply isolating; reading Deep Fix is a valuable reminder that stories of overcoming addiction create a pathway for others to follow.