Overview

In Luke Kennard's audacious new novel, a penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr Blend's students react to someone zipped into on oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn term lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own, in particular can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag? Meanwhile, the actor's childhood friend and flatmate forms a vision for monetising this new situation . . . A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.

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9781399826129

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Reviews

Black Bag is a masterpiece from one of the best writers at work today. In his endlessly quotable prose, Kennard explores modern masculinity with compassion and brutal honesty, warmth and despair - through a narrator who, on every page, discovers his true self and simultaneously buries it. Wildly original and funny, yet always underpinned by depth of feeling, this is a novel like no other -- Joe Dunthorne, author of SUBMARINE Equal parts charming and unhinged, Black Bag is the perfect novel for anyone who has ever felt like 'someone is constantly slapping me in the stomach with an old brown shoe.' This is one of hundreds (thousands?) of quotable lines from an immensely talented writer to watch. Luke Kennard, I will follow you anywhere -- Ruth Madievsky, author of ALL NIGHT PHARMACY A stylish, fun, and incisive examination of masculinity, modernity, and attempting to make a living as a creative. It's also a weird little book about and, presumably for, sickos. Reading it hits like a concussion that makes you stranger but more compassionate. Easily the sharpest, funniest thing I've read all year -- Calvin Kasulke, author of SEVERAL PEOPLE ARE TYPING How much can you fit in a large leather satchel? Luke Kennard suggests, when said bag is zipped up around the body of an out-of-work actor trying to find his way, the answer is near infinite: humor, dear friendship, frustrated desire, a talking dog, a wad of cash, hallucinogens, ambition, AI, humility, and no shortage of heart. Black Bag carried me along with a tremendously deft hand: it had me laughing, unnerved, and hopeful as it galloped through a true and strange world. This book left me reckoning with what to make of the society outside my proverbial eye slits, and what, with some effort, we might make of it still -- Emily Nemens, author of THE CACTUS LEAGUE What's most extraordinary about Black Bag isn't just its wry discursions to the psychology classroom, the sex dungeon, or the Swedish sawmill of the mind - though these are rendered with such phosphorescent wit that I could've read a book's worth of each. In Black Bag, we're treated to an uncommonly funny and deeply necessary snapshot of masculinity no more objectionable nor perfect than a black leather bag. Whoever thinks men aren't writing fiction clearly needs to read Luke Kennard -- Rafael Frumkin, author of CONFIDENCE This book walks and talks like a comedic masterpiece. Part SNL sketch, part Spike Jonze film, Black Bag punks everyone and everything, taking aim at high tech, higher ed, and modern-day masculinity along the way. It's also just plain hot . . . The smart and sexy look this season? -- Ben Purkert, author of THE MEN CAN'T BE SAVED I have been agonising over saying something clever, funny and/or unusual enough to do Black Bag justice. I've failed dismally, which somehow seems in keeping with this brilliant novel. It's enough, perhaps, to note that it made me laugh, think, worry about a man on a swan pedalo and almost shed a tear into the dark leather of my own consciousness. -- Will Ashon, author of THE PASSENGERS

Black Bag is a masterpiece from one of the best writers at work today. In his endlessly quotable prose, Kennard explores modern masculinity with compassion and brutal honesty, warmth and despair - through a narrator who, on every page, discovers his true self and simultaneously buries it. Wildly original and funny, yet always underpinned by depth of feeling, this is a novel like no other -- Joe Dunthorne, author of SUBMARINE

Author Information

Luke Kennard is an award-winning poet and novelist. His literary criticism has appeared in the London Review of Books, Poetry London, and Times Literary Supplement. He lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. In 2014 he was named one of the 'Next Generation Poets' by the Poetry Book Society in their once-per-decade list. Cain, was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and described by Alan Hollinghurst as 'the cleverest and funniest thing I've read this year'. Notes on the Sonnets, an anarchic response to Shakespeare's sonnets, won the Forward prize for Best Poetry Collection in 2021. His first novel, The Transition, was BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. His most recent novel is The Answer to Everything. His forthcoming poetry collection, The Book of Jonah, will be published by Picador in 2025.

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