David Keenan

This Is Memorial Device, the debut novel by David Keenan, is a love letter to the small towns of Lanarkshire in the west of Scotland in the late 1970s and early 80s as they were temporarily transformed by the endless possibilities that came out of the freefall from punk rock. It follows a cast of misfits, drop-outs, small town visionaries and would-be artists and musicians through a period of time where anything seemed possible, a moment where art and the demands it made were as serious as your life. At its core is the story of Memorial Device, a mythic post-punk group that could have gone all the way were it not for the visionary excess and uncompromising bloody-minded belief that served to confirm them as underground legends. Written in a series of hallucinatory first-person eye-witness accounts that capture the prosaic madness of the time and place, heady with the magic of youth recalled, This Is Memorial Device combines the formal experimentation of David Foster Wallace at his peak circa Brief Interviews With Hideous Men with moments of delirious psychedelic modernism, laugh out loud bathos and tender poignancy.

An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Music Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978-1986

This Is Memorial Device

WINNER OF THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2019 Sammy and his three friends live in the Ardoyne, an impoverished, predominantly Catholic area of North Belfast that has become the epicentre of a country intent on cannibalising itself. They love sharp clothes, a good drink, and the songs of Perry Como - whose commitment to clean living holds up a dissonant mirror to their own attempts to rise above their circumstances. They dream of a Free State, and their methods for achieving this are uncompromising, even as they fully indulge in the spoils of war. Keen to make a difference, the boys find themselves in the incongruous position of running a comic-book shop taken over by the IRA. Their clandestine activities belong in the x-rated pages of graphic fiction: burglary, blackmail, extortion, torture, and murder - and they become transfixed by the initiatory possibilities of free-reign criminality. But when punk rock arrives and the hard edge of the decade starts to reveal its true paranoid colours, Sammy finds himself increasingly isolated, especially after bizarre and gruesome away days in Glasgow and London. Camaraderie and loyalty is the fuel of a terrorist cell. When those virtues prove faulty, the game is up - and Sammy's world starts to shrink as he is assaulted by terrifying visions. For the Good Times shouts and sings with visionary depth and power. It is not just a book about the IRA, but an exploration of what it means to 'go rogue', of the heartbreak and devastation that commitment to 'the cause' can engender, of ideas of martyrdom, fatherhood, and self-sacrifice. It unpacks any dewy-eyed romance associated with the Troubles while re-visioning it as a time of psychological and spiritual intensity where the nature of day-to-day reality itself was up for grabs. And through a dizzying amalgam of modernist prose, roughhouse vernacular and hallucinatory Irish humour, it establishes David Keenan as one of our most fearless literary stylists.

For the Good Times

'This book spoke, it said "read me" from the very first sentence as if it were alive, it gave me visceral joy' Kim Gordon 'Reading [Xstabeth] feels like being cut open to the accompanying sound of ecstatic music' Edna O'Brien 'Prepare for more of that inimitable Keenan narrative voodoo brilliance' Wendy Erskine In St Petersburg, Russia, Aneliya is torn between the love of her father and her father's best friend. Her father dreams of becoming a great musician but suffers with a naivete that means he will never be taken seriously. Her father's best friend has a penchant for vodka, strip clubs and moral philosophy. When an angelic presence named Xstabeth enters their lives - a presence who simultaneously fulfils and disappears those she touches - Aneliya and her father's world is transformed. Moving from Russia to St Andrews, Scotland, Xstabeth tackles the metaphysics of golf, the mindset of classic Russian novels and the power of art and music to re-wire reality. Charged with a consuming intensity and a torrential rhythm that pulses with music, it is an offering of transcendence and a love letter to the books of Chandler, Nabokov and Dostoevsky, by a writer who is rewriting the rulebook of contemporary fiction.

Xstabeth

Is it possible for books to dream? For books to dream within books? Is there a literary subterranea that would facilitate ingress and exit points through these dreams? These are some of the questions posed by David Keenan's masterly fifth novel, Monument Maker, an epic romance of eternal summer and a descent, into history, into the horrors of the past; a novel with a sweep and range that runs from the siege of Khartoum and the conquest of Africa in the 19th century through the Second World War and up to the present day, where the memory of a single summer, and a love affair that took place across the cathedrals of Ile de France, unravels, as a secret initiatory cult is uncovered that has its roots in macabre experiments in cryptozoology in pre-war Europe. MONUMENT MAKER straddles genres while fully embracing none of them, a book within a book within a book that runs from hallucinatory historical epics through future-visioned histories of the world narrated by a horribly disfigured British soldier made prophetic by depths of suffering; books that interact with Keenan's earlier novels, including a return to the mythical post-punk Airdrie landscape of his now classic debut, THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE; whole histories of art and religion; books that are glorious choral appendices; bibliographies; imagined films; tape recorded interviews; building to a jubilant accumulation of registers, voices and rhythms that is truly Choral. Written over the course of 10 years, MONUMENT MAKER represents the apex of Keenan's project to create books that contain uncanny life and feel like living organisms. It is a meditation on art and religion, and on what it means to make monument; this great longing for something eternal, something that could fix moments in time, forever.

Monument Maker

A businessman experiences a breakdown when he arrives in the town of St Andrews on the east coast of Scotland in order to audit a military air base. Obsessed by his estranged daughter, who he believes is walking the streets at night, the unnamed businessman starts to look to art and ritual in order to redeem this new reality, even as time itself appears out of joint, as old WWII fighters appear in the skies and his twin brother, his double or personal daemon, wreaks havoc in his name. The Towers The Fields The Transmitters is a magical novel that channels the surreal paranoia of Kafka, Burroughs, Bolaño and Philp K. Dick, while asking big questions about the nature of art, its ability to re-frame reality, and its moral culpability in aestheticizing suffering and despair. Written in a high-octane style and with a visionary sleight of hand that digs deep textual tunnels between Xstabeth and itself, The Towers The Fields The Transmitters is the next stage in Keenan's radical re-thinking of the possibilities of the modern novel.

The Towers The Fields The Transmitters

David Keenan's book miraculously weaves the history of all three bands into one fascinating narrative.

A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground

England's Hidden Reverse

Industry of Magic & Light is a love letter to the counterculture of the 1960s and a requiem for its passing. The much-anticipated prequel to Keenan's cult classic debut, This is Memorial Device, Industry of Magic & Light is set in the same mythical Airdrie in the 1960s and early 70s and centres on a group of hippies running their own psychedelic light show. Told in two halves - the first in the form of an inventory of the contents of a caravan abandoned by one of the hippies, the second in the form of a tarot card reading - it is not so much a book about the 1960s as a direct channelling of the decade's energies, bringing to life how even the smallest and dreariest of working class towns felt so full of possibility in the wake of the psychedelic moment. Via artefacts from the time - everything from poetry chapbooks, record reviews and musical instruments through bubblegum wrappers, bicycle repair kits and mysterious cassette recordings - the book opens out into adventures along the hippy trail in Afghanistan and behind the Iron Curtain that leads a cast of new and returning characters - as well as the authorities - to believe that they are literally making magic. Simultaneously a forensics of the 1960s, a detective novel, an occult thriller, a vision quest, and the hallucinatory exposition of a moment where it felt like anything was possible, Industry of Magic & Life brings to life the streets of small working class towns as transformational sites of utopian joy.

Industry of Magic & Light

To run wild in it is a book about tarot, an experimental novella, a 'channelled' text and an extension of ideas first broached in David Keenan's acclaimed debut novel, This is memorial device. Tasking that maxim that the best way to understand the tarot is to create your own, Kerenan and Hollington have reimagined the deck as the unfolding of parallel stories alive with uncanny or oracular detail.

To Run Wild in It: a Handbook of Autonomic Tarot

A transcendent love letter to literature and music, Xstabeth is an exciting new work from a writer who, book-by-book, is rewriting the rules of contemporary fiction. Aneliya's father dreams of becoming a great musician but his naivete and his unfashionable music suggest he will never be taken seriously. Her father's best friend, on the other hand, has a penchant for vodka, strip clubs, and moral philosophy. Aneliya is torn between love of the former and passion for the latter. When an angelic presence named Xstabeth enters their lives Aneliya and her father's world is transformed. A short, stylish novel with a big heart, humor, Xstabeth moves from Russia to Scotland, touching upon the pathos of Russian literature and the Russian soul, the power of art and music to shape reality, and the metaphysics of golf while telling a moving father-daughter story in highly-charged, torrential prose.

An expanded edition of the classic exploration of the English esoteric musical underground—with the first biography of Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound. This newly expanded edition of England's Hidden Reverse, the classic exploration of the English esoteric musical underground that includes the first, and only, biographies of Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound, is based on exclusive interviews and unprecedented access to all three bands’ personal archives. Together, these genre-defying bands and their circles represent the English underground in all its cultural, artistic, and sexual variety. Over four decades, the three intertwined groups have maintained a symbiotic, yet uneasy, relationship with the mainstream of popular culture, even as their music, beliefs, and practices have repelled them from it. Theirs was a clandestine scene whose work accents the many occulted peculiarities of Englishness that flow through generations of outsiders, channeling personalities as diverse as Aleister Crowley, Arthur Machen, Joe Orton, Shirley Collins, Björk, and Marc Almond. The story of this Hidden Reverse has, necessarily, remained a secret. Until now. This new volume contains almost 100 pages of extra material culled from Furfur, a collection of interviews with musicians and artists whose careers intersected with the bands’, initially published alongside Strange Attractor's first limited edition of the book.

England's Hidden Reverse, revised and expanded edition

Basée sur des interviews exclusives et un accès sans précédent aux archives personnelles des trois groupes, voici la première biographie de référence consacrée à Coil, Current 93 et Nurse With Wound. Basée sur des centaines d’heures d’interviews avec les membres des groupes, ainsi qu’avec des contemporains, amis et associés, EHR met en lumière une scène anglaise underground obscure, dont l’œuvre met l’accent sur les particularismes du caractère anglais au travers de liens et affinités tissés avec les générations précédentes de marginaux et outsiders britanniques. EHR nous transporte de la Threshold House originelle des deux membres de Coil, John Balance et Peter « Sleazy » Christopherson, basée à Chiswick, à l’ancienne école pour garçons dans laquelle ils se sont plus tard installés, située à Weston-super-Mare, en passant par la bergerie de Steven Stapleton, de Nurse With Wound, et son environnement consacré à l’art visionnaire à Cooloorta dans le sud de l’Irlande, et nous fait atterrir sur le toit d’une maison de Muswell Hill, où David Tibet, de Current 93, eut la vision d’un Oui-Oui crucifié dans le ciel. De là, le livre plonge dans le passé et accélère le temps : témoignages oculaires des premiers concerts de Whitehouse, formation de Throbbing Gristle et naissance de la musique industrielle, derniers instants de la vie du peintre visionnaire Charles Sims, évocation d’Angus MacLise, ex-membre du Velvet Underground, présentant son poème Year comme une Œuvre de magie élémentaire, et visions de l’Angleterre éternelle par Shirley Collins, AE Housman et Denton Welch. La première édition, épuisée depuis longtemps, atteignant des sommes considérables chez les collectionneurs, cette édition augmentée très attendue a totalement été revue : elle comprend deux nouveaux chapitres, un résumé final de la manière dont Reverse a changé de vitesse depuis sa première publication et un chapitre zéro intitulé Le crime en appelle à la nuit, dans lequel Keenan présente un argument audacieux nous lançant sur les traces de l’énergie transgressive qui anime la culture industrielle, depuis l’art rupestre paléolithique jusqu’à la musique noise contemporaine, en passant par le rock’n’roll et le punk rock.

ENGLAND'S HIDDEN REVERSE Coil, Current 93, Nurse With Wound

CAMION BLANC

Soundings of an Unnamed Bird

Chi Yun

In this major undertaking David Keenan translates and contextualizes over 100 tales from the Notes from the Hut for Examining the Subtle, a collection of 1,200 tales and observations by Chi Yun, one of eighteenth century China's leading intellectuals. By illuminating neglected aspects of the interaction between popular and elite cultures in late imperial China, this study portrays the rich connection between life and letters on the eve of the Western impact.

David Keenan

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