Jen Calleja

In a time when looking into the past has become a socially unacceptable and illegal act in the Nation, a group of scholars are offered an attractive residency to allow them to pursue their projects. When the residency transpires to be a devastating trick, these Researchers go on the run, and soon discover that their projects all relate to one major event: the Isletese Disaster - the decline and subsequent devastation fifty years earlier of a long-forgotten roaming archipelago called The Islets. One figure emerges as central to all of their work: Hester Heller, a reformed cult musiker turned student recruited from the Institute for Transmission as an agent of the state and tasked with gathering reconnaissance on the Disaster by using her old band Vehicle as a cover. Heller is the key to the Researchers collective story, which they try to piece together while evading their pursuers. Compiled from the Researchers' disparate documentation, recollections, and even their imaginations, Vehicle is a timely and daring exploration of xenophobia, exploitation, the writing of histories and legacies, and the politics of translation.

A Verse Novel

Vehicle

I'm Afraid That's All We've Got Time For

As formally inventive as readers have come to expect from one of the most daring writers around, and as wild and tricky as its subject matter requires, ‘Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode’ presents us with a series of essays and poems that playfully, artfully propound Jen Calleja’s theory of “goblin hood” – a theory that takes in film, literature, art, and the author’s own distinct and wholly original intellectual and physical response to the world. Goblinhood is a perpetually and variously curious, visceral addition to Calleja’s remarkable oeuvre.

Goblin as a Mode

Goblinhood

Goblins explores the beasts we’ve loved, hated, and longed to be. In a searing exploration of her personal obsessions and preoccupations—from disturbing 80s fantasy films and uncanny puppets in modern art, to sexual predators in music scenes and her longing to ‘become a goblin’ like her icons and fellow performers in DIY punk—Jen Calleja shows us the ways she has lived in relation to these base, hungry, selfish and carefree creatures.

Jen Calleja

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