Rob Doyle

"Threshold, or, how I learned to stop worrying (about what sort of novel this is) and love the narrator, whose brilliance and humor on drugs and literature, sex and boredom and death, leave me in awe." -Rachel Kushner "Fearless and challenging, inventive and compulsive, unique and utterly heartfelt." -John Boyne “Daring and deranged, endlessly entertaining, furiously funny.” -Geoff Dyer “Playful, potent, lurid, moving, and fearless.” -Lisa McInerney “[A] modern day odyssey.” -Teddy Wayne “A Pilgrim's Progress for our time.” -Mike McCormack “A thrilling mutation . . . [Doyle's] is a journey you don't want to miss.” -Chris Power An uninhibited portrait of the artist as a perpetual drifter and truth-seeker--a funny, profound, compulsive read that's like traveling with your wildest and most philosophical friend. The narrator of Rob Doyle's Threshold has spent the last two decades traveling, writing, and imbibing drugs and literature in equal measure, funded by brief periods of employment or “on the dole” in Dublin. Now, stranded between reckless youth and middle age, his travels to far-flung places have acquired a de facto purpose: to aid the contemporary artist's search for universal truth. Following Doyle from Buddhism to the brink of madness, Threshold immerses us in the club-drug communalism of the Berlin underworld, the graves of myth-chasing artists in Paris, and the shattering and world-rebuilding revelations brought on by the psychedelic DMT, the so-called “spirit molecule.” Exulting in the rootlessness of the wanderer, Doyle exists in a lineage of writer-characters-W. G. Sebald, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, and Rachel Cusk-deftly and subversively exploring forms between theory and autobiography. Insightful and provocative, Threshold is a darkly funny, genuinely optimistic, compulsively readable celebration of perception and desire, of what is here and what is beyond our comprehension.

Threshold

Here are the Young Men

In my case, reading has always served a dual purpose. In a positive sense, it offers sustenance, enlightenment, the bliss of fascination. In a negative sense, it is a means of withdrawal, of inhabiting a reality quarantined from one that often comes across painful, alarming or downright distasteful. In the former sense, reading is like food; in the latter, it is like drugs or alcohol. In Autobibliography, Rob Doyle recounts a year spent rereading fifty-two of his favourite books - from the Dhammapada and Marcus Aurelius, via The Tibetan Book of the Dead and La Rochefoucauld, to Robert Bolaño and Svetlana Alexievich - as well as the memories they trigger and the reverberations they create. It is a record of a year in reading, and of a lifetime of books. Provocative, intelligent and funny, it is a brilliant introduction to a personal canon by one of the most original and exciting writers around. It is a book about books, a book about reading, and a book about a writer. It is an autobibliography.

Autobibliography

Jean-Paul Finnegan stands on board the Ulysses ferry heading home to Ireland. 'Not one person in Ireland has even read Joyce!' he rants, terrifying the passengers around him. A young man in the grip of a dark depression roams the vast, formless landscape of a Dublin industrial park where he meets a strange vagrant in the grip of a dangerous ideology. A woman fleeing the break-up of a long term relationship finds herself taking part in an unusual sleep experiment. A man obsessed with Nietzsche clings desperately to his girlfriend's red shoes.

This is the Ritual

Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Edited by Rob Doyle. The Irish writer Killian Turner disappeared under mysterious circumstances in West Berlin in 1985. He was thirty-seven years old. His disappearance, along with the fictions, aphorisms, sketches, and less easily-categorisable writings he left behind, have ensured Turner's lasting cult reputation. Not only writers, but visual artists, filmmakers, philosophers, and even electronic musicians have found inspiration in his singular body of work. IN THIS SKULL HOTEL WHERE I NEVER SLEEP--and its accompanying installation, which recreates Turner's last known place of residence--is intended as an introduction to the life and work of this disturbing, visionary artist. The volume contains key critical and biographical texts about Killian Turner, as well as Turner's last known work, An Investigation Into My Own Disappearance, which is widely considered to be his suicide note. Additional contributors include Thomas Duddy, Sarah Flanagan, Dave Lordan, John Holten, and Alice Zeniter.

In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep

'Doyle is as good as everyone - from John Boyne to Colm Tóibín - says he is' Daily MailA young man in a dark depression roams the vast, formless landscape of a Dublin industrial park where he meets a vagrant in the grip of a dangerous ideology. A woman fleeing a break-up finds herself taking part in an unusual sleep experiment. A man obsessed with Nietzsche clings desperately to his girlfriend's red shoes. And whatever happened to Killian Turner, Ireland's vanished literary outlaw? Lost and isolated, the characters in these masterful stories play out their fragmented relationships in a series of European cities, always on the move; from rented room to darkened apartment, hitchhiker's roadside to Barcelona nightclub. Rob Doyle, a shape-shifting drifter, a reclusive writer, also stalks the book's pages. Layering narratives and splicing fiction with non-fiction, This is the Ritual tells of the ecstatic, the desperate and the uncertain. Immersive, at times dreamlike, and frank in its depiction of sex, the writer's life, failed ideals and the transience of emotions, it introduces an unmistakable new literary voice.

A young man in a dark depression roams the vast, formless landscape of a Dublin industrial park where he meets a vagrant in the grip of a dangerous ideology. A woman fleeing a break-up finds herself taking part in an unusual sleep experiment. A man obsessed with Nietzsche clings desperately to his girlfriend's red shoes. And whatever happened to Killian Turner, Ireland's vanished literary outlaw? Lost and isolated, the characters in these masterful stories play out their fragmented relationships in a series of European cities, always on the move; from rented room to darkened apartment, hitchhiker's roadside to Barcelona nightclub. Rob Doyle, a shape-shifting drifter, a reclusive writer, also stalks the book's pages.

In my case, reading has always served a dual purpose. In a positive sense, it offers sustenance, enlightenment, the bliss of fascination. In a negative sense, it is a means of withdrawal, of inhabiting a reality quarantined from one that often comes across as painful, alarming or downright distasteful. In the former sense, reading is like food; in the latter, it is like drugs or alcohol. In Autobibliography, Rob Doyle recounts a year spent rereading fifty-two books – from the Dhammapada and Marcus Aurelius, via The Tibetan Book of the Dead and La Rochefoucauld, to Robert Bolaño and Svetlana Alexievich – as well as the memories they trigger and the reverberations they create. It is a record of a year in reading, and of a lifetime of books. Provocative, intelligent and funny, it is a brilliant introduction to a personal canon by one of the most original and exciting writers around. It is a book about books, a book about reading, and a book about a writer. It is an autobibliography.

Irish writing is currently enjoying a renaissance. Strange, original talents are blossoming, wielding styles and perspectives as variant as the inspirations they bring to bear on their work. The Other Irish Tradition seeks to situate this recent flowering within the centuries-long efforts of Irish writers to experiment and to innovate, to make the form of the novel new and strange again. From Laurence Sterne to Flann O'Brien and beyond, this anthology presents both highly familiar and relatively obscure writers from across the history of Irish fiction, offering a fresh perspective on and a provocative reshuffling of the literary canon.

Rob Doyle

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