Plug: “Remember You’re a One-Ball!”

“Remember You’re a One-Ball!”

At last, “Remember You’re a One-Ball!” has arrived.

Quentin S. Crisp appeared on the writing scene in 2001, with the release of The Nightmare Factory, a collection of short stories published by BJM Press. Since then there have been three more collections of shorter fiction (Morbid Tales, from Tartarus Press, Rule Dementia!, from Rainfall Books, and All God’s Angels, Beware!, from Ex Occidente) as well as a novella (Shrike, from PS Publishing). “Remember You’re a One-Ball!” is his first full-length novel.

The Nightmare Factory and Morbid Tales (2004) established Crisp’s credentials within the field of the macabre. Rule Dementia! (2005) set forth a manifesto for what Crisp has called ‘demented fiction’ – a form of writing steeped in the imaginative freedoms of genre, without the limitations of genre conventions. Shrike (2009) saw the application of these principles in a subtle fusion of Eastern and Western literature.

“Remember You’re a One-Ball!”, written between 2003 and 2005, before Shrike, is the culmination of Crisp’s initial drive towards the demented from his background of the macabre. The result is a narrative that is paced like a thriller, but laced with the bizarre. Long in the wilderness, “Remember You’re a One-Ball!” finally sees the light of day. Is this, as some have suggested, a work too horrible to publish? You, the reader, must decide.

Chômu Press

“Remember You’re a One-Ball!” is the first publication from Chômu Press, an imprint devoted to ‘demented’ and ‘dadaoist’ fiction, as originally championed by Quentin S. Crisp and Justin Isis on the seminal literary weblog, Chômu. The name derives from the nom de plume of a Japanese poet, and is written with the Chinese ideograms for ‘butterfly’ and ‘dream’, an allusion to the story in which Zhuangzi dreams he is a butterfly and wakes to wonder if he is a man who has dreamt he is a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming he is a man. As the name suggests, Chômu Press hope to offer limitless imaginative vistas of what is possible in literature.