Writing

as i stand living flier “In As I Stand Living, Christopher Higgs vitalizes the memoir with irreverent intelligence and savage emotion, an emotion that preys on insecurity as much as desire, truly human emotion—cerebral and untamed. This book is a gift of hope in a dreadful time, an equal distribution of sorrow and glee.”—LILY HOANG, author of A Bestiary

“[In As I Stand Living], Higgs dispenses with the pleasantries and strictures and familiar contrivances of narrative nonfiction for the sake of something true and honest and brazen: he allows the book to exist in its affirmative, differential, nomadic state—the state of pure becoming.”— EVAN LAVENDER-SMITH, author of From Old Notebooks

“Simultaneously superficial and profound—like all worthwhile books—As I Stand Living is a highly-relatable manifesto against relatability.”— DODIE BELLAMY, author of When the Sick Rule the World

“[As I Stand Living] is a constraint-based and totally fresh-faced memoir-redux of Faulkner in fragments about creation, childbirth, the lakers, torture, embarrassment, community, the internet, confession, anatomy, film, so much more, and all that in a way that feels absolutely anti-pretentious, like reading someone’s secret list of shit they’d never say aloud.”— BLAKE BUTLER, author of 300,000,00

“[In As I Stand Living], the big questions of life sneak up on you as you read it, from the role of art in life to the experience of parenthood. Out of the smallest details can come revelations.”— TOBIAS CARROLL, author of Reel

Available NOW at the website.

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I am pleased to announce the release of ONE (my collaboration with Blake Butler & Vanessa Place) now available from Roof Books. It’s an experiment wherein Blake wrote the exterior perspective and Vanessa wrote the interior perspective; then I assembled the two into ONE.

Here’s the jacket copy:

From the room inside the room, from the house inside the house, memories of a one-legged father and various acts of jurisprudence haunt the mysterious creature who writhes in somatic isolation from one waking nightmare to another. Here, two writers have produced textual bodies: one speaking for the interior and the other describing the exterior, while a third writer has assembled these two bodies into a single grotesque symphony of chimerical language. A hitherto unprecedented collaborative experiment, ONE defies categorization and heralds a new approach to exploring the boundaries of authorship and narrative.

And here’s the blurb from Dennis Cooper:

In theory or even usually, three contemporary majors like Butler, Higgs, and Place interlocking works inside a single book would leave users fannishly dissecting more than reading, but One is something way else. It’s as sublimely integrated as any single-minded novel I can think of, but with this absolutely crazy mega-wattage. I.e., not since Ashbery and Schuyler co-made A Nest of Ninnies, but, whoa, even more so.

REVIEWS

Peter Tieryas Liu says, “I read it three times. My first cold reading was as confusing as watching ten chess matches without any idea of the rules. You recognize something brilliant is happening, but you have to know the parameters to fully appreciate it. […] Reading One is a struggle in the best sense of the word. This is literature that challenges readers in ways that few books do, both demanding multiple readings and indifferent to readers who choose not to do so.”

Will Kaufman says, “The book reads like a fever dream of abstraction, and I imagine that if this text came pouring out of one of his patient’s mouths, Freud would probably become sexually aroused.”

Laura Carter says, “This text, and its assemblage, show the talents of Butler, Place, and Higgs not only as craftsmen but also as thinkers of landscapes, and the filmic quality of the book is one of its highlights.”

You can get it on Amazon.

At Barnes and Noble.

At Books-A-Million.

Or through Small Press Distribution.

If you are interested in reviewing it or conducting an interview, please email me!

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