Happy to announce that my first book of short stories/fictocriticism will be out on November 27th—yep, Thanksgiving in the US of A—on Schism, Gary Shipley’s excellent imprint. You’ll be able to order copies close to the date; in the meantime, if any reviewers want an ARC, please send me a message and I’ll make sure that happens for you…
The cover art below is by the excellent artist (and my former colleague at Artforum, from which I resigned in May) Alex Jovanovich —
For Those Who Hate a Little Bit of Everything
stories/fictocriticism by Travis Jeppesen
“Outlandishly surreal – these short stabs of linguistic psychedelia and poetic virulence make my cerebral cortex itch as if infected. Darkly comic, absolutely unsettling and somehow… weirdly sexy. Creepy and irresistible.”
-Lydia Lunch
A girl awakens to find herself turning into a plant. A rich dandy becomes obsessed with a pickpocket, to the extent that he attempts to become his next victim. A giant struggles to evade imprisonment in a porn star concentration camp. A funny thing happens on the way to the veterinary sex change clinic…
For Those Who Hate a Little Bit of Everything, Travis Jeppesen’s first collection of stories and fictocriticism, is an absurd yet profoundly philosophical investigation into hyper-marginalized existence. With the anarchic imaginativeness that animates his long-form fiction – which has been lauded by the likes of Blake Butler, Joshua Cohen, and Tom McCarthy – as well as the incisive, playful wit that readers of his art writing have come to relish over the past two decades (and that led Bruce Hainley to christen him “the Weird Al Yankovitch of art criticism, but gayer”), Jeppesen’s deranged parables are unlike anything south of Kafka, occupying their own distant planet of discord and disarray.
Travis Jeppesen’s most recent books include Settlers Landing, an epic novel named one of the best books of 2023 by Dennis Cooper; See You Again in Pyongyang, a work of narrative nonfiction which was listed as one of Paris Review‘s Best Books of 2018; and Bad Writing, a collection of his essays on art. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Artforum, Bookforum, Mousse, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Frieze, Art in America, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. He is the recipient of an Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, and his object-oriented writing installation, 16 Sculptures, was featured in the Whitney Biennial. Formerly a professor of writing at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Industry at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Jeppesen is currently based in Berlin.