{"title":"Books by Sam Riviere","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781474617666","title":"Dead Souls","description":"\u003cp\u003e'Mordant, torrential, incantatory, Bolano-esque, Perec-ian, and just so explosively written that I had to stop and shake the language-shrapnel from my hair and wipe it off my eyeglasses so I could keep reading' Jonathan Lethem\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'Full of clever postmodern flourishes, self-referential winks and riotous set pieces. It's funny, smart and beautifully written' Alex Preston, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'I absolutely adored \u003ci\u003eDead Souls\u003c\/i\u003e. Reading it felt like overhearing the most exhilarating, funny, mean conversation imaginable--which is to say it made me extremely happy and I dreaded it ending' Megan Nolan, author of \u003ci\u003eActs of Desperation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e'I first heard about Solomon Wiese on a bright, blustery day on the South Bank...'\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLater that evening, at the bar of the Travelodge near Waterloo Bridge, our unnamed narrator will encounter that very same Solomon Wiese.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn a conversation that lasts until morning, he will hear Solomon Wiese's story of his spectacular fall from grace.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA story about a scandal that has shaken the literary world and an accusation of serial plagiarism.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA story about childhood encounters with nothingness and a friend's descent into psychosis; about conspiracies and poetry cults; about a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost and the death of an old poet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA story about a retreat to the East Anglian countryside and plans for a triumphant return to the capital, through the theft of poems, illegal war profits and faked social media accounts - plans in which our unnamed narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated...\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA story that will take the entire night - and the remainder of the novel - to tell.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'Reading \u003ci\u003eDead Souls\u003c\/i\u003e feels like discovering the British Bolaño, and not just for the gleeful dismantling of the cultural ego: the restless, searching sensibility; the precise tuning-in to contradictory voices. I haven't been so excited by a debut novel in a long time' Luke Kennard, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Transition\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'Elegant, ambitious, very serious and very funny' Katharine Kilalea, author of \u003ci\u003eOK, Mr. Field\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'Sublime, legendary, delightfully unhinged. A rare and brilliant pleasure' Nicolette Polek, author of \u003ci\u003eImaginary Museums\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43204543840434,"sku":"9781474617666","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781474617666_946f8f89-a041-46c4-b255-d57da9db414b.jpg?v=1786020940"},{"product_id":"9780571380985","title":"Conflicted Copy","description":"\u003cp\u003eSam Riviere is a past master of taking and exploiting ‘found’ content and process and transforming it into poetry that captivates and unsettles. Here, he harnesses anxiety about AI only to exploit it for his own extraordinary ends. In this case, Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2), an open source neural network , is used to produce poems that, stripped of the usual authorial clutter, find themselves nonetheless cohering around a voice that speaks of the uncertainties, fears and desires of a world that is desperately, poignantly and recognisably human.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'Riviere’s machine language, often delightfully clunky, also has its magical aspects, unplugging and rebooting our perceptual apparatus as we look over the shoulder of machines clumsily figuring us out. . . In turning poetry towards machine language, Riviere quietly kicks off a poetic revolution for our time.' \u003ci\u003eGuardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44581240996018,"sku":"9780571380985","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780571380985_3d9cc43c-ba3e-49ca-8337-5f41f0fa0321.jpg?v=1786015312"},{"product_id":"9780571321438","title":"Kim Kardashian's Marriage","description":"\u003cp\u003eSam Riviere's debut, \u003ci\u003e81 Austerities\u003c\/i\u003e, began as a blog responding to the spending cuts, and went on in publication to win the 2012 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA sequel of sorts, the 72 poems in \u003ci\u003eKim Kardashian's Marriage\u003c\/i\u003e mark out equally sharpened lines of public and private engagement.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eKim Kardashian's 2011 marriage lasted for 72 days, and was seen by some as illustrative of the performative spectacle of celebrity life. Whatever the truth of this (and Kardashian's own statements refute it), Riviere has used the furore as a point of ignition, deploying terms from Kardashian's make-up regimen to explore surfaces and self-consciousness, presentation and obfuscation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHis approach eschews a dependence upon confessional modes of writing to explore what kind of meaning lies in impersonal methods of creation. For, as with \u003ci\u003e81 Austerities\u003c\/i\u003e, the process of enquiry involves the composition method itself, this time in poems that have been produced by harvesting and manipulating the results of search engines to create a poetry of part-collage, part-improvisation. The effect is as refractive as it is reflective, and disturbs the slant on biography until we are left with a pixellation of the first person. \u003ci\u003eKim Kardashian's Marriage\u003c\/i\u003e is a captivating examination of artifice and reality, privacy and exposure, and an uncanny commemoration of the contemporary moment.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56291395273077,"sku":"9780571321438","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780571321438_dc9a97a9-3b96-4bc9-a388-9aee6bbb69af.jpg?v=1786014837"},{"product_id":"9780571356928","title":"After Fame","description":"\u003cp\u003eWelcome to \u003ci\u003eAfter Fame \u003c\/i\u003e– an ambitious and resonant engagement with the epigrams of the Roman poet Martial, which completes the loose trilogy of Sam Riviere’s process-derived works.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was Martial who first used the term ‘plagiarism’ in its modern sense as a kind of literary theft. Here, the notion is tested even further through the figure of a distracted scribe who, by means of various methods of transcription, including the use of machine translation and creative embellishment, presents a copy of Martial’s famous \u003ci\u003eBook I\u003c\/i\u003e unlike any other. These 118 poems cover timeless themes such as work, friendship, public life and sexual mores, and, as they unfold, are increasingly interrupted by reflections on authorship, technology, cultural complicity and the privileged, mediating role of the poet: all fixations of Martial’s work that still resonate today.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNot strict translation, bona fide reproduction nor wholly original writing, \u003ci\u003eAfter Fame\u003c\/i\u003e challenges the integrity of such categories. So liberated, it dramatises the obscurity of its source, refraining from easy equivalences, while insisting on its contemporary relevance.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56292385816949,"sku":"9780571356928","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780571356928_1d739629-3b3b-4a9b-b9dc-39a0cdf7d6ff.jpg?v=1786014736"},{"product_id":"9780571289035","title":"81 Austerities","description":"\u003cp\u003eAll three-dimensional objects can be experienced in two dimensions: it just takes some careful unpicking of the seams.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWitty, comic, plaintive, touching, acerbic, droll, cavalier, caffeinated, irreverent, stringent: \u003ci\u003eAusterities\u003c\/i\u003e, the mind-altering substantial debut from Sam Riviere, seems to achieve the impossible in being all things at once. Initially conceived as a response to the 'austerity measures' implemented by the coalition government in 2011, the poems quickly began taking on a life in kind: 'cutting' themselves on levels of sentiment, structure and even subject matter. Not content to merely build a series of freethinking poems, these remarkable pieces seem eagerly and mischievously to analyze their moment of creation, then weigh their worth, then consign their excess to the recycling bin thereafter. Experience is speedy, the poems seem to say, so dizzyingly fast that the poetry will inevitably be running to catch up - often arriving at a scene the moment after the moment has gone. The effect is as funny and it is startling, beguiling as it is surprising, and makes \u003ci\u003eAusterities \u003c\/i\u003ea vivid reminder that deprivation, as Leonard Cohen put it, can be the mother of poetry.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56292666704245,"sku":"9780571289035","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780571289035_5a912194-dc6f-4a1b-803a-54aebeea19bd.jpg?v=1786014541"},{"product_id":"doppelganger","title":"Doppelganger","description":"\u003cp\u003eEvery bit as dazzling and unexpected as \u003ci\u003eDead Souls\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eDoppelgaenger \u003c\/i\u003eis a Russian doll of a novel, where layers give way to more layers, a hall of mirrors with endless reflections leading to the heart of the mystery, or possibly nowhere - it is hard to tell.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe story is set in a fictional English university town in the near future and follows the rise of a contagious 'twinning' trend among its students, which has unexpected outcomes on the artistic practices and individual subjectivities of those affected. The narrative sweep includes nefarious art collectors, AIs posing as poets, itinerant 'intimacy' professionals, and dramatises both the ambiguous allure of the collective and the dubious autonomy of the individual in market-led creative fields. We find ourselves in the absurdist literary tradition of Witold Gombrowicz, Antal Szerb, Roberto Bolaño.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs the proliferation of doubles increases, the patterns of duplication point to the presence of a mysterious 'third' - some suspect the phenomenon has a source beyond their everyday horizons . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is fiction at its cleverest, at its most challenging, and most self-reflective. It is also very funny. The reader embarks on a quest with uncertain outcome, and Sam Riviere keeps us on our toes throughout with his wit, his stylistic brilliance and his matchless mind.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57503632195957,"sku":"9781399639415","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781399639415.jpg?v=1786867339"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-sam-riviere.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}