AN EVENING OF TENDERNESS AND AMUSEMENT: A Waxy Pith occasion.

A reading by Jacob Wren from his recently published book,
Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed.

PHOTOS: Brancolina

 

Set in a dystopian near-future, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed is a novel – a kind of post-capitalist soap opera – about a group of people who regularly attend ‘the meetings.’ At the meetings they have agreed to talk, and only talk, about how to re-ignite the left, for fear if they were to do more, if they were to actually engage in real acts of resistance or activism, they would be arrested, imprisoned or worse. Revenge Fantasies is a book about community. It is also a book about fear.

Characters leave the meetings and we follow them out into their lives. The characters we see most frequently are the Doctor, the Writer and the Third Wheel. As the book progresses we see these characters, and others, disengage and re-engage with questions the meetings have brought into their lives. The Doctor ends up running a reality television show about political activism. The Third Wheel ends up in an unnamed Latin American country, trying to make things better but possibly making them worse. The Writer ends up in jail for writing a book that suggests it is politically emancipatory for teachers to sleep with their students. And throughout all of this the meetings continue: aimless, thoughtful, disturbing, trying to keep a feeling of hope and potential alive in what are starting to look like increasingly dark times.

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REVIEW by Chicago Centre for Literature and Photography

REVIEW by Chris Kraus:

“Jacob Wren’s work has always explored the dissonance between psychodynamics – which reveals the ambiguities and possibilities of human behavior – and the deadening psychic economy of capital. In Revenge Fantasies, he demonstrates how deeply literary these concerns are. Whether depicting the intricate mood-shifts of a triangulated romance, or chronicling the inchoate optimism of marathon group meetings designed to identify ‘what went wrong’ with the left, or recasting the recent political past as dystopian sci-fi, the novel is fascinating, lurid and highly accomplished, evoking the best of Colette, Robert Musil and Julio Cortazar.”