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LoveSexTravelMusik: Stories for the Easyjet Generation

This book is the logical short story form extension to my other submissions, being an exploration of how collapsing the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction can create a more energizing novel form for the 21st Century, as urged by David Shields in Reality Hunger, David Peace in his entire ouvre, and Gordon Burn in Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel. My work is consistently about the theme of doubt, and this is created across this collection by providing a series of overlapping but distinct voices which suggest a truth which exists somewhere in the middle of the different voices. In terms of originality, the most important of these stories are ‘Orientation Number 1’, ‘Orientation Number 2’ and ‘Orientation Number 3’. Set in Rome, Copenhagen and the Amazon Rainforest respectively, these are a series of spoof tour guides to each of these places, which start out as traditional tour guides but which contain a slippage in each case, into more personal interpretations of each space, zooming in and out of the lives of individuals, back and forth in time, and blending real characters with fictional ones. A notable case of this is Charles Dickens, who here appears in the Piazza del Popolo, watching a beheading in the 19th Century, composing his travelogue Pictures from Italy in the same spot which is contrasted with a 21st Century demonstration against Western intervention in Syria. These stories seek to show the multiple conflicting personalities of each venue, and also suggest to the reader intended readings of the other stories in the collection, which are bookended by these ‘orientations’, which are in fact disorientating.