Paperback: 184 pages
Language English
ISBN-10: 0955282942
ISBN-13: 978-0955282942
Product Dimensions: 20.2 x 12.6 x 1.8 cm
EVERYDAY takes the reader for a dawdle into the moribund heart of London. This extraordinary collection of stories - featuring pigeons, putrefying exotic dancers, lost loves, boredon, cliche, lacklustre derives, banality, sexual violence, the male gaze, a murderous acquisition of a tortuously blank book, and the sad demise of the number 38 bus - reinvents reality, that is at once sordid, hilarious and tender.
EVERYDAY can be purchased at: Amazon.co.uk, The Book Depository, Foyle's, Beat the Dust and all good bookshops.
Praise for EVERYDAY:
"Dark and seamy stuff - London from p.o.v. pigeon-in-gutter" Tom McCarthy, [author of Remainder, Men in Space, Tintin and the Secret of Literature].
"EVERYDAY is a guide book of sorts: a dark, twisted, hysterical and macabre map of the twilight city which lurks underneath our nation's capital. This magnificent collection is living proof that the short story is alive and well and living in London". Tony O'Neill, [author of Digging The Vein, Seizure Wet Dreams, Songs From the Shooting Gallery and Down and out on Murder Mile.].
"Sick, depraved and utterly mad, with no redeeming features whatsoever. I loved it". [Stewart Home].
"Everyday is Lee Rourke's first collection of short stories for tipped publisher Social Disease and is a work deserving of any reader's attention. A disparate set united by boredom, ennui and a London backdrop, leading light of the self-styled Off-Beat Generation Rourke stakes his claim as heir apparent to greats such as Ballard, Joyce or Houellebecq. In these dark-hearted insights explored with supreme finesse, he succeeds in writing arguably the first believable London book of the decade." Ben Myers, The Guardian [author of 'The Book of Fuck' and 'The Missing Kidney']
"EVERYDAY is an essential read for misanthropes, alcoholics and slubberdegullians." Dazed and Confused.
"Everyday marks an exciting debut. Glibly humorous and with a big, blackened heart, Rourke is a leading light of 'The Off-Beat Generation' . . . Here he delivers a stunning collection charting the tormented lives of everyday misanthropes." ShortList Magazine.
"So this is what EVERYDAY is, then. Not Dubliners but Londoners; a Dostoevskyan tale of Poor Folk; a proletarian classic inflected with a modern(ist) sense of absurdity in all its comic and tragic reverberations. A book of outsiders, from outside hegemonic culture; tales from the margins; a drama of superfluous men and women. Sometimes they have literally been made redundant, which is what they have always been anyway." Ellis Sharp [Author of Walthamstow Central, The Dump, Aria Fritta].
"Rourke portrays a London strung between mysterious history and bland modernity . . . He peoples his brief fictions with happy-slapping teenagers, office juniors miserable to the point of hallucination, murderous amateur psychogeographers and even, in his most visceral illustration of capitalism's sharp-end, a putrefying corpse performing as a lapdancer. These misfits, cynics and disappointed dreamers don't show the reader much of a good time, and yet somehow you feel enlivened for having crossed their path." Chris Power, BBC Online.
"Rourke's stories are dense with authentic London detail - only someone who regularly takes the 38 bus can understand why it might be appropriate to set a story on it - and manage to be at once bleak and jaunty." John O'Connell [Time Out].
"The people in his stories float in and out of each other's lives, via a chain of bad dates and brief sexual liaisons, wine-misted meetings in bars. Events frequently turn violent, even - on one occasion - murderous. People snap, they break up, they break down, they break out, or at least, they try to. London has a strong hold, its grip is tight. A common theme is the chucking in of a dead end job, of people reaching their snapping point, hitting their limits and walking away. It's a familiar urban impulse, to just stop. Or, alternatively, to keep going - and going - to break free of the grind, to ride the tube to the end of line, to hop off the bus at a stop that's not yours [...] Rourke's writing is brisk, fresh and supremely readable." Natasha Tripney, RSB.
"That sense of Chekhovian boredom (where a conversation "is becoming a bore;" dinner "rouses in me nothing but boredom and irritation;" "you could die of boredom;" "sheer boredom;" "his life is dull, nothing interests him;" "life is a snare and a delusion;"), the "continuous shifting and shuffling" through everyday life, and an indifference ("philosophers and sages are said to be indifferent. It isn't true. Indifference is paralysis of the soul, premature death") permeates these fragments of Rourke's. Admittedly it is hardly original, yet this writer, by looking at the pavement and writing from the point-of-view of the pigeons, has crafted miniature masterpieces, made all the more captivating for his enduring fascination with repetition." Susan Tomaselli [Dogmatika]
"Both contemporary and nostalgic, EVERYDAY peers beneath the surface of life in the capital and around it, documenting every moment that passes and unflinching in despair at what it finds. This is a celebration of the banal, avoiding the pretension of the modern novel". A. Stevens, Editor, 3AM Magazine.
"Each of these engaging stories is maked by strong beginnings and endings, he never lets them fade into oblivion. Ultimately, behind the darkness there is a sense of values and a desire for the truth, which in my view makes these stories so much more meaningful than simply urban 'fragments'. This is truly excellent writing." Adian Graham.
"The near Zen-like obsessiveness with which Everyday catalogues the mundane and the pointless occasionally threatens to overwhelm; the sheer volume of failed redemptions and missed opportunities is almost too much to absorb. This too, is surely deliberate; for Everyday is very much a novel of London, in thrall to a monolithic, uncompromising vision of the capital. The city is meticulously observed." Andrew Fleming, 3AM Magazine.
"As the most prominent literary prize in the UK, the Booker should draw attention to works that interrupt mere craftsmanship as they seek more than "a good plot" and "finely tuned sentences". Though not a novel (and thereby ineligible), Lee Rourke's own EVERYDAY is an admirable example of a writer going in the opposite direction to the Man Booker." Stephen Mitchelmore, This Space.
"Everyday is a series of short stories or ‘fragments’ that consider the run of the mill moments in human existence. Everyday doesn’t tell grand stories about great love affairs or tragedies, but instead considers the daily activities of a group of bored individuals. Which is not to say the stories are boring. Some of them are wickedly funny, others poignant, and a few deeply disturbing." Lisa Glass, Vulpes Libris.