about this book

What would you say if you had one ideal chance to speak yourself—to create a language that spoke across time to those you have loved, to those you have wronged, to all those countless human and non-human lives that have intersected with and impacted yours, with or without your knowledge?

Max Porter’s All of This Unreal Time takes this idea—the poetic concept of ‘perfect speech’—and turns it into a wild, psycholo-delic apology rant. With peerless linguistic skill, he shifts between a single speaker’s self-lacerating ‘apology’ and an excavation of family trauma, late-capitalist guilt and rage, and the shame that attends—that must attend—modern masculinity.

All this is, of course, handled with the usual slipperiness and smarts—where nothing is quite as it seems, and everything is pregnant with its opposite. A shape-shifting tour de force of voice and concept from this exciting contemporary writer.

With a foreword by Cillian Murphy.

This book was selected by Tique for Objects & Sounds.