Wish I Was Here

An Anti-Memoir

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M. John Harrison: Wish I Was Here (Hardcover, 2023, Serpent's Tail Limited)

Hardcover, 224 pages

English language

Published May 24, 2023 by Serpent's Tail Limited.

ISBN:
978-1-80081-297-0
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5 stars (1 review)

M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, magical and literary realism. But is there even an M. John Harrison and where do we find him?

This is the question the author asks in this memoir-as-mystery, turning for clues to forty years of notebooking: 'A note or it never happened. A note or you never looked.'

Are these notebooks, or 'nowtbooks', records of failed presence? How do they shine light on a childhood in the industrial Midlands, a portrait of the young artist in countercultural London, on an adulthood of restless escape into hill and moorland landscapes? And do they tell us anything about the writing of the books, each one so different from the last that it might have been written by another version of the author?

1 edition