“A big-gulp master work by the bard of American exile, Travis Jeppesen.” 

—Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus 

“With a mix of premeditation and spontaneous ideation, Jeppesen’s writing both unleashes and is shaped by a torrent of concise, pithy and luminous observations, tied together in syntactical bundles that both defy stable significations and ground them in the object.” 

—Daniel Sherer, Princeton University 

Meet Elias Brynn Mrdok, known simply as Mrdok, a self-made billionaire who has everything he wants and needs, and often, a bit too much of it. What Mrdok doesn’t have yet is his own private island. So, when he discovers Sagosia, a former pirate colony in the lost Pseudotropical region known as the Brown Sea, he decides to take it over the only way he knows how – roughly, and under the guise of “philanthropy.” But merely possessing his own island isn’t quite enough for a man of Mrdok’s ruthless appetites; together with his algorithmically-selected band of .01% elites, he elects to declare sovereignty and launch his very own country. Mrdok’s country will be just like America, only with all the bad parts cut out. You know, like taxes. And poor people. A country where the investors dictate the rules instead of running from them, where no one spies on you or tells you where you can or cannot drill. A great island nation where only the privileged invited few can live, where the indigenous locals know their place and stick to it, and where nobody cares about stupid niggling little details like where you put the apostrophe in this country’s new name, “Settlers Landing.” It will be the deal of the century.

What could possibly go wrong? Well, a lot, it turns out – especially when you throw in an infinite-release opioid manufactured by North Koreans, a CIA-funded civil war being fought by veterans afflicted with untreated PTSD, a poet laureate suffering from aphasia, and a dog that speaks in rhyme. In a shifting, episodic narrative often narrated by Mrdok’s comically verbose sycophantic sidekick Gordo, we watch in terror, fascination, and disgust as his plan comes together and falls apart. A pitch-black perverse comedy of manners for the (post-?) Trumpian era; perhaps the novel that this century deserves!

EVENTS:

November 28th, 7pm, Los Angeles, at Stories Books & Cafe, w/ Bradford Nordeen

More info here.

December 6th, 7pm, New York at POWERHOUSE @ the Archway, w/ Joshua Cohen

More info & tickets here

Copies of the novel are available for pre-order here.

Thanks, as always, for your support!

Sat Sep 16 2023 at 04:00 pm to 06:00 pm

Asymmetry HQ, 102a, Albion Drive, London, United Kingdom

A letter, a line, a passage: a sea of syllables shores up bodies dreamt, dreams remembered, of places foreign yet familiar, always already lost yet impossible to forget. Libraries are where literature-bodies go to rest only to live on forever, time and again, from the lingering finger to the moving lips.

To conclude the 2023 Librarian-in-Residence programme, we welcome three writers — Minying Huang (poet, Oxford), Travis Jeppesen (novelist, Berlin), and Eric Yip (poet, Cambridge) — to the Asymmetry HQ for an afternoon reading of recent and unpublished works. In tones ranging from the confessional to the observant, by intervals sardonic and devastating, they are united by a queer zest for the ephemeral, the not-yet and the in-between.

The event is convened by our librarian-in-residence Alvin Li, who will have a conversation with our guests after their reading.

Minying Huang is a poet, writer, and doctoral student in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. A former Barbican Young Poet, their work appears in fourteen poems, wildness, Palette Poetry, Foglifter, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. In 2021, they were shortlisted for the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize. They grew up in Cambridge, UK.

Travis Jeppesen is the author of numerous books, including Wolf at the Door, All Fall: Two Novellas, The Suiciders, See You Again in Pyongyang, and Bad Writing. His calligraphic and text-based art work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Wilkinson Gallery (London), Exile (Berlin), and Rupert (Vilnius), and featured in group exhibitions internationally. In April 2023, his play Ghosts of the Landwehr Canal was premiered at Berliner Ringtheater under the direction of Ping-Hsiang Wang, and in November 2023, Itna Press will publish Jeppesen’s latest novel, Settlers Landing.

Eric Yip has published his poems in The Poetry Review, Magma, The Adroit Journal, and Best New Poets. He won the 2021 National Poetry Competition and was shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written. He was a Poetry Society Young Critic with reviews forthcoming in Poetry London and Magma and is a co-host of Ying Si Hak Yi, a Cantonese podcast on global Anglophone poetry. He has performed his work at venues including St Paul’s Cathedral, The Common Press, Verve Poetry Festival, and BBC Radio 4. He was born and raised in Hong Kong and is currently based in Cambridge, UK, where he studies.

Free tickets can be booked here.

a play by Travis Jeppesen

directed by Wang Ping-Hsiang

2 – 5 April 2023

Berliner Ringtheater

“They thought I’d been shot to death. But there I was: a failed suicide in Berlin. Capital of the failed suicides. A place you might go and truly die while remaining forever alive. This entire city is full of ghosts in case you’ve never noticed?”

In 1919, just months after the Russian Revolution and the failed German Communist Revolution of 1918/19, the executed body of the Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg was dumped unceremoniously in the Landwehr Canal in Berlin’s city center. One year later, a woman would attempt to end her life by jumping off the Bendlerstrasse bridge into the same canal. Rescued and sent to a mental institution where she refused to give her identity, she was known for a time only as Fräulein Unbekannt – until launching a new career in which she claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, having somehow managed to survive the assassinations of the Russian Revolution…In this wildly imaginative work, the ghosts of these two enigmatic historical figures are joined by a worker ant having been separated from her colony. Left to wander through a Berlin suspended in time between two centuries, with the Landwehr Canal emerging as a symbolic division between the land of the living and the dead, as well as an excavation point for Berlin’s psychogeography, this multi-disciplinary work combines the anarchic linguistic inventiveness of Travis Jeppesen’s writing with dance, sound and video art, all under the direction of Taiwanese theater maverick Wang Ping-Hsiang.

A coproduction between TATWERK and Berliner Ringtheater.Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of NEUSTART KULTUR and by the National Culture and Arts Foundation Taiwan.

Media partner is TAZ. Die Tageszeitung.

World Premiere: 2 April 2023 | 8 p.m.

Further performances: 3 – 5 April 2023 | 8 p.m.

Berliner Ringtheater auf dem Gelände der Alten Münze, Am Krögel 2, 10179 Berlin

Tickets: 15€ / reduced 9 € (plus advance booking fee) available here

I’ve started a Substack. It will serve as a living archive of my writing, from the past up till now, going back 25 years and encompassing both published and unpublished work. Subscribers will get gradual access to every word I’ve ever written.

I’ll be posting 4-5 times a week.

Sign up at travisjeppesen.substack.com

“Intimate Publics, then, is both an homage to a formative place and time and a poignant assertion of its legacy: an intimacy of common sensibilities that will live on in memory—which is perhaps the place it was always destined for.”

On Osheyack’s latest album, in the June edition of Artforum.

A review of Skye Arundhati Thomas’s Remember the Details at Asian Review of Books.

A review of Liu Zhenyun’s novel Strange Bedfellows at Asian Review of Books.

Ten new short stories, in the latest issue of Mousse.

A new-old poem, at Slug.

On Huang Xiaopeng in December’s Artforum.