Solip

But the lack of everything, is forming quite a blank. And the testament I give can’t hold such a rupture: The unholy blank, a middle, around it another pillow blank. These things, in accordance, are not conducive to electrical strain (ME to YOU), So let’s play:

Confession time: Ken Baumann’s debut Solip isn’t a novel. Think of how it feels to watch an engrossing film; now imagine becoming that film, your vision little more than a flickering image, your body just a burst of white vinyl. Baumann’s non-novel, a vast detonation of language, not only captures that feeling, but also challenges you not to be held in its thrall. Indebted to Samuel Beckett and Gaspar Noe, Solip asks the reader to give up all human prejudice and surrender to life’s new texture, the flesh become word: a code all Baumann’s own, which bludgeons language as much as it opens prose fiction up to the highest horizon. Solip is a world for those who already dwell in the sentence, an anarchic hell that sounds something like heaven, by one of America’s most promising young writers.

Ken Baumann lives in Los Angeles, California. He’s worked as an actor for ten years in film, theater, and television. He currently stars in The Secret Life of the American Teenager, a series on ABC Family. His fiction, poetry, and essays have been published at VICE, Juked, HTML Giant, The New York Tyrant, Lamination Colony, and elsewhere. Baumann also runs Sator Press, a nonprofit that publishes innovative literature.