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#Service by John Tottenham publishes today 📚

‘What’s this book about? Is there a restroom? Do you have gluten-free bagels? Do you work here? Do you have a restroom? Do I buy books or rent books or what?’

Still a bookseller in his late forties, Sean knows that the worst thing about a bookshop is the customers. Then there’s the gift-wrapping, the invoicing, the Yelp reviews. The overwhelming sense of self-loathing after another day of not writing a novel yourself.

Biting, hilarious and self-aware, John Tottenham’s debut novel of a cynical English bookseller working in a LA bookshop is a razor-sharp dissection of gentrification, friendship, jealousy and the role of literature in a digital age.

📚 ‘Tottenham writes with a rare comic intensity… an unforgettable character in fiction’ Colm Tóibín

📚 ‘My favourite nihilistic romantic’ Rachel Kushner

📚 ‘Savage, furious, hilarious and melancholic all at once’ Financial Times

📚 ‘Laugh-out-loud funny and nearly always bang-on true’ Daily Mail

John Tottenham's Service in the Financial Times in "A best New debut Novel round up: "Situations that would be tragic in life become delightful when burnished by a fine prose style. John Tottenham magically transmutes existential despair, romantic disappointment, ageing, drug use and a despised day job into high comedy in Service (Semiotext(e) $17.99/in the UK from November 6, Tuskar Rock £14.99). Terminally weary Sean, late forties, is trying to write a novel (this novel, in fact), while working shifts in a bookshop in a rapidly gentrifying area of Los Angeles. The sudden influx of hip youth into a working-class neighbourhood is just one of the things Sean cannot abide, as cheap, authentic bars and eateries close and reopen as gaudy, overpriced facsimiles of their former selves. Toting their phones, the giddy incomers tumble into his store, the perfect backdrop for their social media posts. Some of them even want books, but Sean quickly discourages that. Pages and pages detail his inability to invent characters or settings, so his masterwork will have to be a novel about a man who works in an LA bookstore who’s trying to write a novel. A critical local barista offers suggestions Sean struggles to incorporate, such as creating a convincing female character or a sex scene. As the demands of his clientele escalate (Do you have a washroom? Where can I find Kafka? Do you have The Artist’s Way?), Sean is heading for a spectacular crack-up. Service manages to be savage, furious, hilarious and melancholic all at once."

John Tottenham's Service in the Financial Times in "A best New debut Novel round up: "Situations that would be tragic in life become delightful when burnished by a fine prose style. John Tottenham magically transmutes existential despair, romantic disappointment, ageing, drug use and a despised day job into high comedy in Service (Semiotext(e) $17.99/in the UK from November 6, Tuskar Rock £14.99). Terminally weary Sean, late forties, is trying to write a novel (this novel, in fact), while working shifts in a bookshop in a rapidly gentrifying area of Los Angeles. The sudden influx of hip youth into a working-class neighbourhood is just one of the things Sean cannot abide, as cheap, authentic bars and eateries close and reopen as gaudy, overpriced facsimiles of their former selves. Toting their phones, the giddy incomers tumble into his store, the perfect backdrop for their social media posts. Some of them even want books, but Sean quickly discourages that. Pages and pages detail his inability to invent characters or settings, so his masterwork will have to be a novel about a man who works in an LA bookstore who’s trying to write a novel. A critical local barista offers suggestions Sean struggles to incorporate, such as creating a convincing female character or a sex scene. As the demands of his clientele escalate (Do you have a washroom? Where can I find Kafka? Do you have The Artist’s Way?), Sean is heading for a spectacular crack-up. Service manages to be savage, furious, hilarious and melancholic all at once."

LA’s premier poet of regret and resentment (according to the @lareviewofbooks), John Tottenham’s Fresh Failure is a staff rec at Shakespeare & Co., Paris’ most famous bookshop, English or otherwise. If you haven’t had the pleasure of sitting with Tottenham’s poetry, do yourself a favor and start here. Indiscriminate disdain and humor await.

John Tottenham’s Age Daily.
Now available on agedaily.com.
Inaugural publication.
-
30 Pages, Full-Color on Ivory Wove
Wrapped in The Financial Times
While Supplies Last.
Edition of 300.
-
obsessive drawings of girls, their heads repeating, stacking, forming inky plumes of smoke. Sneering men in the country, desolate towns.
-
John Tottenham is a poet and artist living in Los Angeles. He is the author of several books of poetry (The Inertia Variations, Antiepithalamia) and a novel called Service from @semiotexte / @serpentstail .
@johntottenham recommends New Grub Street by George Gissing— a novel about amoral opportunism, poverty and literary ambition in late-Victorian London.
—
$14 at agedaily.com
#johntottenham

John Tottenham’s Age Daily.
Now available on agedaily.com.
Inaugural publication.
-
30 Pages, Full-Color on Ivory Wove
Wrapped in The Financial Times
While Supplies Last.
Edition of 300.
-
obsessive drawings of girls, their heads repeating, stacking, forming inky plumes of smoke. Sneering men in the country, desolate towns.
-
John Tottenham is a poet and artist living in Los Angeles. He is the author of several books of poetry (The Inertia Variations, Antiepithalamia) and a novel called Service from @semiotexte / @serpentstail .
@johntottenham recommends New Grub Street by George Gissing— a novel about amoral opportunism, poverty and literary ambition in late-Victorian London.
—
$14 at agedaily.com
#johntottenham

John Tottenham’s Age Daily.
Now available on agedaily.com.
Inaugural publication.
-
30 Pages, Full-Color on Ivory Wove
Wrapped in The Financial Times
While Supplies Last.
Edition of 300.
-
obsessive drawings of girls, their heads repeating, stacking, forming inky plumes of smoke. Sneering men in the country, desolate towns.
-
John Tottenham is a poet and artist living in Los Angeles. He is the author of several books of poetry (The Inertia Variations, Antiepithalamia) and a novel called Service from @semiotexte / @serpentstail .
@johntottenham recommends New Grub Street by George Gissing— a novel about amoral opportunism, poverty and literary ambition in late-Victorian London.
—
$14 at agedaily.com
#johntottenham

John Tottenham’s Age Daily.
Now available on agedaily.com.
Inaugural publication.
-
30 Pages, Full-Color on Ivory Wove
Wrapped in The Financial Times
While Supplies Last.
Edition of 300.
-
obsessive drawings of girls, their heads repeating, stacking, forming inky plumes of smoke. Sneering men in the country, desolate towns.
-
John Tottenham is a poet and artist living in Los Angeles. He is the author of several books of poetry (The Inertia Variations, Antiepithalamia) and a novel called Service from @semiotexte / @serpentstail .
@johntottenham recommends New Grub Street by George Gissing— a novel about amoral opportunism, poverty and literary ambition in late-Victorian London.
—
$14 at agedaily.com
#johntottenham

John Tottenham’s Age Daily.
Now available on agedaily.com.
Inaugural publication.
-
30 Pages, Full-Color on Ivory Wove
Wrapped in The Financial Times
While Supplies Last.
Edition of 300.
-
obsessive drawings of girls, their heads repeating, stacking, forming inky plumes of smoke. Sneering men in the country, desolate towns.
-
John Tottenham is a poet and artist living in Los Angeles. He is the author of several books of poetry (The Inertia Variations, Antiepithalamia) and a novel called Service from @semiotexte / @serpentstail .
@johntottenham recommends New Grub Street by George Gissing— a novel about amoral opportunism, poverty and literary ambition in late-Victorian London.
—
$14 at agedaily.com
#johntottenham

John Tottenham’s Age Daily.
Now available on agedaily.com.
Inaugural publication.
-
30 Pages, Full-Color on Ivory Wove
Wrapped in The Financial Times
While Supplies Last.
Edition of 300.
-
obsessive drawings of girls, their heads repeating, stacking, forming inky plumes of smoke. Sneering men in the country, desolate towns.
-
John Tottenham is a poet and artist living in Los Angeles. He is the author of several books of poetry (The Inertia Variations, Antiepithalamia) and a novel called Service from @semiotexte / @serpentstail .
@johntottenham recommends New Grub Street by George Gissing— a novel about amoral opportunism, poverty and literary ambition in late-Victorian London.
—
$14 at agedaily.com
#johntottenham

Evan and John discuss The Fall’s 1991 album “Shift Work,” among other things

Here's the cover and back cover of the UK edition of John Tottenham's Service coming out on November 6th with Tuskar Rock, the imprint of Peter Strauss and Colm Toibin.

This review is out online and in the new print issue of the New York Review of Books

A night to rejoice in and remember. Courtesy of @ruby.zuckerman

A night to rejoice in and remember. Courtesy of @ruby.zuckerman

Thursday April 24. Doors: 7 pm. Reading 7:30 pm. Please join Semiotext(e) and the Poetic Research Bureau to celebrate the publication of John Tottenham’s novel Service.

Reading by: Paul Gellman, Rachel Kushner, Evan Laffer, and Ian Svenonius.

Followed by a conversation between John Tottenham and Colm Tóibín
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A journalist in his late forties—having lost his job as a consequence of the death of print media—finds himself working at a bookstore in a rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhood. His new form of employment becomes a toxic wellspring for his observations on gentrification, debt, friendship, aging gracelessly, self-medication, the writing process, professional jealousy, the perils of political correctness, and the role of literature in the digital era. Service examines the plight of the unrepentant artistic outsider in an unforgiving day and age. It alternates between passages that describe the narrator’s attempts to realize his longtime ambition of writing a novel and scenes at the bookstore, where he becomes progressively more unhinged owing to the unfamiliar humiliations of serving the public. Eventually, after endlessly agonizing about matters of form and style, he finds that despite himself he has actually written a novel.

“The narrator of Service is a cranky middle-aged bookseller who loathes the constant texting and the deep willingness of customers to be offended at the bookstore where he works. Meanwhile, he is writing a novel, perhaps even the very one we are reading, but isn’t getting very far with it. Indeed, he often resembles a character from a novel—a cross between Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener and the Kafka of the Diaries. In the face of penury and a deep sense of failure, he writes with outspoken wit, verve and unsparing emotional accuracy, and his cry from the depth is so bitterly heartfelt that we find ourselves howling with laughter.”
—Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island
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This event is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles

PUBLICATION IN THE AGE OF NEGATION Vol 2 part 4.Blurbs, Blurs, Barbs, Bars, and BathsLINK IN BIO