King of Joy

Advance Praise for King of Joy This novel is transfixing: an imaginative meditation on emotional survival, isolation, and the beauty and limitations of human connection. I love Chiem's writing. --Melissa Broder, author of The Pisces Praise for Richard Chiem Considering how much I love Richard Chiem's writing, and given how its uncanny snare and sweep of life's especially agile, prompt, messed, lithe, sharp, and heartbreaking things leaves me stiffed of summarizing words, I think I'll just nominate his work for immortality. --Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm Praise for You Private Person Richard Chiem writes of all the weirdness and ooziness and tenderness of young love, with such lucid specificity. Like some beautiful film from the '70s, but also distinctly now. Because I also love how in this book he documents the tremors of contemporary existence, of living and working in a city, measuring days not in coffee spoons but in cigarettes and Simpsons episodes. --Kate Zambreno, author of Book of Mutter and Green Girl Richard Chiem's You Private Person is a bustling prism of a thing, full of passages that actually lead somewhere off the paper. His words have brains that have bodies that wake you up in the way waking can be the best thing, like into a warm room full of good calm remembered things that feel both like relics and new inside the day. Here rings a wise and bravely sculpted book packed full of stunning thankful color. --Blake Butler, author of Three Hundred Million and There Is No Year Oh, what a strange, sexy, little book this is. It will have you wondering whether you would categorize yourself as a sociopath or an animal, and it will make you think very carefully about how to approach unwrapping the tinfoil which covers a pie someone has given to you. It will have your mind occupied with thoughts of God and long-distance relationships. It will have you thinking of love and life and language and flying and cities and cigarettes and the length of a Simpsons episode and that song 'Lover's Spit.' Richard Chiem captures the mundane depravities of being young and alive with lucidity and a touching, weird grace. Everyone should live in his world for a little while. --Kristin Iversen, NYLON One of the most compelling and simultaneously disarming things about this book is the style of the prose. . . . As all people who know each other intimately do, each set of characters in YPP seem to speak their own language to each other. Chiem's narration does this too. He takes words, phrases, and even common cliches and destabilizes our knowledge of them . . . animating them with a strange, new kind of life. --Bellingham Review Though they share a certain aesthetic with the emotionless-young-people literary boom of the late 1980s, Person's stories are not Douglas Coupland-style elegies for doomed, ridiculous civilizations or Bret Easton Ellis's unwitting self-satires. There's a seething undercurrent just beneath the placid surface of every page. . . . I greatly enjoyed Person on its initial release, but this reissue feels right, like it was foretold in an ancient prophecy. The topics that once felt like jokes now resonate bone-deep, and the structure that once felt interesting now seems just right for a world whose attention has been blasted into millions of tiny splinters. Loneliness. Rage. The always-impending apocalypse. Hate-fucking. Maybe the world wasn't ready for Person when it came out in 2012. Maybe it's being reborn at just the right time. --Paul Constant, The Seattle Review of Books [Richard Chiem]'s swiftly becoming one of our great chroniclers of urban melancholy. You Private Person understands that sometimes, when faced with the weight of the decisions we've made, both good and bad, and the consequences they've wrought in our lives, the only choice we really have is to start the next shift at work. --ZYZZYVA Richard's stories are as generous as he is. They are the quiet, electric moment between the lightning flash and the thunder rumble. And they have the same odd light. --Matthew Simmons, Hobart Like a stranger, sharper, more localized version of Sam Shepard's Motel Chronicles set in the Pacific Northwest. And I love Motel Chronicles. --Alex Higley, Publishers Weekly, 10 Essential Books of the American West