' Dead Souls is elegant, ambitious, very serious and very funny-an enlivening burst of anti-anti-intellectualism.' -Katharine Kilalea, author of OK, Mr. “Mordant, torrential, incantatory, Bolano-esque, Perec-ian, and just so explosively written that I had to stop and shake the language-shrapnel from my hair and wipe it off my eyeglasses so I could keep reading.” -Jonathan Lethem ' Dead Souls is a whip smart, razor sharp, wise-funny, highly readable animal of a first novel, and I can't recommend it enthusiastically enough.' -Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome

It’s funny, smart and beautifully written.' -Alex Preston, The Guardian 'Full of clever postmodern flourishes, self-referential winks and riotous set pieces. Will appeal to fans of Kate Zambreno’s Drifts.' - Publishers Weekly

calls to mind Thomas Bernhard not only for its form but its rhythm and cadence. artfully blends metaphysics, existentialism, ideas of originality, and plagiarism, plus an enticing dose of history and memoir in this captivating read.” - Reader's Digest, A Best Fiction Book of the Year The Guardian, 1 of the 10 Best Debut Novelists of 2021īuzzfeed, A Most Anticipated Book of the YearĪ New Statesman Most Anticipated Book of the Year Wiese reveals his unconventional views on poetry, childhood encounters with 'nothingness,' a conspiracy involving the manipulation of documents in the public domain, an identity crisis, a retreat to the country, a meeting with an ex-serviceman with an unexpected offer, the death of an old poet, a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost, an entanglement with a secretive poetry cult, and plans for a triumphant return to the capital, through the theft of poems, illegal war profits, and faked social media accounts-plans in which our narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated.ĭead Souls is a metaphysical mystery brilliantly encased in a picaresque romp, a novel that asks a vital question for anyone who makes or engages with art: Is everyone a plagiarist? Later that same evening, at a bar near Waterloo Bridge, our narrator encounters the poet in person, and listens to the story of Wiese's rise and fall, a story that takes the entire night-and the remainder of the novel-to tell. As the unnamed narrator of Dead Souls discovers at a cultural festival in central London, the offender is Solomon Wiese, a poet accused of plagiarism. For readers of Roberto Bolaño's Savage Detectives and Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent, this 'sublime' and 'delightfully unhinged' metaphysical mystery disguised as a picaresque romp follows one poet's spectacular fall from grace to ask a vital question: Is everyone a plagiarist? (Nicolette Polek, author of Imaginary Museums ).Ī scandal has shaken the literary world.

Dead Souls by Sam Riviere