Black Bag
Hilarious ... Tremendous good fun, with razor-sharp jokes and absurd scenarios galore ... A campus novel for our end times, packed with keen insights into the current state of art, masculinity and friendship ... Fizzes with wit and invention and winningly communicates a very human concern for meaning and connection ... This novel will gain your affections on the first page.
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A triumph of deadpan comedy ... Kennard is superb at capturing the chaotic interior life that produces such thoughts. The narrator’s mind is an elaborate ecosystem of digressions — riffs on everything from Henry James’s horny characters to the video game Animal Crossing ... Surreal and ambitious ... But beneath the playfulness lies a thoughtful, tender meditation on the difficulty of being a man in the modern world ... A brilliant comic tour de force.
Kennard doesn’t hide behind the wacky, playful premise; his characters – an eccentric cast that includes a professor of posthumanism and a flatmate eager to monetize his friend’s new role – are fully realized, contradictory figures who move fluidly between shrewdness and compassion. Resisting any neat resolution, Black Bag becomes a strange, tender meditation on masculinity, academia and the precarities of creative life.
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