"Brilliant stuff. It captures the terrific, obsessive, ludicrous pomposity of every music fans youth in an utterly definitive way." Irvine Welsh "I wanted to live in this book." ― Kim Gordon Ross Raymond and Johnny McLaughlin are two fanboys dedicated to the Airdrie post-punk scene of the early ’80s – the glory years – when anything and everything seemed possible. Looking back on that time – the people, the bands, the underground legends – they piece together a story which has at its core Memorial Device, the greatest band you’ve never heard of. Featuring a cast of misfits, artists, drop-outs, small-town visionaries and musicians, This Is Memorial Device is a dark, witty novel depicting a moment where art and the demands it makes are as serious as life itself.

This Is Memorial Device: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Keenan, David

Literary

Faber & Faber Social

Sammy and his three friends live in the Ardoyne, an impoverished, predominantly Catholic area of North Belfast that has become the epicentre of a country intent on cannibalising itself. They love sharp clothes, a good drink, and the songs of Perry Como - whose commitment to clean living holds up a dissonant mirror to their own attempts to rise above their circumstances. They dream of a Free State, and their methods for achieving this are uncompromising, even as they fully indulge in the spoils of war.Keen to make a difference, the boys find themselves in the incongruous position of running a comic-book shop taken over by the IRA. Their clandestine activities belong in the x-rated pages of graphic fiction: burglary, blackmail, extortion, torture, and murder - and they become transfixed by the initiatory possibilities of free-reign criminality. But when punk rock arrives and the hard edge of the decade starts to reveal its true paranoid colours, Sammy finds himself increasingly isolated, especially after bizarre and gruesome away days in Glasgow and London. Camaraderie and loyalty is the fuel of a terrorist cell. When those virtues prove faulty, the game is up - and Sammy's world starts to shrink as he is assaulted by terrifying visions. For the Good Times shouts and sings with visionary depth and power. It is not just a book about the IRA, but an exploration of what it means to 'go rogue', of the heartbreak and devastation that commitment to 'the cause' can engender, of ideas of martyrdom, fatherhood, and self-sacrifice. It unpacks any dewy-eyed romance associated with the Troubles while re-visioning it as a time of psychological and spiritual intensity where the nature of day-to-day reality itself was up for grabs. And through a dizzying amalgam of modernist prose, roughhouse vernacular and hallucinatory Irish humour, it establishes David Keenan as one of our most fearless literary stylists.

For The Good Times

Faber&Faber

Shadows in a Chinese Landscape: Chi Yun's Notes from a Hut for Examining the Subtle (New Studies in Asian Culture)

In this major undertaking David Keenan translates and contextualizes over 100 tales from the Notes from the Hut for Examining the Subtle, a collection of 1,200 tales and observations by Chi Yun, one of eighteenth century China's leading intellectuals. By illuminating neglected aspects of the interaction between popular and elite cultures in late imperial China, this study portrays the rich connection between life and letters on the eve of the Western impact.

Yun, Chi

History & Criticism

Routledge

Birthed in the fall-out from legendary "Industrial" units Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, David Tibet’s Current 93, John Balance and Peter Christopherson’s Coil and Steven Stapleton’s Nurse With Wound represent the real English underground in all its sexual, cultural, and artistic variety. An individually numbered limited edition, lavishly illustrated with photographs and original artworks, complete with previously unreleased CD, this volume will become a collector’s item.

England's Hidden Reverse: Coil-Current 93-Nurse With Wound

Arts & Photography

Music

S A F Pub Ltd

“A sumptuous, high-art production, astonishing photographs. An essential book, a magnet to attract new listeners with its compelling field of gravity.”—Record CollectorDavid Keenan’s book miraculously weaves the history of Coil, Current 93, and Nurse with Wound into one fascinating narrative. Working almost entirely outside the framework of the music industry, all three bands have courted controversy, experimented with the fringes of danger and the occult, and have sold millions of records.Based on several years of exclusive interviews and unprecedented access to all three bands’ personal archives, England’s Hidden Reverse is a unique document of England’s cultural underbelly.

England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground

SAF Publishing Ltd.

England's Hidden Reverse: Coil - Current 93 - Nurse With Wound

Humor & Entertainment

'This book spoke, it said "read me" from the very first sentence as if it were alive, it gave me visceral joy' Kim Gordon\n'Reading [Xstabeth] feels like being cut open to the accompanying sound of ecstatic music' Edna O'Brien\n'Prepare for more of that inimitable Keenan narrative voodoo brilliance' Wendy Erskine\nIn St Petersburg, Russia, Aneliya is torn between the love of her father and her father's best friend. Her father dreams of becoming a great musician but suffers with a naivete that means he will never be taken seriously. Her father's best friend has a penchant for vodka, strip clubs and moral philosophy.\nWhen an angelic presence named Xstabeth enters their lives - a presence who simultaneously fulfils and disappears those she touches - Aneliya and her father's world is transformed.\nMoving from Russia to St Andrews, Scotland, Xstabeth tackles the metaphysics of golf, the mindset of classic Russian novels and the power of art and music to re-wire reality. Charged with a consuming intensity and a torrential rhythm that pulses with music, it is an offering of transcendence and a love letter to the books of Chandler, Nabokov and Dostoevsky, by a writer who is rewriting the rulebook of contemporary fiction.

Xstabeth: A Guardian Book of the Day

Contemporary

White Rabbit

INCLUDES 'PREQUEL' THE TOWER THE FIELDS THE TRANSMITTERS\n'This book spoke, it said "read me" from the very first sentence as if it were alive, it gave me visceral joy' Kim Gordon\n'Reading [Xstabeth] feels like being cut open to the accompanying sound of ecstatic music' Edna O'Brien\n'Prepare for more of that inimitable Keenan narrative voodoo brilliance' Wendy Erskine\nIn St Petersburg, Russia, Aneliya is torn between the love of her father and her father's best friend. Her father dreams of becoming a great musician but suffers with a naivete that means he will never be taken seriously. Her father's best friend has a penchant for vodka, strip clubs and moral philosophy.\nWhen an angelic presence named Xstabeth enters their lives - a presence who simultaneously fulfils and disappears those she touches - Aneliya and her father's world is transformed.\nMoving from Russia to St Andrews, Scotland, Xstabeth tackles the metaphysics of golf, the mindset of classic Russian novels and the power of art and music to re-wire reality. Charged with a consuming intensity and a torrential rhythm that pulses with music, it is an offering of transcendence and a love letter to the books of Chandler, Nabokov and Dostoevsky, by a writer who is rewriting the rulebook of contemporary fiction.

Xstabeth

Is it possible for books to dream? For books to dream within books? Is there a literary subterranea that would facilitate ingress and exit points through these dreams?\nThese are some of the questions posed by David Keenan's masterly fifth novel, Monument Maker, an epic romance of eternal summer and a descent, into history, into the horrors of the past; a novel with a sweep and range that runs from the siege of Khartoum and the conquest of Africa in the 19th century through the Second World War and up to the present day, where the memory of a single summer, and a love affair that took place across the cathedrals of Ile de France, unravels, as a secret initiatory cult is uncovered that has its roots in macabre experiments in cryptozoology in pre-war Europe.\nMONUMENT MAKER straddles genres while fully embracing none of them, a book within a book within a book that runs from hallucinatory historical epics through future-visioned histories of the world narrated by a horribly disfigured British soldier made prophetic by depths of suffering; books that interact with Keenan's earlier novels, including a return to the mythical post-punk Airdrie landscape of his now classic debut, THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE; whole histories of art and religion; books that are glorious choral appendices; bibliographies; imagined films; tape recorded interviews; building to a jubilant accumulation of registers, voices and rhythms that is truly Choral.\nWritten over the course of 10 years, MONUMENT MAKER represents the apex of Keenan's project to create books that contain uncanny life and feel like living organisms. It is a meditation on art and religion, and on what it means to make monument; this great longing for something eternal, something that could fix moments in time, forever.

Monument Maker

British & Irish

A transcendent love letter to literature and music, Xstabeth is an exciting new work from a writer who, book-by-book, is rewriting the rules of contemporary fiction. 
Aneliya’s father dreams of becoming a great musician but his naivete and his unfashionable music suggest he will never be taken seriously. Her father’s best friend, on the other hand, has a penchant for vodka, strip clubs, and moral philosophy. Aneliya is torn between love of the former and passion for the latter. 
When an angelic presence named Xstabeth enters their lives Aneliya and her father’s world is transformed. 
A short, stylish novel with a big heart, humor, Xstabeth moves from Russia to Scotland, touching upon the pathos of Russian literature and the Russian soul, the power of art and music to shape reality, and the metaphysics of golf while telling a moving father-daughter story in highly-charged, torrential prose.

Europa Editions

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Keenan, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Keenan, David

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Keenan, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

This Is Memorial Device: A Novel

For The Good Times

Shadows in a Chinese Landscape: Chi Yun's Notes from a Hut for Examining the Subtle (New Studies in Asian Culture)

England's Hidden Reverse: Coil-Current 93-Nurse With Wound

England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground

England's Hidden Reverse: Coil - Current 93 - Nurse With Wound

Xstabeth: A Guardian Book of the Day

Xstabeth

Monument Maker

Xstabeth