Bohemian Writers Club

Bohemian Writers' Club

THROUGH PROSE TO SEE THE WORLD MORE CLEARLY

The Bohemian Writers Club is an experiment in writing courageously, creatively, uncomfortably.



"It was like two unsolvable riddles imprinted on my mind: how can humans be so violent, and how can humans be so sublime?”
(Han Kang, 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature)

I want to communicate what it feels like to be human or die trying
(David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008, paraphrased)

About the boo

We respond to Ottessa Moshfegh’s call for stories that live in an amoral universe, past the political agendas on social media. After all, we have imaginations for a reason. We need characters in novels to be free to range into the dark and wrong. How else will we understand ourselves?  

This is a space for story truths more than happening truths: stories designed to catch-and-release the firestorm that is our world. Of what it feels like to be caught up in something you don’t control. For stories judged not by factual accuracy but by their resonance: stories that restructure worlds and make people feel stuff.

And it can be a space for intelligent polemics and behind the scenes confessionals on the experience of fieldwork and theorising. A space for the psychedelic and ruminative — beautifully rendered, always.

This then is where we promise to write thoughtfully, candidly, experimentally about whatever it is which we have come into this world to say — and damn the consequences.

Want to be a member?

Consider yourself one.

‘I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralysed by the condition that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.’

Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Haley Josephs, You May Bloom and Grow Forever,  2021”

Fiction Stories

The Clochard

Dead Man Can’t Even Blink

The Self, Life in Transition

“Salman Toor, Bar Boy, 2019”

“Jenna Gribbon, A piss that’s not abject, 2021”

Nonfiction Stories

Stories From Ukraine

More Stories From Ukraine

Return to Sender

‘Karen is killing herself rehabbing the house. I sit in the garage with the AC blasting and work very poorly and haltingly and with (some days) great reluctance and ambivalence and pain. I am tired of myself, it seems: tired of my thoughts, associations, syntax, various herbal habits that have gone from discovery to technique to tic. It’s a dark time work wise, and yet a very light and lovely time in all other respects. So overall I feel I’m ahead and am pretty happy.’ 

 

David Foster Wallace in an email to Jonathan Franzen
 
Scroll to Top