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
‘The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning, and the same.’
Martin Amis in Experience
Aboudia, Help Us, 2011
Salman Toor, Dancing to Whitney, 2019
CLEARANCE RACK
Jerome Lagarrigue, Riot, 2022