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
by Erik Dane For an American like me – a born-and-bred East Coaster, a headstrong, pensive brand manager, a heartbreak-escaping, late night jogger – you’d think the hardest part of living in Paris would be the language. Until today, I…
by Philip Stiles Everyone’s piling in on me, but it’s not my fault. And if you want to know the truth, I’m the only one who seems to be trying to rectify the situation. I’ve cycled as far as the…
“Salman Toor, Bar Boy, 2019”
“Jenna Gribbon, A piss that’s not abject, 2021”
Nonfiction Stories
by Loïc Wacquant A dark-skinned, broad-shouldered, African American with searching eyes and a slight stutter, Jake “the Snake” Torrance resides in a depressed neighborhood of the depressed industrial town of East Chicago, Indiana. He rents an unfinished basement in the house…
by Chase La Rosa Nav always had to take a shit twenty minutes into his Officer of the Deck watch, which was funny to everyone except Weps, who had to stop eating his off-going meal and re-take the watch. This…
by Wisam Salsaa, Manager of the Walled Off Hotel, Bethlehem Growing up and living under military occupation is not something you ever get used to. I wake up each day wondering if there is water in the tap so I…