Cover

Praise for Dead Souls

“Mordant, torrential, incantatory, Bolaño-esque, Perec-ian, and just so explosively written that I had to stop and shake the language-shrapnel from my hair and wipe it off my eyeglasses so I could keep reading.”

—JONATHAN LETHEM

“As Brontë does so disarmingly in Wuthering Heights and Nabokov in Pale Fire, Sam Riviere gives a loquacious and pleasingly unreliable nobody the task of telling the tale of Dead Souls’ true protagonist: Solomon Wiese, a recently excommunicated poet who seems to have been everywhere and known everyone. In long, sure sentences reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, Riviere cracks open the administrative heart of the contemporary literary endeavor, finding it full not of hot air but of crowds of characters, a whole shimmering historical ecosystem—in short, the world as we know it, as mesmerizingly real as it is fictional.”

—LUCY IVES, author of Cosmogony and Loudermilk

“If as I read Sam Riviere’s wonderful first novel I discerned intriguing notes of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy and Thomas Bernhard’s propulsive monologues, I also found myself thinking with pleasure of the intricate (and hilarious) book-world satire in Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Echoes aside, Dead Souls is its own whip-smart, razor-sharp, wise-funny, highly readable animal, and I can’t recommend it enthusiastically enough.”

—LAIRD HUNT, author of Neverhome

“Dead Souls is elegant, ambitious, very serious, and very funny––an enlivening burst of anti-anti-intellectualism.”

—KATHARINE KILALEA, author of OK, Mr. Field

“Beautiful, intricately humane, and gut-wrenchingly funny; not so much cynical as a ruthless vivisection of cynicism itself. Reading Dead Souls feels like discovering the British Bolaño, and not just for the gleeful dismantling of the cultural ego: the restless, searching sensibility; the precise tuning-in to contradictory voices. I haven’t been so excited by a debut novel in a long time.”

—LUKE KENNARD, author of The Transition

“Sublime, legendary, delightfully unhinged. Sam Riviere’s Dead Souls is a rare and brilliant pleasure, a coiling, searing fugue of a book that takes our deranged culture and pulls forth from it a box of stars.”

—NICOLETTE POLEK, author of Imaginary Museums

“I absolutely adored Dead Souls. Reading it felt like overhearing the most exhilarating, funny, mean conversation imaginable—which is to say it made me extremely happy, and I dreaded it ending.”

—MEGAN NOLAN, author of Acts of Desperation

Title Page

while I was lolling in a coach the novelty created such strange feelings that I coud almost fancy that my identity as well as my occupations had changd . . . that some stranger soul had jumpd into my skin

JOHN CLARE

It is the absurd ideas that are the clearest ideas, and the most absurd ideas are the most important.

THOMAS BERNHARD

The dominance of one sense is the formula for hypnosis.

MARSHALL MCLUHAN

Zariyah Zhadan