Audio Series: Newer Testaments

 

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen."  was originally hatched in a NYC club during BEA back in 2012. It's a fun little series, where authors record themselves reading an excerpt from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.

Today, Philip Brunetti will be reading an excerpt from Newer Testaments, his first published novel. Fiction writer, poet, antipoet, gentle quasi-misanthrope, librarian, Philip has been writing fiction and poetry since his early 20s. His innovative work has been published in various online or paper literary journals including Cobalt Weekly, Swamp Ape Review, The Boiler, and Identity Theory. His debut novel, Newer Testaments (Atmosphere Press, 2020) is described in the Independent Book Review as 'an innovative existential novel told through hallucinatory poetics.' Via his librarianship at the Brooklyn Public Library, Brunetti also runs the Gravesend Writers Group, a monthly writers discussion group. Find out more about Philip at philipbrunetti.com and bookshop.org/shop/PhilipBrunetti

Click on the soundcloud bar to hear Phillip read from Newer Testaments

TNBBC · Excerpt from Newer Testaments

What it's about:

"In the tradition of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, Brunetti's wondrously wandering writing is taut and cryptic, vivid and hallucinatory, rendering an irony-laden, aberrant odyssey for his impossibly likable protagonist." -Franco D'Alessandro, playwright & poet, Roman Nights, Stranger Love, and Everything Is Something Else

Ever get the feeling that your life is caught up in some kaleidoscopic Jungian dream and that you weren't exactly dying but still everything you'd ever been is flashing before your eyes-and then when you wake from this dissolutive dream, your reality remains altered and time has become concurrent and characters from thirty-plus years ago walk into your life again, if ambiguously, and press you on matters of a sacred-profane written text that you never completed?

Heretical and outrageous, ironic and absurd, Newer Testaments scores a hit in the heart of where the existential meets the fated, and the writer's task becomes both revelatory and abject. Into this formidable personal struggle a cast of untoward and/or diaphanous characters rotate including The Jesus Girl, John Baptist, Macbeth, King Kisko, The Tree Girl, Nurse Mother, a glass satyr and a French New Wave Mother. Has the nameless narrator lost his mercurial mind, or is this a subconscious-shadow-world sojourn he's been practicing for all his life?-the keys to the kingdom of being.