Phil Jourdan – författare

When Phil Jourdan's mother died suddenly in 2009, she left behind a legacy of kindness and charity - but she also left unanswered some troubling questions. Was she, as she once claimed, a spy? Had she suffered more profoundly as a woman and parent than she'd let on? Jourdan's recollections of his struggles with psychosis, and his reconstructions of conversations with his enigmatic mother, form the core of this memoir. Psychoanalysis, poetry and confession all merge to tell the story of an ordinary woman whose death turned her into a symbol for extraordinary motherhood.

This is the first collection of creative writing-related interviews originally posted on Mourning Goats, a website founded by the mysterious Mr Goat. Over a year of mostly anonymous work, the Goat managed to interview some of the most exciting English-language authors around. Edited by Phil Jourdan and the Goat himself, and featuring expanded interviews not available online, Chewing the Page offers a series of weird and hilarious glimpses at the world of writing. Includes interviews with Stephen Graham Jones, Craig Clevenger, Paul Tremblay, Donald Ray Pollock, Stephen Elliott, Chad Kultgen, Chelsea Cain, Rick Moody, Christopher Moore and Nick Hornby, and others.

A young man seeking to hack into his own unconscious mind. An academic conference on the metaphysics of flies. An apocalyptic world where punctuation has been outlawed. An eating disorder that produces collectible antiques. A mix of allegory, satire, randomly generated numbers, spam messages rearranged into haiku form, plagiarism, and bad writing presented in the more sophisticated if still unpalatable guise of literary experimentation, Phil Jourdan's collection of stories is infuriating, challenging and other marketing buzzwords.

In this incomparably brilliant and timeless masterpiece of unrelenting cruelty, two unhappy souls; restless, tormented Rebecca and the harmless mediocrity, McGeeee, find themselves caught in an infinite regress of shifting identities and memories. Rebecca seeks transcendence, an escape from a life she does not know how to live. McGeeee, meanwhile, seems to have no self to speak of, wandering from situation to situation without a sense of purpose. Their relationship has multiple origins, infinite endings and no conclusion. At the heart of this non-story is an unforgivable family secret from generations past. It's none of your business, but go on, have a peek, you cheeky bastard.