M HKA Ensembles

Book, 13.5 x 21.5 cm, 205 p, language: English, publisher: The Do-Not Press Ltd, London, ISBN: 1904316263.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2024/852).

Literary synopsis 

Down & Out in Shoreditch & Hoxton is a slice-and-dice splatter novel in which time-travelling streetwalkers hump their way from the trendy east London of today back to the skid row mutilations of the Jack the Ripper era. As gentrification forces the hookers from their age-old beat along Commercial and Wentworth Streets, they don Victorian Widows' weeds and ply their trade in local graveyards. Amid these psychogeographical dislocations, warm blood isn't the only thing that gets sucked by the night creatures who haunt Home's anti-narrative. 

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice 

“I'm still looking to write bad books as far as literary criticism goes since what I aim to do is go way beyond literature. The novel is a paradigmatically bourgeois cultural form, so a good novel is inherently reactionary –only bad books can be revolutionary. (…) Like all my books, Down & Out in Shoreditch & Hoxton is about the impossibility of separating form from content within human expression and the ultimate futility of genre distinctions. So the book has been written with the constraint of every paragraph within it being exactly 100 words long. This was a way of forcing myself to write differently and simultaneously of self-consciously signifying to readers how distinctions between poetry and prose don't really work. This book is both poetry and prose.” 

- Stewart Home 

Novel website