Man-Eating Typewriter
Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2023
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'A major talent' Irvine Welsh
'Remarkable, beautiful, magic. Like Ulysses for those who can't cope with reading Ulysses' Paolo Hewitt
'We're all in the gutter but some of us are ogling the sparkles.'
Set at the fag-end of the 1960s and framed as a novel within a novel published by a seedy London purveyor of pulp fiction, MAN-EATING TYPEWRITER is a homage to the avant-garde counterculture of the 20th century. Told in Polari, it is the story of an anarchist named Raymond Novak and his plan to commit a 'fantabulosa crime' in 276 days that will revolt the world. A surrealistic odyssey that stretches from occupied Paris to the cruise-liner SS Unmentionable to lawless Tangier before settling in Swinging London, the book casts Novak as an agitator and freedom fighter - but, as his memoirs become more and more threatening, his publishers find themselves far more involved in his violent personality cult than they ever intended.
Constructed like a hallucinogenic cocktail of A Clockwork Orange, Pale Fire and Jean Genet's jailbird fantasies, MAN-EATING TYPEWRITER is an act of seductive sedition by a writer with unfathomable literary talent and boldness. Wild, transgressive, erotic and resolutely uncompromising, this marks the return of a writer who is out there on an island of his own making; a book that will be talked about, celebrated and puzzled over for decades.
'Remarkable, beautiful, magic. Like Ulysses for those who can't cope with reading Ulysses' Paolo Hewitt
'We're all in the gutter but some of us are ogling the sparkles.'
Set at the fag-end of the 1960s and framed as a novel within a novel published by a seedy London purveyor of pulp fiction, MAN-EATING TYPEWRITER is a homage to the avant-garde counterculture of the 20th century. Told in Polari, it is the story of an anarchist named Raymond Novak and his plan to commit a 'fantabulosa crime' in 276 days that will revolt the world. A surrealistic odyssey that stretches from occupied Paris to the cruise-liner SS Unmentionable to lawless Tangier before settling in Swinging London, the book casts Novak as an agitator and freedom fighter - but, as his memoirs become more and more threatening, his publishers find themselves far more involved in his violent personality cult than they ever intended.
Constructed like a hallucinogenic cocktail of A Clockwork Orange, Pale Fire and Jean Genet's jailbird fantasies, MAN-EATING TYPEWRITER is an act of seductive sedition by a writer with unfathomable literary talent and boldness. Wild, transgressive, erotic and resolutely uncompromising, this marks the return of a writer who is out there on an island of his own making; a book that will be talked about, celebrated and puzzled over for decades.
- Published: Mar 16 2023
- 232 x 154mm
- ISBN: 9781399602013
Press Reviews
Ali Millar, author of THE LAST DAYS
Single-handedly proving the novel isn't dead, Milward breathes new life into the form in this erudite, witty yet immaculately crafted, romp of a book
Michael Bracewell, author of UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Man-Eating Typewriter is truly extraordinary: as if Mervyn Peake and Kenneth Williams wrote a book with William Burroughs
Paolo Hewitt
Remarkable, beautiful, magic. Like Ulysses for those who can't cope with reading Ulysses
John Higgs, author of LOVE AND LET DIE
Outrageous, audacious and shameless, Man-Eating Typewriter is a brilliantly constructed murderous lark. Like A Clockwork Orange adapted by John Waters at his most gleeful
David Keenan, author of INDUSTRY OF MAGIC AND LIGHT
I love this book, this jaw-dropping, obsessive love-letter to the alchemy of the word
Rupert Thomson
It doesn't get more exciting. In literary terms, he's right up there with the best this country has to offer
Boyd Tonkin
Financial TimesA mind-bending performance that unspools in flavoursome Polari over much of its pages. Intricate, hilarious, as grossly excessive as the milieu it depicts, the novel often reads as if Jean Genet and Vladimir Nabokov had joined the screenwriting team of the Carry On films
- Daily Telegraph
Man-Eating Typewriter is a disgusting and depraved book, awash with orgies, drug abuse, bestiality (one scene gives appalling new meaning to the expression "he's sleeping with the fishes"), casual violence, cross-dressing, castration, comically unconventional sexual assaults, and lovingly described abnormal bowel movements. I thoroughly enjoyed it
- Literary Review
An exhibition of literary verve as well as a probing examination of morality within a sick society, Man-Eating Typewriter is a phenomenal achievement
- Guardian
The linguistic invention borders on the dazzling, the potted social history drops its names with wit and verve, and the whole thing is both laugh-out-loud funny and authentically disgusting
- Joe Dunthorne
This magnificent, unhinged book is best described by one of its own characters - it's a beautiful fucking heinous masterpiece