Join us for a launch with Francesco Pedraglio for his recent title A man in a room spray-painting a fly… (or at least trying to…), published by Book Works. The event will feature a reading by Pedraglio from a newly-edited version of the text for two voices.

Conceived as a carefully staged gathering of texts slowly composing a unique, layered narrative, A man in a room spray-painting a fly… develops around a main character presented, like literature, as a corpse to be reanimated ad absurdum. This main story is then interrupted, fragmented and diverted from by other tales, stage directions and possible ‘scenarios’ that operate as proposals for narrative changes.

The writing is woven together as a continuous interlocking prose. It utilises the mechanics of storytelling to reflect upon the relation between the perception of objects and the abstract working of our subjectivities as readers or writers.

Moving between and alluding to the different conditions of writing – whether film scripts, drama, letter writing, or mere notes for future projects – this is the first ‘novel’ by Francesco Pedraglio, presenting the possibility of a story within numerous other possible stories, and exploring the fault lines of communication between the text and the spoken performance.

Francesco Pedraglio is an artist and writer. He was one of the founding directors of FormContent, a fellow of Henry Moore Institute, and recently the editor of Time Machine, a series of experimental books published by Book Works.

A man in a room spray-painting a fly… (or at least trying to…) is published by Book Works in an edition of 1,000 copies; 352 pages; black and white with four spot color images; soft cover; designed by James Langdon. It’s available for purchase through the Printed Matter here