Man Hating Psycho

ADVANCE PRAISE:

"A voice this worldly, raucously accurate, brazenly alert, and revelatory comes along almost never, and Iphgenia Baal’s bruisingly breakneck accounts of the messiness of youth, of friendship and its flameout, of life lived at full blast are a heart-quaking wonderment. Man Hating Psycho is the most hilariously alive and essential short-story collection I’ve read in ages."
Garielle Lutz, author of Backwardness
"An extraordinary voice, and if you want to understand what happens next in modern writing, you’d do well to listen to it. A revelation."
Alan Moore, author of Watchmen

ISBN: 9781965028001
Trade paperback
266 pages

$18.00

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In Man Hating Psycho, Iphgenia Baal captures the humor, absurdism, and surreality of online encounters, demonstrating how the indifferent depravity that rules the internet infiltrates our everyday, face-to-face interactions. In these stories, set among the political uncertainty of late-aughts London, young people stage rooftop confessions, DIY group shows, and bowling-alley brawls, and fumble toward a muddled sense of racial and class identity and sexual politics in a world growing increasingly unfamiliar.

In “Pain in the Neck,” a woman’s misguided act of generosity toward an old friend leads to one of the worst nights of her life. A group of teenagers in “Pro Life” disintegrates over a shocking secret that proves their inability to see one another clearly. And in “Crazy Menu,” a dissolute stag party at a Ukrainian strip club unravels into a hilarious spectacle of excess. Provocative, irreverent, and startlingly original, this collection cements Baal as one of the most resolute and daring voices in contemporary literature.

IPHGENIA BAAL
Iphgenia Baal is a publisher, organizer, and the author of several books and zines, including Death & Facebook and Gentle Art. Her first book, The Hardy Tree, was shortlisted for the Granta Young British Novelists award in 2013. Her style has been described as a “marrying of politics and ass,” and has been likened to James Joyce, Manuel Puig, and Dodie Bellamy. Her stories have appeared in The White Review, AQNB, Schizm, and elsewhere. She lives and works in London.

PRAISE FOR MAN HATING PSYCHO:

"Utterly absorbing and standout tales . . . Baal's witty and unconventional prose will hook you in right from the start."
—Cosmopolitan UK

"Man Hating Psycho offers the kind of thrilling reading experience you’d otherwise expect from a book duct-taped at the edges after decades of friends borrowing it. Iphgenia Baal plays by her own rules, attuned to the sorrows and absurdities that modern life incites. Raw, probing, hilarious, and aching, this is a real one."
—Joanne McNeil, author of Wrong Way

"Iphgenia Baal is an ingenious observer of our modern moment. Her voice both delights and slightly terrifies with insightful irreverence as her characters navigate the purgatories of friendship limerence and implosive group chats, the pressures of making art or dating amid gentrification and our fractured political discourse. These stories are gutsily alive."
—Mary South, author of You Will Never Be Forgotten