Matthew Stokoe's Blog

This rather posh edition in German debuted this month. Hardback, signed, artwork by Dean Samed, translation by Manfred Sanders. Published by Festa Verlag.

Just finished signing these - the frontispiece for an upcoming German collectors edition of Colony of Whores. Out through Festa Verlag later this year.

From Aphotic Realm.... Yes, Cows is mentioned, but there are some pertinent thoughts about the need for a certain kind of literature in this age of sanitisation....http://aphoticrealm.com/five-books-you-cant-unread/

So... Daniel Ruczko and his film-making partner Florian Helm are two super cool dudes I met in LA recently. Daniel and Florian have garnered awards and accolades for their films Bipolar and Intrusive Thoughts (among others) and are a pair of very creative, very happening guys. I was lucky enough to sit down with them in Los Angeles recently to tape episode 8 of the Mind Pollution series. What struck me about these guys was their focus on the art of their subjects throughout the series. In LA, that sprawling metropolis, that gargantuan meat-grinder, for a writer used to the less frenetic currents of harbour-city Sydney, it was a gift to be handled so carefully....Check out the interview here.

Tomorrow I fly out to Los Angeles. Back to the land of High Life, Colony of Whores and, later in the month when I drive north, the Gold Rush country of Empty Mile.Since writing High Life I've been back to The States, of course. But not back to California. Not back to LA.It possessed me the first time, lived up to every TV/movie expectation. What I'd seen on the screen through all the long-distance years as a kid in Australia wasn't just set-dressing and camera-illusion. It was real. The roads and the cars and the houses and the money and the lives lived as dreams - these weren't backdrops to screenwriters' stories. Not for me. For me they were the story.At least back then, back when I returned to my cold London bedsit and sat down at a makeshift desk and wrote about a hot rain blowing in from the sea, and about the mad elite of a city whose elite is madder than anywhere else in the world. I wonder if, after all these years, the palms and the stucco and the Spanish tile and the young and the beautiful will still hold something of that magic.

Dear readers - I've had so many requests for this book over the last couple of years that I feel it wouldn't be fair to hold on to it any longer. As many of you already know, it has been published in France as SAUVAGERIE by Gallimard and will be published in Germany next year by Festa Verlag. An English language publisher, though, has proved elusive - just as well I can get by without one! Check out amazon now.For your delectation....

Zack Ravas in Zyzzyva on the re-issue of High LifeClick image or use the link: http://www.zyzzyva.org/2018/06/01/babylon-burning-high-life-by-matthew-stokoe/.

Review of the re-issue of High Life by Ben Arzate.https://culturedvultures.com/high-life-by-matthew-stokoe-review/

The brand new edition of High Life is now available on Amazon. You can find it here.