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No Pity
Home, Stewart
- GenresFiction
144 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1993
22 people want to read
About the author
Stewart Home
95 books288 followersStewart Home (born London 1963) is an English writer, satirist and artist. He is best known for novels such as the non-narrative "69 Things to Do With A Dead Princess" (2002), his re-imagining of the 1960s in "Tainted Love" (2005), and more recent books such as "She's My Witch" (2020) that use pulp and avant-garde tropes to parody conventional literature.
Home's unusual approach to writing is reflected in the readings he gives from his novels: he recites from memory, utilises ventriloquism, stands on his head and declaims his work and even shreds his own books.
Home's first book "The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War" (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) is an underground art history sketching continuations of dadist and surrealist influences on post-World War II fringe radical art.
Home's first novel "Pure Mania" was published 1989 (Polygon Books), and details a violent neo-punk subculture. Unmistakenly postmodern but nfluenced by surrealism and the nouveau roman, it pushes the appropriation of pulp tropes and use of repetition found within historical avant-garde fiction to such an extreme that some critics mistook it for a piece of low-brow writing.
Home continued in much the same vein with his next four novels, starting with "Defiant Pose" (Peter Owen, 1991) and continuing with "Red London" (AK Press 1994), "Blow Job" (published in 1997 but written in 1994) and Slow Death (Serpent's Tail 1996).
All Home’s early fiction collages in large amounts of prose from a wide variety of sources – and while it is often close in spirit to the work of ‘postmodern extremists’ such as Kathy Acker, the appropriated material is much more heavily reworked than in the latter’s books.
The novels Home wrote after the mid-nineties featured less subcultural material than his earlier books and focus more obviously on issues of form and aesthetics. Home’s sixth novel "Come Before Christ And Murder Love" (Serpent's Tail 1997) featured a schizophrenic narrator whose personality changed every time he had an orgasm. This was the first novel Home wrote in the first person, and much of the fiction he wrote after this utilised the device of an unreliable first-person narrator.
"Cunt" (Do Not Press 1999) is a postmodern take on the picaresque novel. "69 Things to Do With A Dead Princess" (Canongate 2002) mixes porn with capsule reviews of dozens of obscure books as well as elaborate descriptions of stone circles, while in "Down and Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton" (Do Not Press 2004) every paragraph is exactly 100 words long. "Tainted Love" (Virgin Books) is based on the life of the author's mother, who was part of the London subcultural scene in the 1960s. "Memphis Underground" (Snow Books 2007) has a long conventional literary opening that is slowly unravelled.
Home’s 2010 novel "Blood Rites of the Bourgeois" (Book Works) is to date his only work written in the second person. The plot – as far as there is one - concerns an artist hacking the computers of London’s cultural elite to infect them with modified penis enlargement spam. Reviewing Home’s incredibly weird campus novel "Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane" (Penny-Ante Editions 2013) for The Guardian, Nicholas Lezard observes: “I think one of the great virtues of Home's work is the way it forces us to address our own complacency.”
"The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones" (Test Centre 2014) is a fictional exploration of the life of one of the author's more infamous criminal relatives. "She's My Witch" (London Books 2020), is a love story exploring an unlikely relationship between a fitness instructor and a heroin addicted witch. "Art School Orgy" (New Reality Records, 2023) is a 'BDSM extravaganza'. Before this Home published his collected poems "SEND CA$H" (Morbid Books 2018) and a book about martial arts films "Re-Enter The Dragon: Genre Theory, Brucesploitation & The Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema" (Ledatape 2018).
Home's unusual approach to writing is reflected in the readings he gives from his novels: he recites from memory, utilises ventriloquism, stands on his head and declaims his work and even shreds his own books.
Home's first book "The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War" (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) is an underground art history sketching continuations of dadist and surrealist influences on post-World War II fringe radical art.
Home's first novel "Pure Mania" was published 1989 (Polygon Books), and details a violent neo-punk subculture. Unmistakenly postmodern but nfluenced by surrealism and the nouveau roman, it pushes the appropriation of pulp tropes and use of repetition found within historical avant-garde fiction to such an extreme that some critics mistook it for a piece of low-brow writing.
Home continued in much the same vein with his next four novels, starting with "Defiant Pose" (Peter Owen, 1991) and continuing with "Red London" (AK Press 1994), "Blow Job" (published in 1997 but written in 1994) and Slow Death (Serpent's Tail 1996).
All Home’s early fiction collages in large amounts of prose from a wide variety of sources – and while it is often close in spirit to the work of ‘postmodern extremists’ such as Kathy Acker, the appropriated material is much more heavily reworked than in the latter’s books.
The novels Home wrote after the mid-nineties featured less subcultural material than his earlier books and focus more obviously on issues of form and aesthetics. Home’s sixth novel "Come Before Christ And Murder Love" (Serpent's Tail 1997) featured a schizophrenic narrator whose personality changed every time he had an orgasm. This was the first novel Home wrote in the first person, and much of the fiction he wrote after this utilised the device of an unreliable first-person narrator.
"Cunt" (Do Not Press 1999) is a postmodern take on the picaresque novel. "69 Things to Do With A Dead Princess" (Canongate 2002) mixes porn with capsule reviews of dozens of obscure books as well as elaborate descriptions of stone circles, while in "Down and Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton" (Do Not Press 2004) every paragraph is exactly 100 words long. "Tainted Love" (Virgin Books) is based on the life of the author's mother, who was part of the London subcultural scene in the 1960s. "Memphis Underground" (Snow Books 2007) has a long conventional literary opening that is slowly unravelled.
Home’s 2010 novel "Blood Rites of the Bourgeois" (Book Works) is to date his only work written in the second person. The plot – as far as there is one - concerns an artist hacking the computers of London’s cultural elite to infect them with modified penis enlargement spam. Reviewing Home’s incredibly weird campus novel "Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane" (Penny-Ante Editions 2013) for The Guardian, Nicholas Lezard observes: “I think one of the great virtues of Home's work is the way it forces us to address our own complacency.”
"The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones" (Test Centre 2014) is a fictional exploration of the life of one of the author's more infamous criminal relatives. "She's My Witch" (London Books 2020), is a love story exploring an unlikely relationship between a fitness instructor and a heroin addicted witch. "Art School Orgy" (New Reality Records, 2023) is a 'BDSM extravaganza'. Before this Home published his collected poems "SEND CA$H" (Morbid Books 2018) and a book about martial arts films "Re-Enter The Dragon: Genre Theory, Brucesploitation & The Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema" (Ledatape 2018).
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 9, 2008
(review originally published in Holy Titclamps #13, Feburary 1994)
Stewart Home is perhaps best known for his role in the Art Strike. No Pity is a collection of short pieces about class war, art, etc.
About half the pieces were written before the Art Strike, and the rest in the first few months after the end of the strike. The pre-Art Strike pieces are more concerned with the world of gallery artists. "Frenzy of the Flesh" is about homosexual art students and professors, who snuff each other for art projects. "Straight" involves people shooting up as art.
Some of the pre-strike work, and most of the post-strike work is concerned with class warfare. The heroes of the stories are anarchist homosexual skinheads involved with an organization called Class Justice, which organizes violent political actions.
Home, who is straight, seems to have taken Burroughs and Hakim Bey too much to heart, because all his heroes are homosexuals. There seems to be a glorification of homosexuality by the anarchist left, as though it automatically means relationships free of hierarchy, that homos are natural anarchists. Well, if that was true, the Castro wouldn't exist. And for some reason, only male homosexuality is interesting. There's also a chapter called "Grrrl Power" in which he portrays an anti-boy grrrl band as being just as bad as that which they're trying to overthrow. I hope he's not being serious, because he's set up a puppet example that doesn't really exist.
A common theme seems to be that would-be anarchist leaders are eventually shown to be superfluous to the inevitable people's uprising. Well, if it's so inevitable, why bother writing about it? And it also seems that Home lets very little love of humanity show through. If he doesn't care, why does he even bother? The book is bleak, but the future will likely be even bleaker.
Stewart Home is perhaps best known for his role in the Art Strike. No Pity is a collection of short pieces about class war, art, etc.
About half the pieces were written before the Art Strike, and the rest in the first few months after the end of the strike. The pre-Art Strike pieces are more concerned with the world of gallery artists. "Frenzy of the Flesh" is about homosexual art students and professors, who snuff each other for art projects. "Straight" involves people shooting up as art.
Some of the pre-strike work, and most of the post-strike work is concerned with class warfare. The heroes of the stories are anarchist homosexual skinheads involved with an organization called Class Justice, which organizes violent political actions.
Home, who is straight, seems to have taken Burroughs and Hakim Bey too much to heart, because all his heroes are homosexuals. There seems to be a glorification of homosexuality by the anarchist left, as though it automatically means relationships free of hierarchy, that homos are natural anarchists. Well, if that was true, the Castro wouldn't exist. And for some reason, only male homosexuality is interesting. There's also a chapter called "Grrrl Power" in which he portrays an anti-boy grrrl band as being just as bad as that which they're trying to overthrow. I hope he's not being serious, because he's set up a puppet example that doesn't really exist.
A common theme seems to be that would-be anarchist leaders are eventually shown to be superfluous to the inevitable people's uprising. Well, if it's so inevitable, why bother writing about it? And it also seems that Home lets very little love of humanity show through. If he doesn't care, why does he even bother? The book is bleak, but the future will likely be even bleaker.
December 27, 2011
There is more about this title at the following link: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ana...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews