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VHS
WINNER OF THE 2026 MARY SHELLEY AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING FICTIONAL WORK
Pushcart Prize-winning author Chris Campanioni tells a story about the silences of generational trauma and the tenuous conditions in which stories get passed down in migration, a surface flimsy enough to allow the traffic between novel, notebook, reportage, and myth.
While collecting the scattered stories of his parents’ entangled passages to the United States, the narrator begins to record the material onto videocassettes through a series of cutting and grafting, splicing footage of his present dislocation and overlaying on the audio track the polyphonic voices of his inherited exiles.
VHS reminds us, in its narrative’s insistence on mediation, that the slippage between speaker and listener, experience and memory, is also a fault line that can reveal our own prior movements.
Pushcart Prize-winning author Chris Campanioni tells a story about the silences of generational trauma and the tenuous conditions in which stories get passed down in migration, a surface flimsy enough to allow the traffic between novel, notebook, reportage, and myth.
While collecting the scattered stories of his parents’ entangled passages to the United States, the narrator begins to record the material onto videocassettes through a series of cutting and grafting, splicing footage of his present dislocation and overlaying on the audio track the polyphonic voices of his inherited exiles.
VHS reminds us, in its narrative’s insistence on mediation, that the slippage between speaker and listener, experience and memory, is also a fault line that can reveal our own prior movements.
220 pages, Paperback
Published March 11, 2025
About the author
Chris Campanioni
23 books23 followersChris Campanioni was born in Manhattan in 1985 and grew up in a very nineties New Jersey. The son of exiles from Cuba and Poland, Chris is a writer, multimedia artist, and instructor. He is a recipient of the International Latino Book Award for his debut novel, Going Down (Aignos, 2013), the Pushcart Prize for “Soft Opening,” from his cross-genre collection Death of Art (C&R Press, 2016), and the 2013 Academy of American Poets College Prize.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 21, 2025
A collage of dreamlike, visceral images—an experimental arthouse movie in shifting literary form.
Full review: https://independentbookreview.com/202...
Full review: https://independentbookreview.com/202...
Displaying 1 of 1 review