THIS BOOK IS THE LONGEST SENTENCE EVER WRITTEN AND THEN PUBLISHED

by Dave Cowen

What makes a good writer? Publishing in The New Yorker? Selling a screenplay? Writing something that will be acknowledged for all time? In April of 2019, Dave Cowen wanted to prove he wasn't a failed writer. Even though he published humor in The New Yorker, they weren't buying any more of his work. Even though he wrote a screenplay that sought to help heal the country's divide on guns, Hollywood didn't want it. So he set out to write something that would be a success no matter what anyone thought of it. The ensuing quest to write the longest sentence ever published in the English language becomes a strange, all-consuming, life-changing odyssey. The stream-of-consciousness draws in James Joyce, Numerology, Copyright Law, Jeff Bezos, Instagram, The Enneagram, Kanye West, and portions written by an AI.But what begins as a comedic conceptual performance soon transforms into a poignant grappling with the suicide earlier that same spring of the writer's beloved father with whom he shared a bipolar disorder diagnosis. As the author pours out words through his year of mourning - without stopping to edit - right up until the anniversary of his father’s death, he’s unsure if he’s losing his sanity or if he’s awakening his consciousness, seeing mystical synchronicities in the texts he reads, the music he hears, and the external/internal interplay of life itself. Finding inspiration in his father's hero, Abraham Lincoln, and other father figures such as Lewis Hyde and David Shields, Carl Jung and James Hollis, Bob Dylan and Lou Reed, and Philip K. Dick and Jack Kerouac, the writer integrates personal memoir with literary criticism, original thought with collage remixing, depth psychology with freethinking spirituality. He comes out on the other side a wounded healer with much to offer his readers: comedy, candor, and catharsis. And the opportunity to add 250 words of their own to the sentence-book, whatever it inspires them to express, via a verified Amazon purchase review, so that all of us can be part of the longest sentence ever written and published!

345 pages, Paperback

Published April 9, 2020

Reviews

[Phillip Freedenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s 3:33, we are all connected, the Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator closes on the table, Cervantes wept over his unproduced plays, the divine was unraveled within the algorithm, a consciousness is kept alive within the text, yet cracks open nonetheless, we pour ourselves in without disguise, Jonathan Coe wrote something, Lucy Ellmann wrote something else, a man claps wildly with a beer in This Is 40, we say things like, “Think Positive,” and “The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Create it…,” we think “memoir,” we think “mental illness,” we think, “spirituality,” but today was February 25, 2020, and Vivaldi’s Nisi Dominus – Cum Dederit plays through the final pages of the book, as it also plays through the opening passage of this review, as it also played through the solemn, yet almost imperceptible movement of the air in and around the cemetery, as snow was falling in Western New York in February of 2019, then again in 2020 when the synchronicity began, as it has yet again now begun, it took shape in the form of a sentence that would run-on through the hardest year of our lives and then end on page 333, arising once more for the reader, lovingly, in the attempt to heal us all.

This Book Is The Longest Sentence Ever Written Then Published…By Dave Cowen is a brilliant, experimental, stream of consciousness, Joycean meta-narrative that explores the struggle to navigate the colossal information system of modernity all the while attempting to map the extraordinary foot-print that the weight of both trauma and loss may place upon the sometimes uncertain trajectory of our lives.

Carl Jung, who coined the term, defined synchronicity as an “acausal connecting togetherness principle, acausal parallelism, or meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.” In the case of Cowen’s stunning novel, there is something far more inspiring at work than mere chance, instead there is a profoundly illuminated metaparadigmatic synchronicity at work which results in the rare alchemical convergence of grief and art, which yields for the curious, even advantageous reader, an experience that will be unparalleled.

We all have the golden scarab jewelry of our dreams transform into flying scarab beetles that signify, whether they arrive from the biological arousal of some grand symphony of a well-organized Darwinian neural group selection, or from the collected debris of some grand cosmological quantum collapse, or from the cognitive pyrotechnics behind the almost epiphenomenal mysticism that occurs within the human mind when small black, coded symbols on a page transform, by way of Broca’s arabesques into something so meaningful that it achieves, as Cowen’s book does, what all great literature does, it helps share in that feeling of what it means to be alive, even when we face our grand confrontation with entropy, trauma, loss, and pain, we learn and are reminded that new meaning and beauty may still emerge in the world.

Not unlike Yale University’s Benjamin L. Hess who argues in his article “Lightning Strikes as a Major Facilitator of Prebiotic Phosphorous Production on Earth,” that lightning strikes connecting with the Earth 3.5 billion years ago could be a primary cause for providing some essential building blocks for life on Earth, This Book Is The Longest Sentence Ever Written Then Published, is also a highly ionized, positively charged Cloud to Ground (CG) lightning strike of consciousness that boldly brings life to the page in that rare way that only a great book can mirror that profoundly seductive allure of experiencing the thinking mind in motion.

Dave Cowen, in his book, shows for readers that behind the deconstruction of the sometimes maximalist verbosity of our obsession with the grand deluge of our eloquently arranged language structures exists a raw, primal, vulnerable, still ready to evolve human energy that strives to communicate our fundamental human need to not only deeply feel but also understand both the humility and the truth in our lives that emerges around the themes of loss, pain, family, art, literature, music, culture, identity, hope, as well as our dreams which we use to somehow shield ourselves from the often times impossible feeling we face when attempting to navigate the complexity of our lives.

I hope that this book finds the wide-reaching readership that it deserves.

Dave, rest easy knowing that Richard Brian Cowen would be proud of you today.

Phillip Freedenberg
Author of America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic

January 2022
Buffalo, NY

[Kristel Greer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was sent a copy for review of This Book is the Longest Sentence ever Written and then Published by Dave Cowan.

How do you read a book that has no full stops, no chapters and no ending? Well I found out that you just dive in and see where you end up.

This book is basically one long run on sentence beginning with the title but not ending at the end. There are no full stops, no question marks and no exclamation points but there is a lot of thought and soul.

The book for me was a continuous stream of consciousness that Dave uses to work through the death of his father, the realities of their shared bipolar disorder but also how he sees his life as a son, a man, a writer and a person who is dealing with his mental health.

The story is a loving tribute to his late father as he painstakingly processes the life his father lead, how he dealt with his mental health, physical health and how he never let it interfere with how much affection and love he showed to others.

I found this book helpful personally as someone who has lost a good friend to mental health issues. I felt Dave’s raw, honest and sometimes heartbreaking musings on his life, religion, his relationship with his father and his subsequent death and both their individual mental breakdowns showed me inside a mind that dealt with a life that was sometimes beyond their control and gave me more of an understand into my own friend’s thinking and world view.

I give the book 🌟🌟🌟🌟. It was a hard read both emotionally and practically. Emotionally I feel like I went on this personal journey with Dave and understood him a lot more by the end. The lack of full stops, paragraphs and chapters made the reading experience a little confusing and frustrating at times and I also felt that a lot of the referenced texts were repetitive and unnecessary space filler. This book took a lot more work to read than any other book I’ve read before but a lot of the time it felt worth that effort.

[Genkat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did Not Finish this book. It was an interesting concept, but I could not stand the stream of consciousness flow he had going and also I need multiple sentences I found out. I appreciate the Author sending me a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

NOOOOOOOOO I WANNA READ THE WHOLE THING :(((. I FOUND A PDF BUT IT WAS ONLY 45 PAGES AND I DON'T HAVE THE MONEY TO BUY THIS BOOK, BUT I WANT TO KNOW HOW IT ENDS!!!!!

[Julie Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️.25

Note: I received an e-copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

This Book is the Longest Sentence Ever Written and then Published is an experimental memoir by Dave Cowen. It explores his life, mental health and bipolar disorder, and the grief and loss of his father. But unlike other memoirs, this book features a stream of conscious narration and is one sentence long. Throughout This Book is the Longest Sentence Ever Written and then Published, Cowen also discusses other experimental works, past iterations of the longest sentence ever written, and more.

When the author reached out to me about this book, my first thought was the last sentence in Ulysses (which I shamefully have not read yet) that is several pages long. And to my surprise, Ulysses was mentioned on the very first page (and throughout the memoir). I find myself very interested in books like these that go outside the box. And as I found out from this memoir, there are several books that are written similarly.

Even if this book had more than one sentence, a stream of conscious narration is something that I almost never see in memoirs. There was something about reading Cowen’s thoughts as they were that brought a different kind of insight to his life than a standard memoir would have. And while I don’t have bipolar disorder myself, as someone who has Seasonal Affective Disorder, there were certain times where I could see myself where Cowen was describing the ‘highs’ of bipolar disorder, and where his thought process sounded very much like my own. It takes a lot of opening up to write a memoir, but even moreso to write your thoughts word-to-word as they come, and I don’t think I’ve ever had exposure to someone’s thought process on this level. I think part of the reason for this is that writers are usually reflecting on events that are happening in the past. But in Cowen’s case, he is primarily discussing mental health and grief, which are two things that are very current and so he is able to share his thoughts and emotions more clearly.

With this type of writing comes with a lot of different topics. And while the memoir mainly covers mental health and grief, there is so much more that is covered, ranging from the Enneagram to Kanye West to spirituality. And while I was much more interested in the most prominent events in Cowen’s life, I found that these smaller topics give readers a lot of insight into a person without exploring the bigger things.

As a part of his writing process, Cowen mentions in the book that he would not going back to edit the content that he already wrote. This was done in order to preserve his thought process and keep it as genuine as possible. However, I do wish there were some other forms of editing with this book. While the author uses a lot of punctuation (other than periods, obviously) to make the flow of his sentence sound more like internal dialogue, I do think more grammatical edits would have helped overall. There are some instances with capitalization and punctuation that I felt could have been altered to help guide the reader as the subject matter changed. Writing one sentence obviously means that you have to bend the rules a bit, but I do think creating grammatical rules can give words even more power in this case.

But overall, reading This Book is the Longest Sentence Ever Written and then Published has been a pretty one-of-a-kind reading experience. I felt like this experimental memoir shows an interesting way of looking at a person’s life, and as I know now, there’s lots of books out there that break the norm similar to this. Perhaps soon I will finally pick up Ulysses – after all, I have already read a sentence much longer.

[Rosie | mybookishdream · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3.5*
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"but sorry I am trying to understand my life so how can this be wrong"
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This highly creative memoir takes stream of consciousness to the next level by undertaking the ambitious pursuit of writing the longest sentence ever published. Fusing together humour, mental health, and self-discovery, Dave Cowen explores his thoughts from screenwriting to Kanye West and everything in between. Cowen bravely invites you into his head and, as the book unfolds, I became intimately connected to his voice that was at once unfiltered, vivid, honest, and completely unedited.
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His willingness to expose hard truths, delve into the complicated emotions surrounding his father's suicide, and come to terms with his own bipolar disorder was very impressive and thought provoking. I don't think I've ever read a book that so unapologetically takes its reader through a moment-by-moment transcription of the human thought process. All points to Dave Cowen for undertaking such an experimental piece of writing and proving that there is no right way to understand your life. Maybe all it takes is a single sentence.
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Note: I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

[Edward Champion · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dave Cowen is not Knausgaaard or Saramago or Joyce or Faulkner. He is some rando in Rochester and not very remarkable in his "insights" on Enneagrams, his father, having TC Boyle as a writing professor, Kanye West, and the like. This book is both entertaining and wildly annoying, but Cowen did win me over with his stunt. He is at least more honest about his insecurities (or his confabulations) than most contemporary writers, who pretend as if they do not have ego.