The New Revelations of Being & Other Mystical Writings

Following in the tradition of prison writers like Jean Genet, Jack Henry Abbott and de Sade, Wolfe Margolies’s SHAME is one of the decade's most urgent and disturbing debut novels. SHAME explores themes of rape, trauma, addiction, sadomasochism, heartbreak, tragedy and death through the connected stories of multiple young and old New Yorkers as they struggle to conquer their internalized feelings of shame. SHAME is Wolfe Margolies' first novel, but his writing and music have appeared in many places, including Vice, The Daily Beast and Rolling Stone (for a collaborative EP with Lydia Lunch, 2017). He is currently serving a 14-year sentence in a federal prison where he wrote this book. I love Wolfe Margolies’s writing. The vehemence, roughshod poetry, and its sense of having needed to exist recalls French literary scourges like Guyotat, Celine and Genet. At the same time his writing has an impassioned “anyone could do this” clarity and a beseeching tenderness that’s distinctly American and totally his. SHAME is a novel that could inspire readers to be writers and writers to be great writers. —Dennis Cooper