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

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SHAME is truly fantastic. A philosophical purging of a young pervert’s darkest obsessions.

—Lydia Lunch

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SHAME is not your enemy. SHAME aids survival, incentivizing you to blend in, thereby concealing yourself from predators and avoiding conflict with peers, while pride aids reproduction, motivating you to stand out, thereby attracting mates. Evolution did not design you to be happy, only to behave in ways which benefit your genes, in this case by disguising socially undesirable traits. SHAME is like a mother who restricts her child’s freedom in order to keep him safe. Ideally, her admonitions foster social integration, but sometimes they backfire. Sometimes her children rebel.

          SHAME prevents social injury. Socialized people suppress their impermissible desires and cover the occasional aberration with hypocrisy and self-deception. The characters in this book, however, try to eradicate SHAME, by finding masochistic enjoyment in it or by transgressing so often, or getting so high, that they become numb to it. When SHAME no longer serves as a deterrent, when man seeks harmony with himself by battling his group, he trades his sense of belonging, with its accompanying inhibitions, for freedom with accompanying alienation. He makes himself an outcast, a criminal, a kamikaze for inner peace. 

 

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.

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Foreword by Lydia Lunch

Illustrated by Karolina Urbaniak & Wolfe Margolies

With an interview conducted by Martin Bladh

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