Black Bag - Luke Kennard

Written by Luke Kennard
Read by Luke Kennard
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

An out-of-work actor accepts the role of a lifetime—sitting soundlessly in a lecture theatre, zipped into a large leather bag—to aid a professor’s psychological experiment. What could possibly go wrong?

In Luke Kennard’s audacious new novel, a penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr. Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr. Blend’s students react to someone zipped into an oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of Fall lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own—in particular, can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag?—and the actor’s childhood friend forms a vision for monetizing this new situation . . .

A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity, and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.

“[A] delightful and dark picaresque . . . Kennard entertainingly pokes and prods at conceptions of identity, whether in sexual relationships or online personae. It’s a hoot.” —Publishers Weekly

“A genre-defying, big-swing of a novel with a Kafkaesque premise . . . a sharply funny meditation on masculinity, academia, the modern attention economy, and the quiet desperation of everyday life.” —Andrew Boryga, author of Victim

“Irreverent and honest, Black Bag is an answer to the ‘masculinity crisis’ that suggests the solution is a lot easier than it appears.” —OurCulture Mag

“A comedic masterpiece. Part SNL sketch, part Spike Jonze film.” —Ben Purkert, author of The Men Can’t Be Saved

“What’s most extraordinary about Black Bag isn’t just its wry discursions to the psychology classroom, the sex dungeon, or the Swedish sawmill of the mind—though these are rendered with such phosphorescent wit that I could’ve read a book’s worth of each. In Black Bag, we’re treated to an uncommonly funny and deeply necessary snapshot of masculinity no more objectionable nor perfect than a black leather bag. Whoever thinks men aren’t writing fiction clearly needs to read Luke Kennard.” —Rafael Frumkin, author of Confidence

“Fizzes with wit and invention and winningly communicates a very human concern for meaning and connection. In 1967 “Black Bag” apparently took a whole semester to win over his fellow classmates, but this novel will gain your affections on the first page.” —Guardian

“[An] ecccentric, amusingly slanted campus novel . . . the action escalates, sometimes into absurdity, always hilariously . . . poignant . . . The bug-eyed hypercapitalism of the internet is gleefully and sinisterly skewered . . . Luke is also a widely admired poet, and his prose ripples with unusual images and wry aphorisms . . The tone throughout is delightfully mordant . . . This is a very modern novel with a comfortingly familiar core: that of an ode to the importance of friendship, tenderness and love” ― Times Literary Supplement

“Gleefully absurd . . . a triumph of deadpan comedy . . . From this gloriously unhinged premise, Kennard explores broader questions of identity, masculinity and the pursuit of meaning in art and in life . . . Kennard is superb at capturing [a] chaotic interior life . . . The novel’s off-kilter humour combines minute social observation with incongruous ideas, drawing on a wide sphere of reference from religion to pornography. Conceptually, Black Bag is as surreal and ambitious as Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, only written by someone with the comic instincts of Peep Show‘s Jesse Armstrong. But beneath the playfulness lies a thoughtful, tender meditation on the difficulty of being a man in the modern world: how to find purpose, how to make art that matters and how to connect with other people when you suspect you might not possess a fully formed self to offer them. In Kennard’s hands, the bag contains a lot, and he’s so generous with the jokes that I found myself laughing on almost every page. A brilliant comic tour de force” ― Johanna Thomas-Corr ― Sunday Times

“Hilarious . . . Both [of Luke’s] works operate as Black Mirror-style satires of late-capitalist, technocratic societies, where discontented thirtysomethings find themselves embroiled in bizarre social experiments. This is all tremendous good fun, with razor-sharp jokes and absurd scenarios galore. It is a campus novel for our end times, packed with keen insights into the current state of art, masculinity and friendship . . . Black Bag fizzes with wit and invention and winningly communicates a very human concern for meaning and connection. In 1967 “Black Bag” apparently took a whole semester to win over his fellow classmates, but this novel will gain your affections on the first page” ― Observer

“A wryly subversive glimpse into the inner life of an actor who barely perceives how truly lost he is. It’s clever, moving, biting, rich with integrity, and wildly funny.” —Sierra Greer, award-winning author of Annie Bot

“How much can you fit in a large leather satchel? Luke Kennard suggests, when said bag is zipped up around the body of an out-of-work actor trying to find his way, the answer is near infinite: humor, dear friendship, frustrated desire, a talking dog, a wad of cash, hallucinogens, ambition, AI, humility, and no shortage of heart. Black Bag carried me along with a tremendously deft hand: it had me laughing, unnerved, and hopeful as it galloped through a true and strange world. This book left me reckoning with what to make of the society outside my proverbial eye slits, and what, with some effort, we might make of it still.” —Emily Nemens, bestselling author of The Cactus League

“A stylish, fun, and surprisingly incisive examination of masculinity, modernity, and attempting to make a living as a creative. It’s also a weird little book about and, presumably for, sickos. Reading it hits like a concussion that makes you stranger but more compassionate. Easily the sharpest, funniest thing I’ve read all year.” —Calvin Kasulke, author of Several People Are Typing

“Equal parts charming and unhinged, Black Bag is the perfect novel for anyone who has ever felt like ‘someone is constantly slapping me in the stomach with an old brown shoe.’ This is one of hundreds (thousands?) of quotable lines from an immensely talented writer to watch. Luke Kennard, I will follow you anywhere.” —Ruth Madievsky, bestselling and award-winning author of All Night Pharmacy

“Black Bag is a masterpiece from one of the best writers at work today. In his endlessly quotable prose, Kennard explores modern masculinity with compassion and brutal honesty, warmth and despair – through a narrator who, on every page, discovers his true self and simultaneously buries it. Wildly original and funny, yet always underpinned by depth of feeling, this is a novel like no other” — Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine

“I have been agonising over saying something clever, funny and/or unusual enough to do Black Bag justice. I’ve failed dismally, which somehow seems in keeping with this brilliant novel. It’s enough, perhaps, to note that it made me laugh, think, worry about a man on a swan pedalo and almost shed a tear into the dark leather of my own consciousness.” — Will Ashon, author of The Passengers

“Had me laughing from page one” — Anthony Cummings ― New Statesman

”Such a smart and philosophical novel really has no business being this entertaining. Black Bag is hilarious, profound, tender and deranged. A deeply cathartic read for anyone seeking the funny side of the total decimation of the arts” — Anna Metcalfe, author of Chrysalis

“Strange and surprisingly tender” ― Our Culture

“With all the fuss about the manosphere, Luke Kennard’s Black Bag comes as comic relief . . . The novel is profound as well as funny” ― The Standard

“The absurdist set-up pin-wheels into a comedy of 21st-century manners, told in a winningly wry voice, both vulnerable and dyspeptic” ― Mail on Sunday

By: Luke Kennard … Narrated by: Luke Kennard … Length: 9 hours and 6 minutes