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A Graveyard of First Chapters
by
Johnny Payne
A darkly comic literary novel that explores creative failure, self-invention, and the quiet wreckage of the American dream.
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Once a bestselling author, Jasper Delgado has lost his wife, his house, his life savings, his car, and all his possessions except for an old laptop. In that laptop lie many chapters of novels he began but couldn’t finish: after success with his first three novels, he's choked. When a letter arrives from a half-sister in Peru he never knew existed, Jasper embarks on an improbable journey that might change his beaten life. As he rereads his graveyard of first chapters, they begin to make uncanny sense. What if this graveyard of creative failures isn't a death sentence but the key to his redemption?
By turns comic, philosophical, and heartbreakingly self-aware, A Graveyard of First Chapters walks the blurred lines between fiction and existence, memory and myth. It’s a novel about unfinished stories, written on the page and in the heart—and the absurd, glorious, completed puzzle that can be made of all those fragments.
PRAISE FOR A GRAVEYARD OF FIRST CHAPTERS
Johnny Payne’s new novel is intelligent, skillful, inventive, and moving. It begins in a North American junkyard and ends at a Peruvian hacienda, tracking the struggles of a confused young writer to find the woman who raised him, who may or may not be his biological mother. Surprisingly enough, despite the turbulence of the journey, the book has a happy ending, and even more surprising, the happy ending is earned, and richly satisfying. Payne is such a master of fictive techniques that he can do almost anything he wants on the page and make it work. The text is often insanely funny, yet confronts the unavoidable disturbance at the core of human experience. This is a book that everyone should read.
—Stephen-Paul Martin, author of TwentyTwenty and The Ace of Lightning
What a crazy and confounding contraption from the toy-box of a Macedonio Fernandez or a Julio Cortazar have we in our hands when we open this graveyard of first chapters. But an American, rough-n-tumble Macedonio or Gregory Samsonite awakening from one dream into multifarious landscapes of dead-end jobs, alien abductions, Medieval moors, six packs, tow trucks, conquistador battles, and arctic explorers, scurvy-ridden, and surviving on pemmican hash. It's a wild whirlwind, pure fun and a turbine of energy and shrapnel. You won't be able to put this novel down.
—Anthony Seidman, author of That Beast in the Mirror
In the tradition of the late, great Gilbert Sorrentino, Johnny Payne’s latest “novel”, A Graveyard of First Chapters, is a tour de force of narrative invention, an exposition of writing’s potential when it is freed from the laborious conventions of the contemporary novel. Payne has a ball as he flips in and out of various story lines across time, space, the “real” world and myth tracking Jasper and Vanessa through semi-related stories interspersed with quasi-historical/fantasy narratives from pre-colonial Peru to Hindu myth. Equally whimsical, insightful, and hilarious, Payne thankfully shares his writer character Jasper’s lack of a sense of closure, the ultimate bugaboo of the unimaginative hordes. Be prepared—he careens through multiple realities with the unrestrained joy of an 8-year old kid on his first time in bumper cars. A Graveyard of First Chapters is a true delight.
—Michael Boughn, author of Cosmographia—A Post-Lucretian Faux Micro-Epic, The Book of Uncertain—A Hyperbiographical Users’ Manual, and Measure’s Measures—Poetry and Knowledge
—Marc Nash, Literary Fiction Booktuber
About Johnny
Johnny Payne is the author of several novels, plays, and poetry collections, including Confessions of a Gentleman Killer, The Hard Side of the River, Ostraca, and Midnight Sutra. His work spans fiction, drama, and verse, and he contributes literary essays to journals such as Merion West.
