Silent Clamor Press
We publish fiction and nonfiction that reflect the world with clarity, invention, and nerve. Our books offer a profound emotional journey—literary in style, driven by consequential events, and crafted to transform the way you see yourself and the world.
Silent Clamor launches its first title with pride: A Graveyard of First Chapters, by Johnny Payne—a fearless and formally daring debut that embodies the literary ambition at the heart of our press.
A Graveyard of First Chapters
by
Johnny Payne
Preorder Coming Soon!
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.
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.
