Gravity’s Volkswagen

Also by Ian Blackwater

The Phallicist

Bob Pettit is an average man: average height, average weight, with an average income, average job and a perfectly averagely sized penis. However, like all men, he certainly wishes he had a little extra in the phallus department.

And then one day his wish starts to come true. His penis begins to get larger, pleasingly at first, then exponentially, then monstrously. He ceases to be a man with a penis and becomes a penis with a man attached.

A savage satire on male desire, potency and inadequacy, and a timely warning about getting too much of what we want. Based on a true story.

Letters to Thurston

The year is 1982 and in a boring northern town sixteen-year-old Steve Sterling, sits in his bedroom, practises electric guitar, and listens to the first Sonic Youth album. The music speaks to him and he sends a fan letter to guitarist Thurston Moore, expressing his love of the band and letting out all his personal teenage angst.

Over the years his life progresses — college, drug experimentation, first love, a job, a failed marriage, the death of all his hopes and dreams. And at each crucial stage there’s a Sonic Youth album that seems uncannily to match his situation. With each new release he sends Thurston Moore a further confessional letter.

Now as his life spins out of control he decides he must journey to America, track down Thurston Moore, talk to him face to face. Naturally he takes his electric guitar with him. But will it end in an avant-garde free-jazz noise jam or in tragedy?

A bittersweet meditation on the nature of music, mortality and unrequited fandom.

The Million-Martini Lunch

Part memoir, part travelogue, in which Ian Black-water scours the world — New York, Sarajevo, Alice Springs, to name but a few — in search of the perfect martini.

He starts at Julio Richelieu’s saloon in Martinez, California, where the drink was invented in the late nineteenth century (or was it?). And he goes on to limn the history, the fascination and multiple meanings of the drink sometimes called the silver bullet.

A protean meditation on what we drink, why we drink and what it tells us about who we are. Black-water discovers some startling and disturbing truths about the martini — and himself!

Beetamorphosis

“Greg Wintergreen woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a giant Volkswagen Beetle…”

So begins this artful, yet playful, pastiche of Kafka’s great work.

A brilliant jeu d’esprit and a long-awaited follow-up to Ian Blackwater’s cult hit novel Volkswagens and Velociraptors.

♦

Available at all good bookstores, and in some pretty crappy ones too.

EOF