Christopher Linforth
Christopher’s website || Interview with Vol. 1 Brooklyn about Directory
Directory unites the lives of interconnected twins and triplets whose identities switch and blur and fracture as their plural selves crisscross the country. The inhabitants of the collection explore the causes of their trauma, reliving memories of past existences, looking for an end to their pain.
A collection of semi-related stories that accumulate, fragment, and finally rupture, Directory commands sharp, quick, glass-like shardes of story that embed in the reader. A hybrid book concerned with the blurring of identity and deatomizing a sense of self, Christopher Linforth’s second collection sifts through experimental tendencies, fragmentation, kaleidoscopic identities and interpersonal ties, choral voices, gender fluidity, and corporeal experience to offer a lasting commentary on what it means to be–as one, as many, or as several–in the modern United States.
First published by Otis Books/Seismicity Editions in 2020 before encountering the pandemic, Directory will be reprinted by Indirect Books as the press’ second project. Find more coverage on Directory below.
“Strikingly written and told with urgency…” Wendy J. Fox, BuzzFeed
“Christopher Linforth’s splendid Directory is composed of shrapnel selves, both aesthetic and existential, each shard sharp, concentrated, biting, brutal, devastating, and astonishing.” —Lance Olsen, author of My Red Heaven
“Christopher Linforth’s Directory offers prose that twins no others. Original crisp writing, taking its readers on an unforgettable journey, through portals of the unknown. A wonderful, surprising, powerful read.” —Kim Chinquee, author of Wetsuit and Shot Girls
“…refreshing at times, shocking, disorienting and puzzling at others, but throughout the entire book you follow a thread of tender humanity that begs you to identify with a perspective that squeezes, prods and stabs at the heart in a multiplicity of ways.” —Levi Noe, Bending Genres
“Directory’s rogues’ gallery of rakes, rapscallions, and rascals, of hoydens, harridans, and doyennes, gestures semaphorically at abandoned subjectivity. This is evinced in this collection’s recurrence of apparatuses, an unpacking of the colonization of the human by technologies, particular analog ones — pre-cellular telecom and pre-digital photography — familiar in the films, photography, and paintings of David Lynch.” —Sean Hooks, Necessary Fiction
“…what is distinctive about the book…its use of the story-fragment to both exploit brevity as a self-sufficient narrative strategy and to organize a series of such brief stories so that the result is a work that has structural coherence without strictly conforming to a pre-established form.” —Daniel Green, The Reading Experience
“Linforth’s elegant and powerful prose invites the reader to join a chorus of collective voices that explore questions of identity, the constant uncomfortableness of growing up and the painful legacy of abuse.” —María Alejandra Barrios, Smokelong Quarterly.
Select coverage of Christopher’s first book, The Distortions:
“This richly textured collection reminds us of the tether to our geographical homes.”
Daphne Kalotay, The Washington Post
“…chiseled, captivating stories….with compassion and brutal honesty, the stories in The Distortionsdeal with how war tears people apart, but also with the stubborn resistance of those who search for redemption.”
Wendy J. Fox, BuzzFeed
“This story collection, Christopher Linforth’s third, powerfully probes the pain of those scarred by the Croat/Bosnian Serb War and its aftermath, as memory embeds the horrific twentieth-century past within a grim present. These meticulously constructed characters live beyond the text; their ambiguous fates invade our consciousness.”
Kristen Rabe, Foreword Reviews
Please follow us on social media (@indirectbooks) and subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date on these projects and help support fearless writing.
Indirect Books 