In the experimental Directory, Christopher Linforth brilliantly renders a series of fractured voices which echo through a kaleidoscopic landscape of shared trauma, vanished identities, and American dread. Told through interconnected flash fictions that blur the line between individual and collective consciousness, the book unfolds like a spectral phonebook, each entry revealing another shard of a dark familial mythology. Choral, nightmarish, and claustrophobic, Directory is a mesmerizing exploration of the unstable architecture of the self.
A collection of semi-related stories that accumulate, fragment, and finally rupture, Directory commands sharp, quick, glass-like shards 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.
