A new installment in Dennis Cooper's "Little House on the Bowery" series

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Click here to read an excerpt from Artificial Light

"Greer does a superb job of transcending conventional genrefication, bringing something fresh to contemporary literature . . . A very enjoyable read [with a] highly inventive structure, full of eccentricities and rock music factoids..."
--Library Journal

"Artifical Light skates on the purity of confession. It's a brutal reveal; an Abyss Narrative with hooks. Read it in a rush of abomination and rise above, rise above." --Stephen Malkmus

Artificial Light has won a California Book Award. Mr. Greer will be honored with a Silver Medal for First Fiction at a special ceremony in San Francisco on June 7.

"When is flight not-flight? How does a dead (very dead) celebrity manage to be not-dead? Why are Dayton, Ohio, and not-Dayton so endgame-compatible? James Greer eats being and non-being for breakfast, and his tale is one of Parmenidian oompah and shebang. As apocalyptic page-turners go, Artificial Light beats the bejeezus out of the last dozen Thomas Pynchons, the last nineteen Don DeLillos, and the last forty-three Kurt Vonneguts. I wouldn't shit ya."
--Richard Meltzer, author of A Whore Just Like the Rest

"Fiat Lux gleams like an onyx from a vivid and darkly mythical world. She is impossible to forget and her skewed cynicism and solipsistic melancholy linger long after you've turned the final page. Greer's writing is lean and poetic, shot through with sagacious observations and demented humor, but at the heart of his strange semiŠsci fi world there is a huge human tenderness, moments of heart-rending lyrical beauty, and a rabid, breathtaking imagination." --Helen Walsh, author of Brass

In 1994, a young woman named Fiat Lux donates twenty-one notebooks full of her writings to a university library and then disappears. It's only later that her close relationship with a well known rock musician who had recently committed suicide is discovered, and the notebook's contents become the subject of growing fascination, conjecture, and gossip. Intending to satisfy the public's insatiable curiosity about the rock star and throw light on the author's rumored involvement in his now infamous death, and, more importantly, hoping to make a case for her remarkable writings as a work of literature, the university's press has decided to publish her notebooks in a single volume under the title she had given them, Artificial Light.

Set in the mythological land of Dayton, Ohio, Artificial Light is part historical novel, part science fiction, part sociological study, part murder mystery. Stunningly written in prose that is poetic, gripping, and highly adventurous, Artificial Light may be the first American novel to successfully treat the alternative rock scene of the 1990s as a subject for serious literature. James Greer has written a novel at once completely original in its form, composition, and outlook and yet as classically pleasurable and informative as any work of contemporary fiction in memory.

Writer/Director/Critic/Musician James Greer grew up in Boston, MA. He lived for many years in Charlottesville, VA, New York City, Dayton, OH, and now Los Angeles, CA. Greer is also the author of Guided By Voices: A Brief History (Grove Press, 2005). He has written for Spin, Entertainment Weekly, and Tennis magazine. He's played and sung in several New York City bands and one or two Dayton, OH bands. His directorial debut, a short film called Mimesis, premiered at the Bumbershoot/One Reel Festival in Seattle, WA over Labor Day weekend 2006. He is currently at work on the follow-up to Mimesis, entitled Diegesis, as well as a new novel, a book of short stories/poetry, and the script for a rock musical based on the life of Cleopatra for director Steven Soderbergh. Artificial Light is his first novel.