Lee Rourke
| Lee Rourke | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1972 |
| Occupation | Novelist, Literary Critic |
| Nationality | British |
| Period | 2002–present |
| Notable works | Vulgar Things, Varroa Destructor, The Canal, Everyday, A Brief History of Fables: From Aesop to Flash Fiction |
Lee Rourke is the author of the short-story collection EVERYDAY, the novel THE CANAL (winner of the Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize 2010) and the poetry collection VARROA DESTRUCTOR. His latest novel, VULGAR THINGS (‘poignant and unsettling’ – Eimear McBride) is published in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the US by 4th Estate, Harper Collins. He is a contributing editor at both The White Review and 3AM Magazine, has a literary column at the New Humanist, and has written regularly for The Guardian, TLS, Bookforum, The Independent, and The New Statesman. From 2012-2014 he was Writer-in-Residence at Kingston University, where he lectured on the MFA Programme in creative writing and critical theory. He once taught creative writing at Middlesex University, and now works as an English teacher at an Essex high school not far from the sea. He currently lives in Southend-on-Sea.
Vulgar Things in which Jon Michaels - a divorced, disaffected and fatigued editor living a nondescript life in North London - wakes one morning to a phone call informing him that his uncle has been found dead in his caravan on Canvey Island. Dismissed from his job only the day before and hung-over, Jon reluctantly agrees to sort through his uncle's belongings and clear out the caravan. What follows is a quixotic week on Canvey as Jon, led on by desire and delusion, purposeful but increasingly disorientated, unfolds a disturbing secret, ever more enchanted by the island - its landscape and its atmosphere. Haunted and haunting, 'Vulgar Things' is part mystery, part romance, part odyssey: a novel in which the menial entrances and the banal compels.
The Canal follows an unnamed narrator as he tries to make sense of the everyday violence around him. One morning, instead of walking to work (his usual weekday routine), he simply walks to the Regent’s canal in north east London, where he finds himself a suitable bench to sit on opposite a whitewashed office block on the other side of the murky water. He spends most of this first morning watching the commuters walking and cycling to and fro, together with the swans, coots and moorhens who have made the canal their home. He blames the onset of boredom for this sudden change in lifestyle. He is soon joined by a young woman on the same bench. She doesn’t speak, just stares ahead at the whitewashed office block, watching its occupants move from office to office and desk to desk. In this coming together begins a complicated treatise on violence, catastrophe, secrets, death, aviation, weight, technology and gravity, as this mysterious woman leads the narrator into a dark world of obsession and brutality.
Everyday is a set of short stories based in the heart of London. Rourke writes:
“What truly interests me is why Everyday was created in the first place: I guess I wanted to recreate, or copy, the base materiality around me: the same faces walking to work each day, the same arguments in the road, cyclists falling off their ‘fixers’ and ‘Bromptons’, the same conversations, the same daydreams, the same photocopying machines… A copy of the things of the everyday. I’m interested in Blanchot’s idea that we are all riveted to existence.” 3:AM Magazine
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