Jackie Ess is a writer and teacher.
Darryl
£ 11.99
Darryl
Jackie Ess
Underneath the sharp satire and hilarious sexual irreverence this is a deadly serious book: a brilliant novel of a seeker, like The Pilgrim’s Progress refracted by queer internet culture.
Darryl Cook is a cuckold, and that’s exactly how he likes it. He has an inheritance that spares him from work, a manageable and seemingly consequence-free drug habit, and a lovely wife called Mindy who’s generally game for anything—and for as much of it as she can get. But after an accidental overdose and some serious oversharing, Darryl’s world begins to crack up. Tormented by what seems to be the secret truth in sex, and less assured of that secret’s form, Darryl steps into what used to be called real life . . . Darryl is a disarmingly funny and unabashedly intelligent look at a community of people parsing masculinity, marriage, sex (and love) on their own terms.
Shortlisted for The Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize 2026
Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize in Fiction 2026
- 978-1-7395161-7-8
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 200 pp.
- Paperback
- 10 February 2025
About the author
Endorsements (7)
What Darryl is looking for is a crisis of sufficient severity that it will cause him to feel real to himself.
One of the best novels on the planet.
Darryl crashes through the pieties of inclusive literature like a horny aurochs through an Apple Store. Jackie Ess’s vicious wit and humane soul refuse to settle for anything less than an enhanced interrogation of human frailty, here through the psychosexual evisceration of an ordinary, relatable guy who simply wants someone else to bang his wife. Who doesn’t? This book takes the raw power of the sentence seriously, which is the best way to be funny: Darryl is sprinting ahead of the reader, mooning, with knowledge they crave, and we must try our hardest to catch up. I was already breathless by page ten, my gut torn in half by horrified glee. I stayed awake all night reading and couldn’t work the next day. Jackie Ess is the best. Cuck rights!
Ess is what I might call a burgeoning cult literary figure, armed with an unmistakable lyric deadpan and a taste for provocative subject matter.
Jackie Ess’s debut novel is a smart, unexpected and extremely funny take on marriage, masculinity and desire, written from the perspective of a loser extraordinaire.
Running through it’s core is a torrent of wisdom at a fibre-optic pace with more power than even the most edited digital diatribe ... It’s a beautiful, genre-bending book — a jewel of the future that demands to be read, treasured, now.
Jackie Ess’s blogpost-shaped chapters build up a momentum ... The novel’s dissociative tone, veering between sharp satire and thorough character exploration, turns it into an unlikely page-turner.
Press (11)
Top 5 works of satire, chosen by writer and cultural mischief maker Jackie EssThe Big Issue, 16543222/02/2025
Twenty Shadows
£ 13.99
Pre order in Europe
Twenty Shadows
£ 13.99
Twenty Shadows
Richard Boothby
This singular book brings together the reflections of one of our greatest living philosophers with a father’s grief.
Taking its title from Shakespeare’s Richard II—“Each substance of grief hath twenty shadows”—this book follows personal tragedy into the murky place where memory and interpretation become indistinguishable. What lies at its heart is a meditation on the unknowability of the other.
Richard Boothby is right that no amount of intellect curbs the impulses of real experience, but that doesn’t mean you have to remain in a state of ignorance. Composed from the leftovers of terrible, unassimilable events, this book gives us bracing indications of ways to live on in a diminished aftermath.
Twenty Shadows tells of a man’s spiritual change following the suicide of his son after a long addiction. Haunted by this loss and the unknown desire of his only child, thinking and writing with a new emptiness, he finds a form of expression that was previously impossible.
- 978-1-0684395-3-7
- 7 b&w illustrations
- 19.8 x 12.8 cm
- 212 pp.
- Paperback
- October 2026
About the author
Richard Boothby is professor emeritus of philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. Boothby’s books include Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud (1991), Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan (2001), Sex on the Couch: What Freud Still Has to Teach Us about Sex and Gender (2006), and Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred (2023). He lives in Baltimore.
Press (1)
Upcoming (1)
| 29 November | Launch of Richard Boothby's Twenty Shadows with Rohit Goel, Charlotte Northall and Julie Reshe, BICAR |