The Clocks Have Stopped. You're Invited to Celebrate

Celebrate the End of Historical Time with Me Tonight and Tomorrow. Buy and read my novel to find out what this means.

My first novel, Stop All the Clocks, is out today. Critics have called it:

• “a Neuromancer for the 21st century”

• “the first genuinely compelling novel of the latest US batch [of novels]”

• “funny and terrifying and strange, like life; but, unlike life, it offers something like catharsis.”

This is the end of a long journey, which began almost nine years ago to the day. Back in 2016, I was walking around the Village, and some paradoxical lines of poetry entered my mind. I jotted them down on a napkin, and they became the lines of poetry that conclude Stop All the Clocks. Now the book is here. It’s in stores, including at the famous McNally Jackson, where in my youth I would browse the stacks and dream of seeing my own book among them, coming in right ahead of Kundera, Kunkel and Kunzru; at Book Culture in Morningside Heights, where I had my first job in the city; at the famous City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, which was founded by the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti; and many more. You can read an excerpt from my publishers

Arcade Publishing

here.

I’m having two big events for the book: a reading and conversation with KGB Lit Journal editor Carrigan Miller at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn TONIGHT Weds June 4 at 7PM, and a party at Pubkey TOMORROW Thurs June 5 at 10PM. See below. RSVP for the Thursday party here.

Reading TONIGHT (Weds). Party TMRW (Thurs).

Nine years is a while to have a novel in the works. I’ve had a lot of time to think about what my purpose was with this novel, and what the novelist’s purpose should be in general. One could say that the novelist’s purpose is just to tell a story. But that’s not really good enough. There are many media now for storytelling. And these new media—film, TV, and short form video content being the obvious ones—often tell stories with greater immediacy and impact. For the novel to make sense as a form, there must be some other reason for it to exist. There must be something the novelist can do that other storytellers cannot.

I’ve never really been a manifesto sort of guy. But I also can’t produce art blindly without knowing where the whole process is going. (I deeply envy the sorts of people who can.) I need reason to follow my intuition. And a sufficient number of early Stop All the Clocks’s early readers have told me that the book is refreshing in some way—perhaps new in some way, though the principles behind it are very old—that I thought it would be worth it for me to examine what principles guided my own writing and to suggest them as principles for other novelists to follow if they so choose.

I wanted to have this piece on principles of novel-writing ready for you today, but it has proven to be a difficult piece to write, being a summation of pretty much everything I’ve learned as a novelist and a critic. And I needed to send you this email so you’d know about these events. So consider this a preview, and a promise.

Hope to see you tonight and/or tomorrow.

—Noah