Fiction

A bold and brilliant short work by the author of the Goldsmiths Prize-winning Cuddy‘Makes most contemporary fiction look bloodless by comparison’ Daily Mail‘Like nothing else you’ll read this year’ Jan Carson‘Highly original, bold, inventive … A stunning rendering’ independent.co.uk‘A hair-raising performance’ Kit Fan‘Brilliant, strange and electrifying’ Daily TelegraphNovember, 1971. Berlin, Germany. Opening night.

Klaus Kinski, Germany’s most controversial actor, steps into the spotlight to a crowd of thousands. After years of making movies abroad, he has returned to the stage for a much-publicized one-man performance about Jesus Christ. As the crowd turn on him and violence is threatened, it is also very nearly his last.

After this week, he will never perform on stage again. Exactly fifty years later, a hypochondriac writer, housebound by winter snowstorms, becomes fixated with video footage of Kinski at his most manic. In this forensic analysis, he strays into the darker corners of modern culture, and finally begins to understand the compulsive urge that drives artists to the edge of sanity in their pursuit of perfection.

Jesus Christ Kinski is a novel about a film about a performance about Jesus. It is a daring act of literary ventriloquism, a meditation on censorship, creativity, loneliness – and just how far our tolerance is tested by bad people who make great art. Praise for Benjamin Myers‘One of our finest, and most deftly imaginative, writers’ i news ‘Radical and gorgeous’ Max Porter‘A writer of extraordinary and incandescent talent’ Alex Preston