Black Bag

[An] ecccentric, amusingly slanted campus novel … the action escalates, sometimes into absurdity, always hilariously … poignant … The bug-eyed hypercapitalism of the internet is gleefully and sinisterly skewered … Luke is also a widely admired poet, and his prose ripples with unusual images and wry aphorisms . . The tone throughout is delightfully mordant … This is a very modern novel with a comfortingly familiar core: that of an ode to the importance of friendship, tenderness and love * Times Literary Supplement *Gleefully absurd … a triumph of deadpan comedy … From this gloriously unhinged premise, Kennard explores broader questions of identity, masculinity and the pursuit of meaning in art and in life … Kennard is superb at capturing [a] chaotic interior life … The novel’s off-kilter humour combines minute social observation with incongruous ideas, drawing on a wide sphere of reference from religion to pornography. Conceptually, Black Bag is as surreal and ambitious as Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, only written by someone with the comic instincts of Peep Show’s Jesse Armstrong. But beneath the playfulness lies a thoughtful, tender meditation on the difficulty of being a man in the modern world: how to find purpose, how to make art that matters and how to connect with other people when you suspect you might not possess a fully formed self to offer them. In Kennard’s hands, the bag contains a lot, and he’s so generous with the jokes that I found myself laughing on almost every page. A brilliant comic tour de force – Johanna Thomas-Corr * Sunday Times *Hilarious … Both [of Luke’s] works operate as Black Mirror-style satires of late-capitalist, technocratic societies, where discontented thirtysomethings find themselves embroiled in bizarre social experiments. This is all tremendous good fun, with razor-sharp jokes and absurd scenarios galore. It is a campus novel for our end times, packed with keen insights into the current state of art, masculinity and friendship … Black Bag fizzes with wit and invention and winningly communicates a very human concern for meaning and connection. In 1967 “Black Bag” apparently took a whole semester to win over his fellow classmates, but this novel will gain your affections on the first page * Observer *Black Bag is a masterpiece from one of the best writers at work today. In his endlessly quotable prose, Kennard explores modern masculinity with compassion and brutal honesty, warmth and despair - through a narrator who, on every page, discovers his true self and simultaneously buries it. Wildly original and funny, yet always underpinned by depth of feeling, this is a novel like no other – Joe Dunthorne, author of SUBMARINEEqual parts charming and unhinged, Black Bag is the perfect novel for anyone who has ever felt like ‘someone is constantly slapping me in the stomach with an old brown shoe.’ This is one of hundreds (thousands?) of quotable lines from an immensely talented writer to watch. Luke Kennard, I will follow you anywhere – Ruth Madievsky, author of ALL NIGHT PHARMACYA stylish, fun, and incisive examination of masculinity, modernity, and attempting to make a living as a creative. It’s also a weird little book about and, presumably for, sickos. Reading it hits like a concussion that makes you stranger but more compassionate. Easily the sharpest, funniest thing I’ve read all year – Calvin Kasulke, author of SEVERAL PEOPLE ARE TYPINGHow much can you fit in a large leather satchel? Luke Kennard suggests, when said bag is zipped up around the body of an out-of-work actor trying to find his way, the answer is near infinite: humor, dear friendship, frustrated desire, a talking dog, a wad of cash, hallucinogens, ambition, AI, humility, and no shortage of heart. Black Bag carried me along with a tremendously deft hand: it had me laughing, unnerved, and hopeful as it galloped through a true and strange world. This book left me reckoning with what to make of the society outside my proverbial eye slits, and what, with some effort, we might make of it still – Emily Nemens, author of THE CACTUS LEAGUEWhat’s most extraordinary about Black Bag isn’t just its wry discursions to the psychology classroom, the sex dungeon, or the Swedish sawmill of the mind - though these are rendered with such phosphorescent wit that I could’ve read a book’s worth of each. In Black Bag, we’re treated to an uncommonly funny and deeply necessary snapshot of masculinity no more objectionable nor perfect than a black leather bag. Whoever thinks men aren’t writing fiction clearly needs to read Luke Kennard – Rafael Frumkin, author of CONFIDENCEThis book walks and talks like a comedic masterpiece. Part SNL sketch, part Spike Jonze film, Black Bag punks everyone and everything, taking aim at high tech, higher ed, and modern-day masculinity along the way. It’s also just plain hot … The smart and sexy look this season? – Ben Purkert, author of THE MEN CAN’T BE SAVEDI have been agonising over saying something clever, funny and/or unusual enough to do Black Bag justice. I’ve failed dismally, which somehow seems in keeping with this brilliant novel. It’s enough, perhaps, to note that it made me laugh, think, worry about a man on a swan pedalo and almost shed a tear into the dark leather of my own consciousness. – Will Ashon, author of THE PASSENGERSHad me laughing from page one – Anthony Cummings * New Statesman *Such a smart and philosophical novel really has no business being this entertaining. Black Bag is hilarious, profound, tender and deranged. A deeply cathartic read for anyone seeking the funny side of the total decimation of the arts – Anna Metcalfe, author of CHRYSALISStrange and surprisingly tender * Our Culture *With all the fuss about the manosphere, Luke Kennard’s Black Bag comes as comic relief … The novel is profound as well as funny * The Standard *The absurdist set-up pin-wheels into a comedy of 21st-century manners, told in a winningly wry voice, both vulnerable and dyspeptic * Mail on Sunday *Black Bag made me laugh aloud dozens and dozens of times. It’s brilliant, a triumph of a book: the story of a young out-of-work actor who takes on a job working for a professor of psychology, who employs him to dress in a black bag during his lectures in order to gauge his students’ changing attitude to strangeness. It’s based on a real-life experiment from 1967. I loved its inventive originality and its ambition: it is very powerfully worth your time – Katherine Rundell, author of Super-InfiniteVery, very funny. * GQ *The funniest and smartest novel I’ve read in a while – Zadie Smith * Guardian Summer Reads *

Luke Kennard is an award-winning poet and novelist. His literary criticism has appeared in the London Review of Books, Poetry London, and Times Literary Supplement. He lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham.

In 2014 he was named one of the ‘Next Generation Poets’ by the Poetry Book Society in their once-per-decade list. Cain, was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and described by Alan Hollinghurst as ‘the cleverest and funniest thing I’ve read this year’.

Notes on the Sonnets, an anarchic response to Shakespeare’s sonnets, won the Forward prize for Best Poetry Collection in 2021.

His first novel, The Transition, was BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. His most recent novel is The Answer to Everything. His forthcoming poetry collection, The Book of Jonah, will be published by Picador in 2025.

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