Brendan McKenico

@mckenico.bsky.social

77 Followers 125 Following

Photography, books, old TV, film, Golden Retriever/Russian Blue, LGBTQ+, cooking, Doctor Who…

The book Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor sits up right on a circular, golden metallic table. To the right of the book is a red rotary telephone. The cover of the book is of city sky scrapers in New York on a summer evening. It is warm and vibrant looking.
A copy of the novel John of John by Douglas Stuart sits in a chair next to a large window. Outside the window the sky has rain clouds and the ground looks damp with rain.
A copy of the book ‘Elena Knows’ by Claudia Piñeiro resting on golden metallic table.
A copy of the novel The Bee Sting by Paul Murray sits on a pale stone surface. The book cover faces the camera. Yellow is the dominant colour of the cover. The book title is in a red font. The author’s name is in black font. Weaving between the title and the authors name is a looping squiggling line which starts at the bottom right corner. It manoeuvres across the cover and eventually ends in the top right where it can been seen the line is flight path of a bee which is drawn as seen from above.
A copy of the book John of John by Douglas Stuart, positioned on a yellow book case, cover front facing. Visible to the right of the image are the books spines of Douglas Stuart’s previous two novels, Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo.
A copy of the book ‘There are rivers in the sky’ by Elif Shafak stands upright on a window sill showing both its spine and its front cover.
Four books sit in a pale blue dish on a white windowsill. Behind is a pane of opaque glass. It is dusk outside. The room is lit from overhead. To the left, a Super Mario Bros. Piranha Plant light casts extra light. To the right, a rainbow glass skull bottle sits. The books are (from top to bottom) The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Galatea by Madeline Miller, Moondial by Helen Cresswell, and The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas. The spines of the books face the camera.
Stack of four books on a desk, spines facing the camera. From bottom to top: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Escapades: An exploration of Avenging curiosities by JZ Ferguson & Alan Hayes, The Quatermass Experiment: The making of TV’s first sci-fi classic by Toby Hadoke
struggle for verbal consciousness should not be left out of art. It is a very important part of life. It is not superimposition of a theory. It is the passionate struggle into conscious being. Love, and the struggle to be as fully conscious as we can: the most important aspects of being human. So This Is All is 'all' in another sense. It is the summation of the novels in the Dance Sequence, bringing together everything contained in the other five books, and exploring the two most important aspects of life through a young woman's eyes. It is the longest, the most passionate, the most thoughtful, the most complex in form, but also, I hope, the most engaging of all the Sequence. This, at least, is how I think of these novels. But of course what everybody knows is that readers make of books whatever they want to make of them. They often find things the author did not know were there and they often think of the stories quite differently from the way the author thought of them. Which is why I'm always keen to hear what readers say about my books, because it adds to my pleasure and increases my understanding. Besides, the truth is that books only come to life when readers read them and are only kept alive by readers talking about them.