Lee Rourke

Lee Rourke (1972-) is an English writer and literary critic. His books include the short story collection Everyday, the novels The Canal (winner of The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize in 2010), Vulgar Things, and Glitch, and the poetry collection Varroa Destructor.

Lee Rourke
Born1972
OccupationNovelist, Literary Critic
NationalityBritish
Period2002–present
Notable worksVulgar Things, Varroa Destructor, The Canal, Everyday, A Brief History of Fables: From Aesop to Flash Fiction

Career

Rourke is a contributing editor at 3:AM Magazine, has a literary column at the New Humanist, and has written regularly for The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, The Independent, and the New Statesman.

From 2012 to 2014, he was Writer-in-Residence at Kingston University, where he later lectured in the MFA Programme in creative writing and critical theory. After leaving Kingston University, he taught creative writing at the University of East London and Middlesex University. He currently lives in Leigh-on-Sea, England.

Work

Novels

Vulgar Things in which Jon Michaels - a divorced, disaffected and fatigued editor living a nondescript life in North London - wakes one morning to a phone call informing him that his uncle has been found dead in his caravan on Canvey Island. Dismissed from his job only the day before and hung-over, Jon reluctantly agrees to sort through his uncle's belongings and clear out the caravan. What follows is a quixotic week on Canvey as Jon, led on by desire and delusion, purposeful but increasingly disorientated, unfolds a disturbing secret, ever more enchanted by the island - its landscape and its atmosphere. Haunted and haunting, 'Vulgar Things' is part mystery, part romance, part odyssey: a novel in which the menial entrances and the banal compels.

The Canal follows an unnamed narrator as he tries to make sense of the everyday violence around him. One morning, instead of walking to work (his usual weekday routine), he simply walks to the Regent’s canal in north east London, where he finds himself a suitable bench to sit on opposite a whitewashed office block on the other side of the murky water. He spends most of this first morning watching the commuters walking and cycling to and fro, together with the swans, coots and moorhens who have made the canal their home. He blames the onset of boredom for this sudden change in lifestyle. He is soon joined by a young woman on the same bench. She doesn't speak, just stares ahead at the whitewashed office block, watching its occupants move from office to office and desk to desk. In this coming together begins a complicated treatise on violence, catastrophe, secrets, death, aviation, weight, technology and gravity, as this mysterious woman leads the narrator into a dark world of obsession and brutality.

Short stories

Everyday is a set of short stories based in the heart of London. Rourke writes:

"What truly interests me is why Everyday was created in the first place: I guess I wanted to recreate, or copy, the base materiality around me: the same faces walking to work each day, the same arguments in the road, cyclists falling off their ‘fixers’ and ‘Bromptons’, the same conversations, the same daydreams, the same photocopying machines… A copy of the things of the everyday. I’m interested in Blanchot’s idea that we are all riveted to existence." [1]

Poetry

Rourke's collection of poetry, Varroa Destructor, was published in 2013 by 3:AM Press.

Anthologies

Rourke's work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including Best British Short Stories 2011 (ed. Nicholas Royle, Salt Publishing, 2011), Best European Fiction (ed. Aleksandar Hemon, Dalkey Archive Press, 2011) and The Beat Anthology (ed. by Sean McGahey, Blackheath Books, 2010).

Non-Fiction

A Brief History of Fables: From Aesop to Flash Fiction is published by Hesperus Press.

Themes

Boredom

Rourke’s fiction deals primarily with boredom. Rourke explains further in The Guardian:

"Boredom has always fascinated me. I suppose it is the Heideggerian sense of 'profound boredom' that intrigues me the most. What he called a 'muffling fog' that swathes everything – including boredom itself – in apathy. Revealing 'being as a whole': that moment when we realise everything is truly meaningless, when everything is pared down and all we are confronted with is a prolonged, agonising nothingness. Obviously, we cannot handle this conclusion; it suspends us in constant dread. In my fictions I am concerned with two archetypes only, both of them suspended in this same dread: those who embrace boredom and those who try to fight it. The quotidian tension, the violence that this suspension and friction creates naturally filters itself into my work." [2]

gollark: Oh yes, I'll just use Rust's stdlib in my glorious C.
gollark: Well, it does at most `(arrayorsomethinglength * arrayorsomethinglength * arrayorsomethinglength * 3) / 2` iterations.
gollark: *And* it terminates in bounded time.
gollark: It's optimized because it uses XOR over inefficient temporary variables.
gollark: I will have to make it `a____________` instead, maybe.

References
  1. Killen, Chris (19 February 2009), "you know the scene - very humdrum", 3:AM Magazine, retrieved 28 March 2020
  2. Rourke, Lee (15 June 2008). "Lee Rourke's top 10 books about boredom". The Guardian. Retrieved 28 March 2020.
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