Flower

‘I like eating cold, clammy wraps from big pharmacies that are open late and sell just a few foods like protein bars and powders.’ Flower is a book of realistic admissions, likes, dislikes, memories and no-brainer observations, treating personal truth as unavailable – something that must be made up and convincing. Taking cues from confessional literature, his daughter’s improvised games, poor internet writing and shitty AI, Ed Atkins, in his first work of non-fiction, equivocates between inanity and divinity, ease and pain, sentimentality and sterility. An anti-memoir, a list, a listless blur – Flower is a highly original, moving and absurd book by one of the most influential artists of his generation, formally inventive and disturbingly of our time.

‘I feel like a permanent conduit has been built between my brain and this book. Atkins is relentless, beautiful, hideously and angelically honest. Sometimes it brought me to tears and I’m not even sure why. It’s the stuff most of us leave out, or wouldn’t even know how to articulate. By which I mean this book has made so much other writing feel like propaganda. It’s heroic. I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from it.’
— Luke Kennard, author of Notes on the Sonnets

‘Every sentence in this delightfully bizarre techno-memoir could stand alone on a page and command allure. Like splicing the miniature divulgences of Édouard Levé with the ominous bombast of Jenny Holzer, Flower makes automatic non-fiction feel like sci-fi, and it’s instantly unforgettable.’
— Blake Butler, author of Molly

‘Flower is propulsive and it doesn’t let up. It’s about vulnerability, sort of, and invincibility: it swings between these poles. It’s about mortality, too, and in that sense humanity. To speak the book back at itself, I confess it did get to me.’
— Isabel Waidner, author of Corey Fah Does Social Mobility

‘Ed Atkins is a radical humanist who rediscovers the human in the most inhuman of states, when the usual supports – ego, language, people, technology, media, food – all fail. In Flower Atkins turns that abjection towards us, in a spleeny anti-autofiction that is his own version of Les Fleurs du Mal.’
— Hal Foster, author of What Comes After Farce?

‘In its hysterical representation of Ed’s demonic internalities, Flower surfs waves of experiencing typically suppressed, bypassed, ignored. What seems at first blush exemplary of contemporary literary modes of postmodern confession quickly cumulates into a free mobility of avid, jagged distraction at a comic-book clip as his exaggeratedly magnified self-awareness refracts and distends. A rhythmically unique flow and a robust “minor work” in the best possible sense: file Flower’s barrage of Ed’s “sexless kinks” under New Forms Of Poetry.’
— Zach Phillips, Fievel is Glauque 

‘Finally someone is writing about all the food in drugstores. A paean of appreciation to these freakish purveyors of junk is how Atkins launches his amorous, granular unspooling of outrageous drives and appetites. Flower is the kind of book many people dream of writing: kudos to Atkins for getting it on the page.’
— Moyra Davey, author of Index Cards