Search results for ""Author RM Vaughan""

LAMBDA LITERARY OCTOBER'S MOST ANTICIPATED LGBTQIA+ LITERATURETHE GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 30 CANADIAN BOOKS TO READ IN 2023A novel about Berlin: a city for artists and libertines, a perfect place to find love and madness. When he tired of Toronto’s insular scene, art critic Martin Heather fled to Berlin, where he tried to sleep his way through the entire population of gay men. And then he met Alexandar, who began to tutor Martin in increasingly violent sex – and in love. Pervatory is a series of journal entries about Martin and Alexandar’s relationship. But interjections from the present, where Martin has been institutionalized, suggest that the hints we get of his increasing instability and obsession with the idea that his apartment is haunted by an evil spirit may have led to something dire … RM Vaughan was an astute art critic, a dazzling poet, and an important queer activist. His untimely death in October 2020 was a tremendous loss to the queer and literary communities. This novel is what he left for us."Pervatory is RM Vaughan's perverse Valentine to Berlin. It is sexy, funny, often elegant, and a fitting elegiac punctuation mark to his incredible body of work. Given the way he left us, it is as devastating as it is exhilarating." – journalist and Lambda Award–winning author Matthew Hays"RM Vaughan was a promiscuous pansy, a louche moralist, a lonely heart, but most importantly, he was a writer, an irritating, idiosyncratic, incisive writer. This country, with its mawkish, mediocre literary culture, didn't know what to do with him. Pervatory is his final affront." – Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot"Brilliant, funny, propulsive." – Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People

Read more less

For forty years, RM Vaughan has been fighting, and failing, to get his forty winks each night. He's not alone, not by any stretch. More and more studies highlight the health risks of undersleeping, yet we have never been asked to do more, and for longer. And we can’t stop thinking that a lack of sleep is heroic: snoozing is a kind of laziness, after all. But why, when we know more about the value of sleep, are we obsessed with twenty--four--hour workdays and deliberate sleep deprivation? Working outward from his own experience, Vaughan explores this insomnia culture we’ve created, predicting a cultural collision — will we soon have to legislate rest, as France has done? — and wondering about the cause--and--effect model of our shorter attention spans. Does the fact that we are almost universally underslept change how our world works? We know it’s an issue with, say, pilots and truck drivers, but what about artists — does an insomnia culture change creativity? And what are the long-term cultural consequences of this increasing sacri?ce for the ever-elusive goal of ‘total productivity’? ‘RM Vaughan ... [is] easily amongst the top ?ve art critics working today. I’ve seen Vaughan turn phrases that have the forcefulness of Christian Viveros Faune, the plainspoken insight of Dave Hickey, and the lyricism of Peter Schjeldahl. Vaughan should never have to do anything but write. ’— Paddy Johnson, editorial director, Art F City New York RM Vaughan is a Canadian writer and video artist who lives in Berlin and Toronto. Vaughan is the author of nine books and a contributor to over 50 anthologies. His videos and filmed performances play in galleries and festivals around the world.

Read more less