A bold and brilliant short work by the author of the Goldsmiths Prize-winning Cuddy

A bold and brilliant short work by the author of the Goldsmiths Prize-winning Cuddy

‘Makes most contemporary fiction look bloodless by comparison’ Daily Mail
‘Like nothing else you’ll read this year’ Jan Carson
‘Highly original, bold, inventive … A stunning rendering’ independent.co.uk
‘A hair-raising performance’ Kit Fan
‘Brilliant, strange and electrifying’ Daily Telegraph

November, 1971. Berlin, Germany. Opening night.

Klaus Kinski, Germany’s most controversial actor, steps into the spotlight to a crowd of thousands.

After years of making movies abroad, he has returned to the stage for a much-publicized one-man performance about Jesus Christ. As the crowd turn on him and violence is threatened, it is also very nearly his last. After this week, he will never perform on stage again.

Exactly fifty years later, a hypochondriac writer, housebound by winter snowstorms, becomes fixated with video footage of Kinski at his most manic.

In this forensic analysis, he strays into the darker corners of modern culture, and finally begins to understand the compulsive urge that drives artists to the edge of sanity in their pursuit of perfection.

Jesus Christ Kinski is a novel about a film about a performance about Jesus. It is a daring act of literary ventriloquism, a meditation on censorship, creativity, loneliness – and just how far our tolerance is tested by bad people who make great art.

Praise for Benjamin Myers
‘One of our finest, and most deftly imaginative, writers’ i news
‘Radical and gorgeous’ Max Porter
‘A writer of extraordinary and incandescent talent’ Alex Preston

"A compelling autofictional account which exerts a strange charm … Plunges us into Kinski’s fevered mind … A riot of salty vituperation" - GUARDIAN

"Brilliant ... The bravura stylistic flourishes, the wild imagination, the conjuring of a damaged and maddening psyche – this book is strange and electrifying ... When Myers’s Kinski – vituperative, committed, possessed – grabs us by the neck and spits in our faces, deep down we know it’s what we deserve ... One of our brightest young novelists" - DAILY TELEGRAPH

"An experimental and distinguished novel ... An idiosyncratic and destabilising performance that matches Kinski’s own" - SPECTATOR

"Highly original, bold, inventive … Myers captures the dark and forceful energy of Kinski and his startlingly aggressive and vicious mind … A stunning rendering" - independent.co.uk, Book of the Month

"Benjamin Myers is truly one of the most exciting writers we have, and Jesus Christ Kinski cements his reputation as an innovative and versatile author, able to write an astonishing range of styles while remaining utterly compelling and surprising. Here is Myers at his experimental and provocative best, raising questions of literary censorship, commercialism and the separation of one’s appreciation of an artist’s life and work" - FOYLES, Top Ten Reads for October

"A bravura conceit written with messianic intensity, Kinski coming over like a cross between Hitler and Iggy Pop … Myers is one of the UK’s finest authors, his restless mind never settling on one style or genre, and his latest – a which I read in one sitting – asks questions about the creative process and “the art” vs the artist" - THE CRACK

"Makes most contemporary fiction look bloodless by comparison" - DAILY MAIL

"A vivid demonstration of the way in which extreme conditions conjure up unexpected subjects, hovering outside the room, tapping on the window pane, wanting to be let in" - TLS

"Praise for Benjamin Myers: 'Dizzyingly inventive" - Daily Telegraph

"A visionary epic" - Guardian, Books of the Year 2023

"One of the most interesting, restless writers of his generation" - Daily Mail