you private person by richard chiem

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Five years after its original release, You Private Person is now published in a brand-new edition by small press Sorry House. This Person is a profoundly cleaned up edition, refined and improved and maybe more ready for the world (or perhaps vice versa) than in its first incarnation. It’s a quality rebuild, somewhat like a Criterion edition of a DVD that’s been available, forgotten, in bargain bins for decades.

- Seattle Review of Books

Richard Chiem writes of all the weirdness and ooziness and tenderness of young love, with such lucid specificity. Like some beautiful film from the 70s, but also distinctly now. Because I also love how in this book he documents the tremors of contemporary existence, of living and working in a city, measuring days not in coffee spoons but in cigarettes and Simpsons episodes.

- Kate Zambreno

Considering how much I love Richard Chiem's writing, and given how its uncanny snare and sweep of life's especially agile, prompt, messed, lithe, sharp, and heartbreaking things leaves me stiffed of summarizing words, I think I'll just nominate his work for immortality.

- Dennis Cooper

Richard Chiem's You Private Person is a bustling prism of a thing, full of passages that actually lead somewhere off of the paper. His words have brains that have bodies that wake you up in the way waking can be the best thing, like into a warm room full of good calm remembered things that feel both like relics and new inside the day. Here rings a wise and bravely sculpted book packed full of stunning thankful color.

- Blake Butler