Description

Whisk(e)y Tit is proud to present the first volume of K Hank Jost’s Ordinary Time—Melvillian scope collides with Faulknerian histrionics in cataclysmic splendor over the washed-out and moldered to clay-bottom corpse of the Southern Gothic, upon which Jost has erected an architecture cacophonous and revelatory, a towering Babel upon an Eden refusing the Fall. To paraphrase St. Paul, …these things were written toward those for whom the ends of the ages have arrived. Set within—and narrated by the collective sentience of—an unnamed swamp town sunk into what would seem to be the American South, Ordinary Time is an apocalypse of returned prodigals against the hokum of history, fallow faith, and the violence of the material world, an undulating sea of voices searching for sense in false-history’s immutable myth, and a symphonic swell unto the revelation of miracle’s immanent reality.

Jost’s red-neck epic Ordinary Time is a work of much needed literary ambition, deploying a baroque mastery of craft seldom allowed in American letters. The release of this volume is substantially more than the simple addition of a new book to the marketplace, it is a clarion raised against corporate publishing’s underestimation of the reading public—it is an act of leaping faith in the power of literature and the truth of art.