The Book of the Last Word

By Jesi Bender

Suggested price: $16.00 $16.00

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Description

Want to know what death feels like?
A tidal wave of coagulated mint jelly, the forceful bristles of a candy-apple red, and an indescribable feeling of floating and melting at the same time.

from the Prologue…

Chimera Aoki is a 20-something New Yorker, easy in love and working on a book of famous last words.  Arthur Noyes is older, secretive, existential.  They meet through Chimera’s girlfriend, and are brought together and flung apart through a cosmic collision of coincidence and deceit.

Heavily interwoven with Abrahamic religious influences, THE BOOK OF THE LAST WORD culminates with Chimera discovering Arthur’s secret and having to decide if what Arthur has done is either immensely beneficial or horrifically damaging.

 

BONUS: May is Women’s Health Month.  Thanks to our friends at Nutty Steph’s, if you purchase any book directly from us this month, and add a chocolate vulva for an additional $5, Nutty Steph’s will send a dollar to Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, and Whiskey Tit will match it with $2.  That’s $3 to Women’s Health, as well as books and chocolate sex parts to you.  Good deeds, good literature, and good snacks.

 

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BOOK DETAILS

ISBN: 978-1-7329596-1-3

Publication date: 01 May 2019

Paperback price: $14

Ebook price: $9

WHAT THEY'RE SAYING

"a wonderful balance of funny, sad, and creepy"

– A reader

Throughout The Book of the Last Word, which is Bender’s first novel, Chimera witnesses these acts of violence concentrated, both in herself–a kind of dissociative engagement–and in those around her, and struggles to make sense of them. Chimera’s purpose, and ultimately, the purpose of Bender’s work here, lies in her struggle, in highlighting the effect of culture, experience, intelligence, and trauma on the human psyche.

– M.B.F. Wedge, for Entropy Magazine

Multiple points of view are just part of the intricate layering of this haunting novel. Each chapter has as a predictive headnote, someone’s last words—presumably gleaned from Chimera’s collection. In addition, time is stratified, allowing it to be peeled back to show us what is beneath the present. The lives of the characters are similarly peeled back, revealing the darkness within each and, in doing so, illustrating how each is part of “one body of many, many cells.”

– Patrick Parks, in Heavy Feather Review