{"title":"Sam Riviere","description":"\u003cp\u003eDive into the thought-provoking poetry and prose of Sam Riviere. Exploring themes of modernity, technology, and the human condition, his work offers a sharp, insightful perspective. Browse his collections now.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"penguin-modern-poets-5-book-sam-riviere-9780141987071","title":"Penguin Modern Poets 5","description":"Occasional Wild Parties brings together Sam Riviere, one of the most discussed of the new generation of British poets, whose 'post-internet' poetry sees him acting now as scribe, now as DJ, taking in everything from technologized romance to celebrity culture as filtered through Kim Kardashian's make-up routine; the 'elegant ghoul' Frederick Seidel, zooming through the dark underbelly of international high society on his Ducati racing bike; and the wonderfully observant Kathryn Maris, whose work ranges with a dark wit over incomprehensible deities, wayward mothers, the politics of children's sports contests, and psychoanalysis. All three lift the lid on their corners of civilized society to show the less glittering realities that lie just beneath the surface.  \"On the verge of perpetrating acts of artistic barbarism  \"I perceived a spoon as the title of a plate of food\" - SAM RIVIERE, 'Mindfulness'  \"Deer garter-belt across our vision And stand there waiting for our decision.  \"Our only decision was how to cook the venison. I am civilized but I see the silence And write the words for the thought balloon.\" - FREDERICK SEIDEL, 'Kill Poem'  \"The man in the basement wrote stories about heroin. The woman in the attic read stories with heroines. The woman in the attic noticed a bruise that ran from the top to the base of her thigh. The bruise looked like Europe. The man in the basement was in love with the sister of the secretive man who loved him more. He whooped to the woman, 'You killed your student?' To himself he wept, 'I killed my father.'\" - KATHRYN MARIS, 'The House with Only an Attic and a Basement'","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49508725588241,"sku":"GOR009029870","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53144914952465,"sku":"GOR014774129","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0141987073.jpg?v=1751437147"},{"product_id":"after-fame-book-sam-riviere-9780571356928","title":"After Fame","description":"Welcome to After Fame - an ambitious and resonant engagement with the epigrams of the Roman poet Martial, which completes the loose trilogy of Sam Riviere's process-derived works.  It was Martial who first used the term 'plagiarism' in its modern sense as a kind of literary theft. Here, the notion is tested even further through the figure of a distracted scribe who, by means of various methods of transcription, including the use of machine translation and creative embellishment, presents a copy of Martial's famous Book I unlike any other. These 118 poems cover timeless themes such as work, friendship, public life and sexual mores, and, as they unfold, are increasingly interrupted by reflections on authorship, technology, cultural complicity and the privileged, mediating role of the poet: all fixations of Martial's work that still resonate today.  Not strict translation, bona fide reproduction nor wholly original writing, After Fame challenges the integrity of such categories. So liberated, it dramatises the obscurity of its source, refraining from easy equivalences, while insisting on its contemporary relevance.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49515914166545,"sku":"GOR010722316","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49734520275217,"sku":"NGR9780571356928","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52591926608145,"sku":"NLS9780571356928","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53146897023249,"sku":"GOR014775104","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0571356923.jpg?v=1759229076"},{"product_id":"81-austerities-book-sam-riviere-9780571289035","title":"81 Austerities","description":"All  three-dimensional objects can be experienced in two dimensions: it just  takes some careful unpicking of the seams. Witty, comic, plaintive,  touching, acerbic, droll, cavalier, caffeinated, irreverent, stringent: Austerities,  the mind-altering substantial debut from Sam Riviere, seems to achieve  the impossible in being all things at once. Initially conceived as a  response to the 'austerity measures' implemented by the coalition  government in 2011, the poems quickly began taking on a life in kind:  'cutting' themselves on levels of sentiment, structure and even subject  matter. Not content to merely build a series of freethinking poems,  these remarkable pieces seem eagerly and mischievously to analyze their  moment of creation, then weigh their worth, then consign their excess to  the recycling bin thereafter. Experience is speedy, the poems seem to  say, so dizzyingly fast that the poetry will inevitably be running to  catch up - often arriving at a scene the moment after the moment has  gone. The effect is as funny and it is startling, beguiling as it is  surprising, and makes Austerities a vivid reminder that deprivation, as Leonard Cohen put it, can be the mother of poetry.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49516356337937,"sku":"GOR004691770","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49730136703249,"sku":"NGR9780571289035","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50354064294161,"sku":"CIN0571289037G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52104841462033,"sku":"CIN0571289037VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53505758134545,"sku":"GOR005105633","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0571289037.jpg?v=1771502677"},{"product_id":"kim-kardashian-s-marriage-book-sam-riviere-9780571321438","title":"Kim Kardashian's Marriage","description":"Sam Riviere's debut, 81 Austerities, began as a blog responding to the spending cuts, and went on in publication to win the 2012 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A sequel of sorts, the 72 poems in Kim Kardashian's Marriage mark out equally sharpened lines of public and private engagement. Kim Kardashian's 2011 marriage lasted for 72 days, and was seen by some as illustrative of the performative spectacle of celebrity life.  Whatever the truth of this (and Kardashian's own statements refute it), Riviere has used the furore as a point of ignition, deploying terms from Kardashian's make-up regimen to explore surfaces and self-consciousness, presentation and obfuscation. His approach eschews a dependence upon confessional modes of writing to explore what kind of meaning lies in impersonal methods of creation. For, as with 81 Austerities, the process of enquiry involves the composition method itself, this time in poems that have been produced by harvesting and manipulating the results of search engines to create a poetry of part-collage, part-improvisation. The effect is as refractive as it is reflective, and disturbs the slant on biography until we are left with a pixellation of the first person. Kim Kardashian's Marriage is a captivating examination of artifice and reality, privacy and exposure, and an uncanny commemoration of the contemporary moment.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49533140959505,"sku":"GOR006439884","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49580841500945,"sku":"GOR009493568","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49999232467217,"sku":"NGR9780571321438","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50440652161297,"sku":"CIN0571321437VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51003656896785,"sku":"NIN9780571321438","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51886526562577,"sku":"CIN0571321437G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52591652569361,"sku":"NLS9780571321438","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53613831815441,"sku":"GOR010616887","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0571321437.jpg?v=1758967580"},{"product_id":"faber-new-poets-book-sam-riviere-9780571250011","title":"Faber New Poets","description":"Intends to identify and support emerging talents at an early stage in their careers.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49552603349265,"sku":"GOR004147275","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52108998508817,"sku":"GOR008574600","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0571250017.jpg?v=1751008872"},{"product_id":"dead-souls-book-sam-riviere-9781474617642","title":"Dead Souls","description":"'Mordant, torrential, incantatory, Bolano-esque, Perec-ian, and just so explosively written that I had to stop and shake the language-shrapnel from my hair and wipe it off my eyeglasses so I could keep reading' Jonathan Lethem   'Full of clever postmodern flourishes, self-referential winks and riotous set pieces. It's funny, smart and beautifully written' Alex Preston, The Guardian   'I absolutely adored Dead Souls. Reading it felt like overhearing the most exhilarating, funny, mean conversation imaginable--which is to say it made me extremely happy and I dreaded it ending' Megan Nolan, author of Acts of Desperation   'I first heard about Solomon Wiese on a bright, blustery day on the South Bank...'  Later that evening, at the bar of the Travelodge near Waterloo Bridge, our unnamed narrator will encounter that very same Solomon Wiese.  In a conversation that lasts until morning, he will hear Solomon Wiese's story of his spectacular fall from grace.   A story about a scandal that has shaken the literary world and an accusation of serial plagiarism.   A story about childhood encounters with nothingness and a friend's descent into psychosis; about conspiracies and poetry cults; about a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost and the death of an old poet.   A story about a retreat to the East Anglian countryside and plans for a triumphant return to the capital, through the theft of poems, illegal war profits and faked social media accounts - plans in which our unnamed narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated...   A story that will take the entire night - and the remainder of the novel - to tell.   'Reading Dead Souls feels like discovering the British Bolaño, and not just for the gleeful dismantling of the cultural ego: the restless, searching sensibility; the precise tuning-in to contradictory voices. I haven't been so excited by a debut novel in a long time' Luke Kennard, author of The Transition   'Elegant, ambitious, very serious and very funny' Katharine Kilalea, author of OK, Mr. Field   'Sublime, legendary, delightfully unhinged. A rare and brilliant pleasure' Nicolette Polek, author of Imaginary Museums","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49554437046545,"sku":"GOR011506976","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50697905176849,"sku":"NGR9781474617642","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50713930793233,"sku":"GOR014045716","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1474617646.jpg?v=1751210291"},{"product_id":"dead-souls-book-sam-riviere-9781474617666","title":"Dead Souls","description":"'Mordant, torrential, incantatory, Bolano-esque, Perec-ian, and just so explosively written that I had to stop and shake the language-shrapnel from my hair and wipe it off my eyeglasses so I could keep reading' Jonathan Lethem  'Full of clever postmodern flourishes, self-referential winks and riotous set pieces. It's funny, smart and beautifully written' Alex Preston, The Guardian   'I absolutely adored Dead Souls. Reading it felt like overhearing the most exhilarating, funny, mean conversation imaginable--which is to say it made me extremely happy and I dreaded it ending' Megan Nolan, author of Acts of Desperation  'I first heard about Solomon Wiese on a bright, blustery day on the South Bank...'  Later that evening, at the bar of the Travelodge near Waterloo Bridge, our unnamed narrator will encounter that very same Solomon Wiese.  In a conversation that lasts until morning, he will hear Solomon Wiese's story of his spectacular fall from grace.  A story about a scandal that has shaken the literary world and an accusation of serial plagiarism.  A story about childhood encounters with nothingness and a friend's descent into psychosis; about conspiracies and poetry cults; about a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost and the death of an old poet.  A story about a retreat to the East Anglian countryside and plans for a triumphant return to the capital, through the theft of poems, illegal war profits and faked social media accounts - plans in which our unnamed narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated...  A story that will take the entire night - and the remainder of the novel - to tell.  'Reading Dead Souls feels like discovering the British Bolaño, and not just for the gleeful dismantling of the cultural ego: the restless, searching sensibility; the precise tuning-in to contradictory voices. I haven't been so excited by a debut novel in a long time' Luke Kennard, author of The Transition   'Elegant, ambitious, very serious and very funny' Katharine Kilalea, author of OK, Mr. Field   'Sublime, legendary, delightfully unhinged. 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Here, he harnesses anxiety about AI only to exploit it for his own extraordinary ends. In this case, Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2), an open source neural network , is used to produce poems that, stripped of the usual authorial clutter, find themselves nonetheless cohering around a voice that speaks of the uncertainties, fears and desires of a world that is desperately, poignantly and recognisably human.  'Riviere's machine language, often delightfully clunky, also has its magical aspects, unplugging and rebooting our perceptual apparatus as we look over the shoulder of machines clumsily figuring us out. . . In turning poetry towards machine language, Riviere quietly kicks off a poetic revolution for our time.' 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Later that same evening, at a bar near Waterloo Bridge, our narrator encounters the poet in person, and listens to the story of Wiese's rise and fall, a story that takes the entire night--and the remainder of the novel--to tell.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Wiese reveals his unconventional views on poetry, childhood encounters with \"nothingness,\" a conspiracy involving the manipulation of documents in the public domain, an identity crisis, a retreat to the country, a meeting with an ex-serviceman with an unexpected offer, the death of an old poet, a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost, an entanglement with a secretive poetry cult, and plans for a triumphant return to the capital, through the theft of poems, illegal war profits, and faked social media accounts--plans in which our narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eDead Souls\u003c\/i\u003e is a metaphysical mystery brilliantly encased in a picaresque romp, a novel that asks a vital question for anyone who makes or engages with art: Is everyone a plagiarist?","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50388128071953,"sku":"CIN1646221338A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50397985079569,"sku":"CIN1646221338G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1646221338.jpg?v=1751120215"},{"product_id":"dead-souls-book-sam-riviere-9781646220281","title":"Dead Souls","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eFor readers of Roberto Bola o's \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eSavage Detectives \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eand Muriel Spark's \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eLoitering with Intent\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e, this sublime and delightfully unhinged metaphysical mystery disguised as a picaresque romp follows one poet's spectacular fall from grace to ask a vital question: Is everyone a plagiarist? 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Later that same evening, at a bar near Waterloo Bridge, our narrator encounters the poet in person, and listens to the story of Wiese's rise and fall, a story that takes the entire night--and the remainder of the novel--to tell. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eWiese reveals his unconventional views on poetry, childhood encounters with nothingness, a conspiracy involving the manipulation of documents in the public domain, an identity crisis, a retreat to the country, a meeting with an ex-serviceman with an unexpected offer, the death of an old poet, a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost, an entanglement with a secretive poetry cult, and plans for a triumphant return to the capital, through the theft of poems, illegal war profits, and faked social media accounts--plans in which our narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eDead Souls\u003c\/i\u003e is a metaphysical mystery brilliantly encased in a picaresque romp, a novel that asks a vital question for anyone who makes or engages with art: Is everyone a plagiarist?","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50397928259857,"sku":"CIN1646220285G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51282295980305,"sku":"GOR011985640","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52817547165969,"sku":"CIN1646220285VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1646220285.jpg?v=1751376117"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-sam-riviere.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}