Sean Ashton, 2025
MASSIVE MASSIVE OIL SLICK
Expect anger. Expect joy, joy interspersed with anger, anger with joy, anger and joy in equal proportions, till joy is eclipsed by anger, or anger by joy. Expect decline. Expect steady and sudden decline, in fortune and wellbeing, a decline in wellbeing in places as far afield as Corby and Inverness, London, Manchester, and Yorkshire.
Massive Massive Oil Slick is a monologue written in sentences that begin with the verbs expect, suppose, and avoid, delivered in a seminar room of an unnamed institution. The audience is invited to participate in imagined scenarios: predicaments, thought-experiments, moral quandaries. Themes range from profound to mundane, serious to absurd: homelessness, drug trials, social exclusion, traffic, Brazil nuts, carveries, contact with extra-terrestrial life. The result is a prophecy, and the reader the central character through whom multiple futures are posited, dismissed, and revived.
‘Reading this book is like playing a game with clever rules and unpredictable combinations. Every move brings us closer to a point where thought, feeling and language miraculously converge...’
– > Anna Aslanyan
‘Stripped back of the usual comforts of fiction, this is a work of jolts and surprises that demonstrates brilliantly the way formal constraints yield philosophical riches. I loved it.’
– > Adam Smyth
‘Immersive, insightful, and inventive, Massive Massive Oil Slick deploys three recurrent imperatives to develop a rich range of scenarios. It is a copious, compelling, and sometimes comic inventory of individual and collective anticipations, apprehensions, and aversions in a society pervaded by consumer goods, lifestyle advice, and insidious (often invisible) manipulations, concentrated in the Orwellian/Sherlockian Room 411B. A wealth of cultural and literary allusion and quotation weaves a vibrant text, with a distinctive, driving rhythm, offering fresh pleasures.
–> Nicholas Tredell
Sean Ashton’s books include the short-story collection Sunsets (Alma, 2007); the novel Living in a Land (MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2017); the poetry collection Sampler (Valley Press, 2020); and the novel The Way to Work (Salt, 2023). A former art critic for Map Magazine and Art Review, he lives in London, where he teaches on the Sculpture programme at the Royal College of Art and on the Fine Art programme at Leeds Beckett University.
Massive Massive Oil Slick is a monologue written in sentences that begin with the verbs expect, suppose, and avoid, delivered in a seminar room of an unnamed institution. The audience is invited to participate in imagined scenarios: predicaments, thought-experiments, moral quandaries. Themes range from profound to mundane, serious to absurd: homelessness, drug trials, social exclusion, traffic, Brazil nuts, carveries, contact with extra-terrestrial life. The result is a prophecy, and the reader the central character through whom multiple futures are posited, dismissed, and revived.
‘Reading this book is like playing a game with clever rules and unpredictable combinations. Every move brings us closer to a point where thought, feeling and language miraculously converge...’
– > Anna Aslanyan
‘Stripped back of the usual comforts of fiction, this is a work of jolts and surprises that demonstrates brilliantly the way formal constraints yield philosophical riches. I loved it.’
– > Adam Smyth
‘Immersive, insightful, and inventive, Massive Massive Oil Slick deploys three recurrent imperatives to develop a rich range of scenarios. It is a copious, compelling, and sometimes comic inventory of individual and collective anticipations, apprehensions, and aversions in a society pervaded by consumer goods, lifestyle advice, and insidious (often invisible) manipulations, concentrated in the Orwellian/Sherlockian Room 411B. A wealth of cultural and literary allusion and quotation weaves a vibrant text, with a distinctive, driving rhythm, offering fresh pleasures.
–> Nicholas Tredell
Sean Ashton’s books include the short-story collection Sunsets (Alma, 2007); the novel Living in a Land (MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2017); the poetry collection Sampler (Valley Press, 2020); and the novel The Way to Work (Salt, 2023). A former art critic for Map Magazine and Art Review, he lives in London, where he teaches on the Sculpture programme at the Royal College of Art and on the Fine Art programme at Leeds Beckett University.
180 pages
120 mm x 190 mm
80 mm French flaps (cover)
Format: Paperback
ISBN
978-1-7385079-5-5
£15.00
ORDER BEFORE THE END OF MAY for the special price of
£12.50
Next Book ->
120 mm x 190 mm
80 mm French flaps (cover)
Format: Paperback
ISBN
978-1-7385079-5-5
£15.00
ORDER BEFORE THE END OF MAY for the special price of
£12.50
Next Book ->