Join us at the London Review Bookshop for the launch of Sorcerer, a collaboration between the artist Ed Atkins and poet Steven Zultanski. Atkins and Zultanski will be in conversation with the art writer and journalist Emily LaBarge.

Thursday 30 November, at 7pm. Tickets are available here.

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Three friends hang out and share a long and unremarkable conversation about getting dressed, headaches, ticks, compression fantasies, surgery, and personal aspirations, among other things. When two of the friends go home for the night, the remaining one watches TV, dances, and takes apart his face in front of a giant mirror. 

Originally a play, Sorcerer is a book about the pleasures of being together and being alone. The characters find contentment in each other’s company, conversing in the placid, eerie rhythms of a sitcom in which conflict never arises. Unease is exported to furniture, gadgets, and bodily movements. The result is a counterintuitive kind of realism, lying somewhere between the procedural and the miraculous. There’s levitation. 

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Ed Atkins has exhibited internationally, including solo presentations at New Museum, New York; Serpentine Gallery, London; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; TANK Shanghai; and MMK, Frankfurt. He is the author of Old Food (2019) and A Primer for Cadavers (2016), both published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Steven Zultanski is the author of several books of poetry, including Relief (Make Now Press, 2021), On the Literary Means of Representing the Powerful as Powerless (Information as Material, 2018), Bribery (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014), and Agony (Book*hug, 2012). An essay, Thirty-Odd Functions of Voice in the Poetry of Alice Notley, was published as a pamphlet by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2020.