Stewart Home

Stewart Home (born London 1963) is an English writer, satirist and artist. He is best known for novels such as the non-narrative "69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess" (2002), his re-imagining of the 1960s in "Tainted Love" (2005), and more recent books such as "Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane" (2013) that use pulp and avant-garde tropes to parody conventional literature. His unusual approach to writing is reflected in the readings he gives from his novels: he recites from memory, utilises ventriloquism, stands on his head and declaims his work and even shreds his own books at public appearances.

Home's first books appeared in the late nineteen-eighties. "The Assault on Culture: Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War" (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988), is an underground art history sketching coninuations of dadist and surrealist ideas and influences on post-World War II fringe radical art. Home's first novel "Pure Mania" was published 1989 (Polygon Books), and details a neo-punk subculture obsessed with sex and violence. Home continued in much the same vein with his next four novels.

The novels Home's wrote after 1995 featured less subcultural material than his earlier books and instead more obviously focused on issues of form and aesthetics. Home’s sixth novel "Come Before Christ And Murder Love" featured a schizophrenic narrator whose personality changed every time he had an orgasm and there is a lot of sex in the book. This was the first novel Home wrote in the first person, and much of the fiction he wrote after this utilised the device of an unreliable first-person narrator. "69 Things to Do With A Dead Princess" (Canongate 2002) also contains capsule reviews of dozens of obscure books as well as elaborate descriptions of stone circles, while in "Down and Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton" (Do Not Press 2004) every paragraph is exactly 100 words long.

Home’s 2010 novel "Blood Rites of the Bourgeois" (Book Works) is to date his only work written in the second person. The plot – as far as there is one - concerns an artist hacking the computers of London’s cultural elite to infect them with modified penis enlargement spam. Reviewing Home’s most recently published novel "Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane" (Penny-Ante Editions 2013) for The Guardian, Nicholas Lezard observes: “I think one of the great virtues of Home's work is the way it forces us to address our own complacency.”