Travis Jeppesen, Bruce Benderson
Margins

Mayor Rudi Giuliani cleaned up seedy New York, but the writers spawned by the old city, still pick at the scab. Like a late-in-life sex tourist, their books hunt for the subaltern and marginal in places that have not yet become sterile.

For Those Who Hate a Bit of Everything, Travis Jeppesen’s latest collection of stories and fictocriticism, is an absurd, profoundly philosophical investigation into hyper-marginalized existence. Jeppesen’s deranged parables occupy their own distant planet of discord and disarray. Bruce Benderson’s collection of stories Urban Gothic is, likewise, adverse to the co-option of the odd and the marginalised. It manifests as a refusal to let his stories settle into accepted social narratives. 

With content that explores the edges of society and subjective experience, it seems only right that both authors write at the edge of established forms. Jeppesen and Benderson, who met in New York at the apex of its feralness, are known for their critical and essayistic writing alongside fiction. The interplay of these modes of writing, perhaps informs the irreverence that manifests across their oeuvre. 

Benderson has long been celebrated in France, and his books sometimes appear in translation before they are published in English. Jeppsen is likewise in ‘exile’ in Germany, and before that, in North Korea. The combination of visceral experience and distance gives both bodies of work their immediacy as well as their wit and criticality. 

Margins will launch Travis Jeppesen’s For Those Who Hate a Little Bit of Everything and will include readings and a conversation between the authors.