Christopher Nosnibor

— in conversation with John Wisniewski

Transgressive, surrealist, urban post-realist writer Christopher Nosnibor — author of This Book Is Fucking Stupid, The Plagiarist, and The Gimp — picks up where writers such as William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Jorge Luis Borges, and JG Ballard leave off, sharing influences with such contemporaries as Kenji Siratori, Stewart Home, Barry Yourgrau, and Mark Leyner. Urban Graffiti is pleased to present, “Christopher Nosnibor — in conversation with John Wisniewski”, the first in an ongoing series of evocative and probing conversations with contemporary experimental and transgressive writers. ~Editor

John Wisniewski: Could you tell us about your earliest writings — was the writing experimental in nature?

Christopher Nosnibor: My very first stab at writing was when I was aged about 7 or 8. I wanted to write an epic that was my own equivalent of Star Wars. I didn’t get very far. Well, I filled a heap of little spiral-bound notepads with explosions and so on, but never really got a sense of plot. Actually, that probably set the template for everything I’ve done since! However, it was later, after I’d read Naked Lunch that I stared writing as an adult. That novel, The Sound of Impact, written between the ages of 18 and 22, was highly experimental and not terribly successful as a novel. It’s not published, but parts of it have been reconfigured and used in subsequent works which have made it into the public domain. That was my first ‘word hoard’, I suppose. I chiseled out another brace of unpublished novels in my twenties which were pretty straightforward. My first published work proper was a collection of short stories called Bad Houses that I put out myself in 1997. Again, there are some experimental pieces in there, and it’s stylistically diverse. I think it’s fair to say there’s always been an experimental element to my work.
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