Alex Mazey won The Roy Fisher Prize from Keele University in 2018 and was the recipient of a Creative Future Writers’ Award the following year. A culture writer at PublicPressure.io, he is also a contributing researcher for the international academic journal, Baudrillard Now and author of both Living in Disneyland (2020) and Sad Boy Aesthetics (2021).
Alex’s next book, GHOST LIVES : CURSED EDITION is OUT 28TH MARCH 2024 from the award-winning, Bad Betty Press. Order it Here.
“Alex Mazey’s playful text art sequence follows Ghost through a hyperreal metropolis beset with neoliberal temptation and eschatological peril. Woven between the visuals are virtuosic lyric poems: poignant, philosophical and irreverent. Mazey gamifies this astute, genre-defying collection with an intricate plexus of symbolism, mysticism, numerology, reference and ritual. Haunting and haunted, Ghost Lives paints an eerily recognisable picture of how it feels to be lonely, or, in other words, to be human.”
Sad Boy Aesthetics is available through the award-winning Broken Sleep Books. (Please consider purchasing through independent bookstores before visiting Amazon.) Sad Boy Aesthetics is only £8.99 – and whilst the publisher received a Michael Marks Publishing Award last year, Broken Sleep has conducted some incredible work outside of publishing too, whether that’s raising almost £10k for a variety of causes, or covering the citizenship costs of a European migrant to the UK. For what is essentially the price of two coffees, you’ll get 150-pages of Mark Fisher/Jean Baudrillard vibes – not forgetting a beautiful foreword written by MIT/Strange Attractor Press’ cultural theorist, Ken Hollings. Purchasing a copy of Sad Boy Aesthetics *is* the fabled praxis, allowing for Broken Sleep Books to continue its work as ‘An innovative, exciting, and vital press in the dreamscape of UK publishing.’
‘Sad Boy Aesthetics shares with its reader the casual nihilism of a party that never wants to be over, even though it really should have ended a long time ago. Nausea and vertigo become new forms of ecstasy. The glossy surfaces of this world are alive with distorting scratches and reflections. There is in Mazey’s exploration of this hedonistic despair an equally desperate desire for it not to stop.’ – Ken Hollings
‘Living in Disneyland’ is a short - yet urgent - tour de force exploration of late-stage capitalism, told through the lens of a Baudrillardian perspective. Through an aphoristic and epigrammatic style, Alex Mazey delves into the absurd (hyper)realities of contemporary living, attempting to decipher and understand 'what it means to observe surrealism in the 21st Century, to feel as if you must be dreaming.'
Purchase copies direct from Broken Sleep Books
