Man Hating Psycho
Iphgenia Baal
‘Utterly absorbing and standout tales... Baal’s witty and unconventional prose will hook you in right from the start.’
– Cosmopolitan
‘An extraordinary voice, and if you want to understand what happens next in modern writing, you’d do well to listen to it. A revelation.’
– Alan Moore
Man Hating Psycho is the caustic new collection of stories from visionary writer Iphgenia Baal. Interrogating the disconnect between our public identities and real-life selves, Baal exposes the inherent duplicity of online communication.
Text messages relaying deep personal crisis are nothing more than an annoyance, WhatsApp takedowns of wide-eyed left-wingers unfold at breakneck speed, friendships that seem set in stone disintegrate at the first hint of sex, the language of love degraded as life becomes more and more transactional.
With black and disquieting humour, thirteen playful texts disparage the highly-profitable superstitions that are the scaffolding of our current social order.
Man Hating Psycho lays bare the trappings of modern life, whilst putting the short story form through a literary mincer.
Praise for Man Hating Psycho
‘Iphgenia Baal is a writer whose work has long intrigued me since I read The Hardy Tree, her book about Thomas Hardy, graveyards and how London shifts and evades. This new collection of her fiction, I hope, will make her better known in what passes as “the literary establishment”.’
– The Scotsman
‘Quick, awake, addictive… I loved it!’
– Isabel Waidner
‘For fans of short stories and also people who are more ambivalent towards the form but want to try something different, Man Hating Psycho is a gleefully spiky collection that shows the mostly downs of modern London.’
– FiendfullyReading
‘Smart, sparky and occasionally bleakly funny Iphgenia Baal’s Man Hating Psycho is perfect.’
– The Crack
About the Author
Iphgenia Baal is a writer who lives and works in London. She is the author of several fiction books, including The Hardy Tree (Trolley Books, 2011) and Death & Facebook (We Heard You Like Books, 2017).
Her unique prose style, once cited as a ‘marrying of politics and ass’, has been likened to writers as varied as James Joyce, Manuel Puig and Dodie Bellamy, and appeared in publications including AQNB, Nervemeter, Schizm and The White Review, among others.
Paperback ISBN: 9781910312797
Ebook ISBN: 9781910312803
Publication date: April 2021
Formats: Paperback / eBook