Tuesday or September or The End

Tuesday or September or The End by Hannah Black is an incisive and playful work of speculative fiction that explores the rupture year of 2020, when aliens finally invaded. Hannah Black is an artist and writer from the UK. She lives in New York. She has written for a number of publications including The New Inquiry, Artforum, and Bookforum. Her previous books include Dark Pool Party (2016) and Life (2017, with Juliana Huxtable). She is represented by the galleries Arcadia Missa in London and Isabella Bortolozzi in Berlin. Praise for Tuesday or September or the End: Tuesday or September or the End puts calendar time back into messianic time, and also the reverse. An account of the last two disorienting years in history, in our lives, this intimate and funny and abstract fiction uses fable, and unreality, to flood a reader with the real, to remind her what is at stake. — Rachel Kushner Allegory and satire, alert and conscious, Hannah Black’s Tuesday or September or the End, is an existential novel. Narrative innocence is not the engine of this work; knowledge of life in the modern is. Bird and Dog, Black’s wide awake and dreaming characters, are electric and wise. This novel is fluent in our dystopia and utopia. — Dionne Brand An acid calendar of planetary rot and revolt, Hannah Black’s new novel listens for that alien language of the future: total social transformation. Staging debates on communism and social democracy, or unraveling the double helix of race and capitalism, Black’s calendar is one that breathes and breaks, figuring the temporal hiccups of revolution. Suddenly it’s no longer endless winter and our narrator Bird, much like chirping in early spring, brings us to witness the reanimation of the world. — Greg Nissan In Tuesday or September or the End, we see ourselves battered by time, which isn’t real, and chance, which is. But just as “the world resists its reduction to winter,” Hannah Black’s writing, in its passionate grasp of possibility, resists spiritual suicide. The book is deeply felt because the pain of attachment is close to its center and funny because life is currently absurd. But what I love most about it, reading its compact brilliant sentences in this sunless covid afternoon, is the way it makes an argument for clarity, which really can—partially, briefly, and when it matters most—sometimes be achieved. — Benjamin Krusling