Pre-order now: This Time of Life is Meant for Savages by Leonie Rowland
Buy our dark and tender new collection of stories, prose poems and photography
“The place I am taking you is dark and ruined, but I don’t tell you that. I say, ‘Look at the lamplight,’ when what I mean is, ‘Find a way to blot out the ghosts.’”
Over the past year, we’ve been working alongside some brilliant authors and artists to nurture and publish new creative work. We approached a number of people whose work we’ve seen and loved (and in some cases published before) and asked them “Would you be interested in developing a standalone work for us to publish?”
Leonie Rowland was the first of those authors. We were stunned by the work we’ve published from her before (in LOST FUTURES volume 3, Jennifer’s Dream and The woods are wondrous here, but strange). Both pieces left us aching for more. Her authorial voice is so distinctive—hypnotic, passionate, tender and visceral. We’ve been working with Leonie to help bring her vision to life and we’re thrilled to be finally bringing that vision to you. We traded ideas, helped shape the direction, and then Leonie wrote prolifically. We gave the note “Write until your most unhinged work is in here” and she took the note gleefully.
In This Time of Life is Meant for Savages, Leonie takes us to the darkest—and most tender—corners of existence. This collection of stories, prose poems and photographs surveys the full range of human emotions. Anger gives way to sadness, sex gives way to death, melancholy gives way to connection. Her narrators grapple with a lack of certainty and identity, set against a backdrop of liminal spaces: waiting rooms, airports, convention centres. The collection takes us on a journey of how we might find escape inside of excess—and how moments of horror might be interspersed, against all odds, with peace.
This Time of Life is Meant for Savages is available for pre-order now, releasing October 20th. If you’re attending Grimmfest in Manchester next week, you can get your hands on an exclusive early release copy.
If you like what we do here at EXIT Press and want to support us, you can buy the collection with solidarity pricing, which helps us to keep bringing you more experimental art and stories by early career artists and authors.
If you really like what we do, you can buy the “Next 3” bundle, which will get you a copy of This Time of Life is Meant for Savages plus our next two releases at a discount. Details to come for our next two publications, but expect work focused on addiction and recovery, the body and femininity, and landscapes under threat.
Also by Leonie Rowland