It was the year that autofiction was everywhere.

All the major authors were accused of writing autofiction. You, the reader, were reading autofiction, maybe even writing autofiction yourself. The little known author HWK also was working towards his own autofiction, cycling through London, drafting, redrafting, scrapping, and scraping by, spiraling through his own mind, a geography of ambient anxiety, and a rising sea of associations and dead ends. As the tides begin to overwhelm him, HWK finds lifelines in the various stories that float past.

Possible rescuers, including Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, Sheila Heti, Mario Levrero, Jay Sherman (best known by his professional title, The Critic), and the noted animated therapist Dr. Katz call out to our narrator from the shores of literary and cultural success, will he reach them before the waters close over his head? Will HWK, dear reader, reach you?

Fail Worse is the smartest novel I’ve read in a long time, at once a scathing and hilarious critique of the limitations and conventions of autofiction as well as a moving work of personal narrative. I want to give copies of this novel to every writer I know. – Madeleine Watts, author of The Inland Sea

A brilliantly audacious and thoroughly ridiculous book – skewers its subject with a grandeur and wit it scarcely deserves… a stained glass window thrown at a pebble. – Keiran Goddard, author of I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

William Kherbek’s Twenty Tales from our Technofeudal Tomorrow are of course twenty tales from our technofeudal today. From the software company to the art gallery to the prison to the nature park, here is our scary, scary world as seen through the Kherbekian filter: colors pushed to full saturation, soundtrack ramped up to eleven, video played at 1.1x speed. Luckily, the terror of true realism is laced with wild insights, and the acerbic critique is mercifully cut with Kherbek’s signature raucous hilarity.

"Read this book for its political sagacity and wit, but also for its linguistic extravagance, its jubilant play on every word you thought you knew — down to the last punctuation mark. It’s the kind of funny that makes you smack yourself on the forehead. (But as always, as one character reminds, “keep one hand free for rose.”) We can only hope that some CEO does not pick this book up and take it as an instruction manual." – Elvia Wilk, author of Oval

"Kherbek’s ruthless, dystopian future bears an uncanny resemblance to present-day office politics. Twenty Terrifying Tales from Our Technofeudal Tomorrow is a book that, in true Swiftian style, is written “to vex the world rather than divert it.” – Susan Finlay, author of My Other Spruce and Maple Self

Big data (n) is high-volume, high-velocity and/or high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing that enable enhanced insight, decision making, and process automation.

Deep cover, a new identity, a beached whale… a man with dreadlock implants using the alias Spanx is rooting the crusty enviro-activists out of their squats.

An ambitious young detective is tasked with creating a new kind of surveillance project to contain domestic extremists: become a domestic extremist. Under the pretence of forming a cell of environmental activists, Spanx and company go deep into the belly of the beast. Along the way, they take over the identities of dead children, the carcasses of cetaceans, and Wordsworth’s cottage in Grasmere. But then Spanx falls for a flower child called Psyche, takes on one identity too many and things really get complicated.

Arcadia Missa Publications, London, 2013; with additional editing by Felix L. Petty.

Entropia (vol. I & II) – written by William Kherbek and edited in collaboration with Jack Clarke – is a publication which seeks to recount and re-examine a decade of artistic curation, production, and critique between London, Berlin, and other urban art centres from 2010 to 2020.

Comprised of two volumes, this publication contains a compendium of over one hundred reviews and interviews with luminaries of contemporary art (Vol I), as well as a speculative attempt to create a newly generated algorithmic art(ificial) critic (Vol II). Together they serve to document, excoriate, and theorise an art world which is simultaneously hegemonic and precarious, complicit and constructive, driven by values, yet fed by extraction, all filtered through Kherbek’s precise, aphoristic, acerbic, lens.

The publications include contextual contributions from both Josie Thaddeus-Johns, writer for the New York Times, The Financial Times, Frieze; and Rozsa Farkas, director of London-based gallery Arcadia Missa.