Valencia

A man checks into a hotel in a Mediterranean city on the banks of the Turia.

He is far from home. He holds few possessions. Enough clothing for a week, money for drink. A few essential paperbacks, a cigar box of old photographs. He intends to commit suicide. But somewhere along the way he gets lost in the churn of memory.

Valencia is an elegiac and hallucinatory meditation on beauty, loss, and how memory is deceitful, even when photographs are involved.

The things we carry come from an infinite sadness. That sadness is the death of childhood.

_________

Did you ever stumble across a writer who seems to have lived your life and inhabited your dreams, your darkest moods? This happened to me, and I hope it will happen to you as you read through the mesmerizing pages of James Nulick’s Valencia… Nulick has inherited, from Zola, from Celine, from Burroughs maybe, something of the sweetness that lingers when everything extant has died of rot. His book will live forever in the literature of truth and waste.

— Kevin Killian, author of Spreadeagle The prose of Valencia is delicately simple yet densely poetic. Its voice is haunting. I couldn’t help being reminded by every line I read in James Nulick’s novel of Garcia Lorca’s famous "Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias" and its chilling refrain: At five o’clock in the afternoon.

— Thomas Ligotti, author of The Conspiracy against the Human Race