Running the Light

Author: Sam Tallent

Performing arts: comedy | Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945) | Fiction: special features

Published on 15^th May 2025 by Orion Publishing Co (White Rabbit) in the United Kingdom.

Hardback | 352 pages
164mm x 244mm x 31mm | 556g

'A thrilling, nauseating and painfully real depiction of what happens as youth, talent and charisma sour' MEGAN NOLAN'Anyone wondering where The Great American Novel went: this is it on bail' DBC PIERREDebauched, divorced and courting death, Billy Ray Schafer is a comedian who has forgotten how to laugh. Over the course of seven spun-out days across the American Southwest, he travels from hell gig to hell gig in search of a reason to keep living, in this bleak and violent glimpse into the psyche of a thoroughly ruined man. Ex-inmate, ex-husband, ex-father - comedian is the only title Schafer has left. Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career, Billy Ray knows the answer to the question: What happens when opportunity doesn't come - or worse - it comes and goes?In 'a majestically bleak, hilarious and bruising tour of regret, delusion and the detonation of the soul' (Sam Lipsyte), Tallent hurls you into an absolute mess of a man's life as we search for the mercy he does not want.