the Internet is for real

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• the Internet is for real
• Price: $28.00 $22.00
• Non-fiction | Paperback
• Pages - 550
• ISBN - 978-1-949540-06-2
• May 1, 2019

“the Internet is for real is obsessive, it’s compulsive—it throbs with the autonomic flush of being ‘seen.’”
— Tommy Pico

the Internet is for real inverts the autobiography in the age of dis-integration, calling into question all narratives of national belonging.

“Right? So that the universe could eat me & send traces everywhere, this book or the backroom countertop audio of the same scene.”

Sifting through—and re-writing—the films of Godard, the novels of Henry James, Twin Peaks, VR fantasies, Internet ephemera, and his father’s dreams of Cuba, Chris Campanioni reveals the materiality of our spaceless encounters, and forces us to reckon with the violence hidden below the sleek 4G surface. As he revisits his parents’ migration to the United States and his own first-generation dislocation through a blur of poetry, prose, and screen-play, Campanioni shows us that in a culture of self-dissemination and unlimited arrivals, we are all exiles under the sign of a mythical return.

HYPE

“He is Frank O’Hara traveling the hyper-connected contemporary landscape via iPhone—spawning, recording, discarding speculative versions of himself . . . He carries his Situationism between cities, between countries, between periods in his life without rest or regard for boundaries. Campanioni isn’t playing at being clever; he is erasing himself to locate the sublime.” — The Brooklyn Rail

“Campanioni’s writing is playful, unflinching . . . a much-needed reminder of our endless potential for duality, in a world that too often suggests only polarity is possible.” — Harvard Review

“Award-winning author Chris Campanioni may, for better or worse, be the voice of our generation in which the internet is our stomping ground and making eye contact with our friends and family is a rare treat . . .” —Your Impossible Voice

“A hashtag, abbreviated quality . . . both deeply intimate and thrilling.” — Metal Magazine

“Bolaño meets DeLillo meets Borges . . .” —Red Fez

“Cuban-American writer Chris Campanioni’s new work is billed as non-fiction, but serves as much more. A dancey mashup of poetry and hybrid prose reminiscent of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets … a genre-bending glimpse into what feels like Campanioni’s private diary.” — Duende

“Hypnotic (and, at times, chaotic) … [an] attack of experimental yet digestible use of language …” — Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“While Chris Campanioni, like Borges and Cortázar, likes to play with form and perception, he doesn’t jeopardize the story he’s telling. He’s a performer. He knows when and how to reward his audience.” — Dead End Follies

“the Internet is for real is like no other book you’ll read this year. Border-busting, fearless, and exquisitely alive, Campanioni’s latest work thrusts readers into a world of self-projections and bold intimacy, techno-anxieties and cyber-bliss, political whirlwinds and cultural homecomings. the Internet is for real again proves that Chris Campanioni is his own remarkable genre. This is a must-read for the ‘post-Internet’ age and beyond.”
— Jennifer Maritza McCauley, author of Scar On/Scar Off

“the Internet is for real is obsessive, it’s compulsive—it throbs with the autonomic flush of being ‘seen,’ and the reflective terror of being ‘known.’ It scared me the way open water scares me, or outer space the vacuum of black. You read this book, and the book reads you right back.”
— Tommy Pico, author of Junk

“Critical theory collides with popular culture, technology, and personal narrative … a wonderful collage-like quality in its language, as well as in its form … the page becomes a visual field.”
— Kenyon Review

REVIEWS

Check out this amazing review in Harvard Review There is a moral dimension to his writing, a recognition and care for the other present in the acknowledgement and love of the self. It is a writing of excess: entirely reasonable, when the subject is the Internet. ”

Another fantastic and thorough review from Fence Magazine!