One Break, A Thousand Blows! is a novel about Japan. The protagonist is a metaphor, wanting to negate Japan, but not by writing a novel about Japan, but by writing falsely about it, using Japan as a screen for the author’s innermost hopes and desires.

One Break, A Thousand Blows! aims to express the claim that there is no gap between sexuality and textuality; it aims to be anti-metaphorical, to escape the logic of modernism and postmodernism and express a pre-modernist, post-human morphogenetic aesthetics in all its wild sacred expressivity.

Cannibalising every book it references One Break, A Thousand Blows! is heavily invested in bibliolatry, its polymorphous protagonists subjected to the occult use of books for divination.

Maxi Kim is the grandson of illiterate Korean peasant farmers. He is a recent graduate of CalArts MFA Writing Program, currently researching a Phd at the University of Greenwich. He has worked with performance artists Gina Clark & Janice Lee, editorially with Matias Viegener and Christine Wertheim, and organised events with Chris Kraus and Mark von Schlegell. This is his first novel.

One Break, A Thousand Blows! is published as part of Book Works’ Semina series (No.2) edited by Stewart Home.
Semina – where the novel has a nervous breakdown.