The Logos
by Mark de Silva
“Mark de Silva is high among the remnant few whose writing still justifies the writing of novels.”
Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus
Paperback: £17.99
ePub: £3.99
Unemployed, lonesome, abandoned by his lover, an obscure artist on the verge of despair begins to question the worth of his craft — until, without warning, he lands the opportunity of a lifetime. Courted by a wealthy patron with enigmatic motives, he yields his talents to corporate interests. In theory, his brief is to sell his soul — to mastermind a publicity campaign for a line of products designed to enhance human perception. In practice, though, he exerts sway over the souls of others. Given freedom to treat the campaign as an artistic endeavour in its own right, he comes to use the public sphere as a forum for shaping aesthetic sensibilities on a scale that others could only dream of. But how far can he extend his ambitions before they break him?
In his bold, uncompromising follow-up to the acclaimed Square Wave, Mark de Silva probes the extremes of human vision. Troubling the relationships between spectatorship and intimacy, beauty and decadence, creativity and exploitation, The Logos challenges the habits with which we look at the world around us — and the ways our selective sight distorts the meaning of our days.
About the Author
Mark de Silva is the author of two novels, Square Wave and The Logos, as well as the essay collection Points of Attack.
Bonus Content
Read excerpts from The Logos:
Read Six Two, an additional excerpt from The Logos, published at 3:AM Magazine.
Read an interview with Mark de Silva in which he discusses The Logos and his début, Square Wave, at 3:AM Magazine.
Read Mark de Silva’s interview with George Salis, editor of The Collidescope.
Listen to Mark de Silva interviewed on the Beyond the Zero podcast.
Watch Mark de Silva interviewed by Nicholas Rombes at Literati Bookstore.
Watch Mark de Silva interviewed at W.A.S.T.E Mailing List.
Watch Mark de Silva in conversation with Greg Gerke at Third Place Books, upon the publication of The Logos in the US:
Praise for Mark de Silva
Mark de Silva is high among the remnant few whose writing still justifies the writing of novels. He has earned this distinction by treating the novel not as a form, but as a formative languaging of the world that spins and tilts beneath the reader.
Joshua Cohen
author of The Netanyahus
Mark de Silva’s The Logos stands with some of the best novels of the century: The Known World, Middle C, and A Naked Singularity. It’s a dark mountain with vertiginous switchbacks — it quests to ask why we “love” those who use us, those who feast on our souls.
Greg Gerke
author of See What I See
The Logos is an intellectual novel not subject to intellectual clichés; a psychological novel not determined by psychological theories; a complex novel of characters not restricted to characters’ beliefs; and a masterful depiction of the search for an intellectual life not determined by intellectuality, in a time when the intellect has stopped being commonly understood as essential for social life — or even survival.
German Sierra
author of The Artifact
The Logos is a seance, a conjuring of unbodily plasmas, blackbox TV metaphysics for the word-made-without-commentary. Flaring outward from a collective dreamwork into the shape of things to come, The Logos is autoluminescent realism transacted at godspeed, in Panavision. Its truth is the obsequious banality of an infinite soap opera, reeling out the testaments, looping and branching through countless subplots, ad-breaks, sales pitches, product placements, only to lead inevitably back to that perennial cave, Platonistic cinematheque — its resident mirror-gang armed with oxygen masks and image duplicators, waiting on the far side of the psychic screen for you, the literal voyeur, to summon them.
Louis Armand
author of The Combinations
The Logos holds a mirror to the tension between art and commerce to reflect our own quotidian complicity as cogs in a world where the profit motive rules supreme. It’s brimming with ideas and easily a book of the year for me.
One of the most fascinating novels I read this year.
[A] provocative epic of ideas. … The result is an original, formidable portrayal of American commerce, where everything — including one’s vision — can be bought and sold.
Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Between its bulk, sober tone, and big themes, this novel is nakedly bidding to join the company of the postmodern titans who dominated late-20th-century American fiction: Gaddis, Gass, DeLillo, Wallace. And the book is capacious enough to fit some thoughtful philosophizing about the fuzzy line between art and money, what artists owe to the human beings they render (or is it exploit?), and the distinct virtues of writing and visual art.
Perhaps the most formidable obstacle to an unequivocal appreciation of Mark de Silva’s The Logos is exasperation with the novel’s narrator/protagonist. Actually more than exasperation: the narrator is an unlikeable, often unpleasant fellow… fully-rounded, consistently believable [but] insistent on his presence — other characters play their parts, but always subsidiary to the protagonist and his concerns.
Daniel Green
Unbeaten Paths
With Wolfe-ian scope and Franzen-y swagger, De Silva’s second novel aspires to be an epic commentary on twenty-first century life.
A dazzling epistemological meditation on modernity, perception, representation and performance.
Both refreshingly conventional and unclassifiably strange.
Matthew Taylor Blais
The Collidescope