Avoid the Day

“Walter Benjamin wrote that great works of literature either found genres or dissolve them, but Jay Kirk’s utterly inspired Avoid the Day somehow manages to do both at once. I’ve never read anything quite like it — a vividly funny Gothic picaresque; a deeply learned incursion into mythopoetry; and a dark, self-consuming act of memoiristic alchemy — and I suspect I never will."—Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful

"Jay Kirk’s Avoid the Day makes me think of The Thing and The Golden Bough and Hunter S. Thompson and David Foster Wallace and Kierkegaard doing shots in the forest while the Milky Way rotates coldly overhead and oh my god...It truly seems to me to push nonfiction memoir as far as it can go without it collapsing into a singularity and I am at a loss for words. You are just going to have to read it.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk