{"product_id":"attention-seeking-behaviour-9781913512583","title":"Attention-Seeking Behaviour","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFunny, sexy, and politically astute, \u003ci\u003eAttention-Seeking Behaviour\u003c\/i\u003e is at once a personal confessional and a critical history of lie detection methods. Blending fiction and non-fiction - memoir, novel and essay - it wields confession shamelessly while positively embracing the proximity of literature and lying.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e'I have never told anyone about this before. There is no way to prove that it happened, but why would I lie?' \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe narrator of \u003ci\u003eAttention-Seeking Behaviour\u003c\/i\u003e thinks you should know about the body she found in the park. She thinks you should know about her sex life, which is fulfilling and systematic. She thinks you should know that she is a writer, that she is 'complex, creative and nasty'.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut above all, she thinks you should know that she is a compulsive liar.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTrying to break this habit for the sake of Normal Ben, an honest and uncomplicated man, she attempts a sincere reckoning with her long history of deception, its psychological roots and the terrible cost it has exacted on her relationships. But can we believe a word she says?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFunny, sexy, and politically astute, \u003ci\u003eAttention-Seeking Behaviour\u003c\/i\u003e is at once a personal confessional and a critical history of lie detection methods. Blending fiction and non-fiction - memoir, novel and essay - it wields confession shamelessly while positively embracing the proximity of literature and lying.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch4\u003eDetails\u003c\/h4\u003e\u003cp\u003eISBN13: 9781913512583\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFormat: Hardback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eNumber of Pages: 192\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eEdition: \u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePublication Date: \u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePublisher: Peninsula Press Ltd\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePublication City, Country: United Kingdom\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDimensions (cm): 19.8(H)x12.9(L)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWeight (gm): \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch4\u003eAuthor Biography\u003c\/h4\u003e\u003cp\u003eAea Varfis-van Warmelo is a writer and poet, and an editor at \u003ci\u003eGranta\u003c\/i\u003e magazine. Her debut poetry pamphlet \u003ci\u003eIntellectual Property\u003c\/i\u003e was published by Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (2024). \u003ci\u003eAttention-Seeking Behaviour\u003c\/i\u003e is her first book. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch4\u003eReviews\u003c\/h4\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘I loved Aea Varfis-van Warmelo’s \u003ci\u003eAttention-Seeking Behaviour\u003c\/i\u003e. Aea speaks with such clarity to the mutability of memory and self-narration, and the painful difficulty of breaking out of one’s own patterns and specific self. Her honest look at lying has produced a novel which is both amazingly playful and deeply serious; warm and destabilising, intellectually rigorous and aesthetically stylish.’ \u003cb\u003eHarriet Armstrong\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘\u003ci\u003eAttention-Seeking Behaviour\u003c\/i\u003e is a book to be read for its sentences alone. Each line reveals the author’s control over fiction’s delicate veils, shaping a mercurial, lyrical reality that embroils the reader into an eerily unstable sense of certainty. Through quiet inversions, diminishments, and disillusions of account, Varfis-van Warmelo offers a voice that is all brain, all mammal—suspended within the mechanics of social life, yet governed by a vulnerable, perhaps universal will to power. The result is painterly and polymorphous: a book that does so much more than seek attention, it renewed what I now hope to find in the contemporary novel altogether.’ \u003cb\u003eEve Esfandiari-Denney\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘Sexy, frightening, immaculately written and mercilessly perceptive. It’s also the most exacting, eviscerating self-critique since St Augustine. Left me with a deeper understanding of myself that I sort of wish I didn’t have. I loved every page.’ \u003cb\u003eLuke Kennard\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘At once a faultless expression of emotional truth and a work of heart-breaking precision and quality. You come away wondering if you’ve ever said an honest word. Human interactions feel stranger and yet more real. Mostly the effect is you end up wishing immediately for more work—a lot more work—from this exceptional writer.’ \u003cb\u003eBen Pester\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘A truly funny, slippery and daring book that is suffused with enviable sentences, a sense of nowness, and this cynical intelligence that is a joy to interact with. It is a brash novel about deceit and love, companionship and interiority, politics and private jokes, sex and polygraph machines, it is a bold and exciting novel for the weary world of today.’ \u003cb\u003eJohn Patrick McHugh\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘With \u003ci\u003eAttention-Seeking Behaviour\u003c\/i\u003e, Aea Varfis-van Warmelo has done something that can’t be undone. Both an essay on the comforting fantasy of lie detection and a kind of extended stress test on the boundary between literary forms, this book directs itself between the factitious and fictive with the elan of a magician. Quite literally, Varfis-van Warmelo goes now you see me, now you don’t ... [T]his book reminds me living (and loving) are both our diagnosis and our antidote. I can’t think of a recent work that more clearly demonstrates that through literature we can lie to tell the truth.’ \u003cb\u003eOluwaseun Olayiwola\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘Nimble, rigorous and almost indecently entertaining. A debut to celebrate, one that announces the arrival of a vital new talent.’ \u003cb\u003eMatt Greene\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘I may well be a liar, but this is compulsory reading. Nabokov, Fleur Jaeggy, Ann Quin and the dark voice in your head whip themselves up into an ambivalent frenzy, only to leave you lying and alone.’ \u003cb\u003eKimberly Campanello\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘Defiant, evasive and cunning, with the precise mechanics of a puzzle box, \u003ci\u003eAttention-Seeking Behaviour \u003c\/i\u003esets a new standard for confessional fiction. In interrogating her narrator’s own testimony alongside the slippery nature of testimony itself, Varfis-van Warmelo invites us into the grey areas but doesn’t deign to show us around. And rightly so. It left me raw, exposed, blinking, unsteady on my feet, totally thrilled.’ \u003cb\u003eVida Adamczewski\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘Flips the reader-author dynamic on its head. Varfis-van Warmelo takes our projections to co-create a confessional fiction–non-fiction hybrid. Tricksy is high praise for this compelling debut.’ \u003cb\u003eRose Cleary\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘A frighteningly bizarre love story for our dark times.’ \u003cb\u003eSara Baume\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘A self-portrait with lies, this sharp, hybrid confection, at once disturbing and funny, finds its place somewhere between Ed Atkins or Edouard Levé’s anti-memoirs and the best episodes of \u003ci\u003eMindhunter\u003c\/i\u003e.’ \u003cb\u003eCamille Bordas\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘A totally compulsive read: daring, witty, incisive. I couldn’t look away. It’s a story about compulsive lying that feels radically truthful; a revelatory account of intimacy, interrogation, sex, and the act of self-narration.’ \u003cb\u003eNaomi Booth\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Aea Varfis-van Warmelo","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50735554527449,"sku":"9781913512583","price":45.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0502\/9530\/8441\/files\/9781913512583.jpg?v=1792168670","url":"https:\/\/www.arielbooks.com.au\/products\/attention-seeking-behaviour-9781913512583","provider":"Ariel","version":"1.0","type":"link"}